Blair at Chilcot Inquiry

It was a vintage Blair performance I will grant that, but it was also a performance which reminded me not only why Blair has been successful and charismatic in the past and why I was passionate about him becoming Labour Leader even when Kinnock was in charge, but also why I felt at the end that he ought to go for the good of the Country and the Labour Party.

Some of the claims for going into Iraq have proven to be negative and it has not done much for us, because if we had not gone in then we might have been able to make more of a fist with Afghanistan, we might have had more public support as a whole, and a no of British soldiers and civilians might still be alive today!

The 45 minute claim and Saddam having Weapons of Mass Destruction was a central part of the reasons given for going into Iraq. I myself saw a copy of the report, given to me when I went to sit in the Commons gallery during the debate which led to us going in. On that basis I put aside my misgivings and supported the decision. I even pitied the protestors (over a million) who marched in London against it as naive. That is something I am ashamed of and perhaps says more about me whom my family says has pro establishment tendencies and who one friend has called me (affectionately thank God) "Conservative with a small c".

You see I actually believed what I was being told, I also suspected that there may have been intelligence findings which could not be mentioned for security reasons and in any case removing a brutal dictator by force struck me as no bad thing. Like a no of people who initially supported the move to go to War with Iraq, I now feel rather silly and ashamed for having supported it in the first place, and saddened and hurt that we could have been deceived about it. I appreciate Blair refuses to believe he did anything wrong and was not surprised by yesterday's events, but it was a sad reminder about the beginnings of an event which I feel we must put behind us as soon as possible.