Quintin Jardine's blog

I’d hoped that we’d heard the last of the Chilcot Inquiry, but sadly we haven’t. It seems that the circus is pitching its very expensive tent once again and we’re in for another round of questioning of our once-elected leaders by a group of people with no obvious qualifications for the task they have been given. By whom were they given it? By Captain Barbossa, our departed and unlamented former Prime Minister, in June 2009. Why? This is the official reason offered at the time: ‘to identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict.’ Simple enough, but this is the spin the chair, Sir John Chilcot put on it when he outlined what he saw as his terms of reference: ‘. . . the essential points, as set out by the Prime Minister and agreed by the House of Commons, are that this is an Inquiry by a committee of Privy Counsellors. It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. We will therefore be considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.’

That all sounds great, but the real reason that Barbossa set the thing in play was that there was an election in the offing and he wanted to spin the public blame for Iraq away from him and on to Tony Blair.

I’m not clear just how the nonentities who make up the committee of inquiry got to be privy counsellors, but it is apparent that the intake that year wasn’t very good. Check their CVs and you’ll find that they’re a crowd of civil servants, academics, diplomats and do-gooders with no experience at all of the sharp end of the kind of decision making on which they will be passing judgement, when eventually they get round to writing their already delayed report, which, I tell you now, will come to have as much historical relevance as a failed and discarded betting slip.

With public spending cuts biting hard, I’m amazed that the Coalition has left Chilcot untouched, with its nose still in the public trough. The fact that they are still calling witnesses eighteen months down the road, and demanding that legitimately private correspondence be made public, indicates to me that they have lost what little grasp they ever had of the plot. They should be told to wind up, shut up and start drafting, without further delay.