Blair at the Chilcot inquiry: the first session

After a nervous beginning, the former PM has hit his stride.

It’s the first break of the morning. Tony Blair eventually hit his stride in the questioning, but in the first few moments the previous prime minister seemed to shake with nerves, his face tense with anticipation. Chilcot gave a preamble — this isn’t “a trial”, he reminded us.

Blair, tanned as ever, was soon on typical form. He half-smiled his way through many of the questions, shrugging self-deprecatingly and making jokes at his own expense (“there were no shortage of people challenging me” on Iraq, he grinned). He was keen to emphasise his preparations, too — he’d read all his own speeches, had documents (such as the options paper) that had only just been declassified by the government, much to the obvious irritation of the inquiry panel.

The question about the Fern Britton interview was one of the few moments when Blair seemed to admit a mistake of any kind; he half-retracted what he’d said in that interview (which SIr Roderic Lyne skewered him on the timing of) about supporting the Iraq war whether WMDs were found or not. He said self-mockingly that he still had lessons to learn on handling the media.

But otherwise Blair was unquestioning in his “belief” in his strategy. After the September 11 2001 attacks, he said emphatically, everything changed. The changes weren’t objectively clear, but manifested themselves in his perception of the “calculus of risk” (a phrase he used repeatedly).

He dismissed the debate over the Crawford meetings, saying he had publicly always expressed his loyalty to President Bush. In fact, he tried to give those meetings a human slant, saying how Bush had talked about his “fear” of not acting in a “strong way”. He even, unnecessarily, announced his “hard line” on Iran and the danger of such a country having nuclear capability.

That is what the morning session came down to — a sense of morality, of right and wrong (he cited Kosovo a number of times, specifically reminding the inquiry that he had acted to defend a Muslim population, as though this proved that he wasn’t motivated by his Christian faith in Iraq), and of his overriding “belief” in the correct strategy despite the challenges from within cabinet.

So far, then, it has been a relatively easy ride for the former prime minister. And Blair has started to deploy his performative weapons to full effect.

The second session is now about to start . . .

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