Don’t call Blair a liar
by Chris Ames
Sky’s Mark Stone has put his finger on what I think is going wrong (already) with the Inquiry:
The Inquiry committee appeared not to follow up some obvious questions. An example. One of the panel, Sir Roderic Lyle, referring to a statement Blair made in 2003, asked the following:
“Would you regard the Prime Minister’s statement in December 2003 that ‘the Iraq Study Group [tasked with finding WMD after the invasion] has already found massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories’ as corresponding to advice you were giving to ministers?”
The response from Tim Dowse was, somewhat sheepishly: “I did not advise him to use those words.”
But then – nothing from the panel. They did not ask whether the advisors told the PM to back off from words which were clearly out of kilter with the advice they were giving him.
So here is Blair saying something completely untrue, and officials know it was untrue. But it’s just left, very politely. You can’t call the former prime minister a liar, even implicitly, whatever the evidence shows. Mistakes were made. No-one is to blame.