Listening to Tony Blair give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry it’s hard to not imagine that he feels he isn’t just defending his actions over the Iraq War, but defending his entire legacy.
And that is what he is doing – while you can have the political debate over everything else he did in his ten years as Prime Minister the Iraq War will be the cloud that hovers over it all. And it will be the issue on which he (and the entire government) will be condemned. For any argument Blairite’s or Labour supporters come up with to defend their hero the easy response for many will be simply “but he took us into an illegal war.”
It struck me as interesting that a Prime Minister who was so obsessed with spin and the media did not realise as soon as questions over the war’s legality came up that he would never escape them. Whatever the outcome of the inquiry many will continue to believe we went to war illegally and unnecessarily simply to keep in favour with the Americans.
Going further, as a Prime Minister who, more than anyone since Gladstone, put his personal morality at the heart of his administration, it astounds me that the moral ambiguity of what he was doing doesn’t seem to occur to him. It appears that he was convinced of the rectitude of his crusade, doubt doesn’t seem to have troubled him even momentarily. And if I am worried by this, I cannot imagine the feelings of the families of soldiers killed in Iraq.
And will he say “sorry” for taking Britain to war against a man who wasn’t a threat (while ignoring many who were and are) or allowing then Chancellor Brown to leave them ill-equipped for the challenges they faced? I doubt it.