Setting Hampstead Ablaze

Checking a link for a recent post about the Iraq Inquiry, I read again the story in the Observer on 16 October which had predicted the Inquiry’s report being postponed to summer 2012. It also said:

Intriguingly, Chilcot is known over the summer to have attended a performance of Loyalty, a play about the build-up to the Iraq war that was performed at the Hampstead Theatre. Written by journalist and author Sarah Helm, the wife of Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, the play provided a rare insight into the psychology of those involved.
Some scenes, including a phone call from Rupert Murdoch to Blair on the eve of the war and another suggesting British officials harboured doubts about the sources behind claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, are close to the truth, say Whitehall insiders.
Private Eye magazine reported that Chilcot had demanded to review some of the evidence presented to his inquiry after attending the play.

Loyalty ran from 14 July to 13 August, so some time had elapsed before Private Eye ran its story (see below) in the 14 October issue. The Hampstead Theatre seats about 325 and there were, it seems, 30 performances including matinees, so only about 9750 people at most saw the play. By comparison in September BBC2’s Page Eight (MI5 as envisaged by David Hare) was watched by nearly four million (high for that channel, but ITV’s hit Downton Abbey series was getting about 11 million). I wasn’t one of the 9750, so I decided to buy a copy of the text, published by Oberon Books, and read it.

It doesn’t take long for the main challenge presented by Helm’s play to emerge: not so much one of loyalty as of veracity. On the cover Loyalty is described as “A fictionalised memoir”, and, on page 7, a Note states: “This play is a work of fiction”. The Foreword, written by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles (who has appeared in this blog before), sets out to clarify this:

Sarah Helm's remarkable play …
… documents real events of great historical importance. Of course, it is a play, it is fiction. Yet it is also a roman à clef in which we all know that Laura is really Sarah Helm, Nick is her partner Jonathan Powell (Tony Blair's Chief of Staff), Tony is Tony, Alastair is Alastair (Campbell), and Jack is Jack (Straw), and so on.
So in one, and perhaps the most important sense, it is an upclose, insider's, account of what it felt like to be living with the daily agonies of deciding to invade Iraq, and then finding out that the original justification for the war - that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction - did not exist, and had been based on false intelligence.
… Even if the plot is not literally true, the characterisation is authentic - alarmingly so.

and closes with:

The first and last question most people will ask about Loyalty will be 'Is it true?' Only Sarah Helm herself can answer this. But my guess is that Loyalty must be at once true, and not true, and somewhere in-between. Not everything in it can be literally true - it is not a documentary - though many or most of the details are remarkably accurate. Paradoxically, however, it uses fiction to get at some much deeper truths, about the reality of the Iraq war, and about how human beings relate to each other.

One could well imagine some of the assessments of Saddam’s WMD capabilities as having been equally categorical.

As for the play itself, the reviews seem a bit lukewarm on the whole (aggregated at the Omnivore, and ongo.com ). In any case, reading the text is a poor basis for judging how it might have seemed on the stage. The first Act is set in LAURA and NICK’s home (like the text, I will put Characters names in capitals) in early 2003, and reminded me of the domestic scenes in BBC R4’s Clare in the Community, as if scripted by Hare. Most of the second Act is set in 10 Downing Street in September 2004. Although no-one should expect cinematic realism on a stage, after a while that feeling of observing a parallel universe set in, often induced by Hare or Stephen Poliakoff dramas. The anomalies eventually undermine the required suspension of incredulity. For example, the RAF has no decoration called a “DFO” (page 80). The PM’s Outer Office has “a vast TV screen showing Sky News” (page 79) whereas Jonathan Powell, no less, describes it as having several (The New Machiavelli, page 48). In the civil service the job title “Clerk” doesn’t always involve clerical duties (or Secretary, secretarial ones, come to that).

But rather more disconcerting is when, in Act 1 Scene 3, LAURA tells us:

At one point a BBC reporter, called Andrew Gilligan, thought he’d got a scoop on the intelligence but instead he botched it up; and there were tragic consequences (page 46)

PETE, “an unidentified government figure”, announces on page 47/48 that “Andrew Gilligan”’s source, “Kelly”, was “A junior official” and “Too junior to have known anything”. Why this “Andrew Gilligan” and “Kelly” are brought in at all in March 2003 is unclear. Curiously for a roman à clef, there are no clues as to the identity of PETE, but he can’t be ALASTAIR, the Press Secretary.

Later, in Act 2 Scene 8, DAVID (C), the "Head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)", says “Look I told the inquiry all this” (page 99), perhaps referring to Lord Hutton’s [Report of the] Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly C.M.G. Dr Kelly died in late July 2003. Or was he referring to Lord Butler’s 2004 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction? In the real world the Chief of SIS gave evidence to both. Then on page 100, C says “It wasn’t me who wrote that dossier”, which the reader has to conclude must be the September Dossier of 2002, never mentioned by the omniscient LAURA (in whose world there seems to be no Joint Intelligence Committee).

Also in Act 1 there was no end of business with “the Brent”, NICK’s special secure phone (“very antiquated in appearance”), forever being unpacked and put away. In fact, it’s Laura’s listening-in on the phone’s second earpiece which makes her so well-informed about affairs of state. But something odd happens in Scene 4 when Nick and Laura listen in to a conversation between PM TONY and RUPERT, “a newspaper proprietor”. On page 50, at the beginning LAURA “sits up next to [NICK] and hears on the ordinary landline. We hear the conversation with TONY is already underway”. At the end, NICK “Puts the phone down. NICK starts putting it back in its box.” So was RUPERT on “the Brent” or not? And if so, where was he, having been “speaking today to Rumsfeld”?

In the end, the MacGuffin is not “the Brent” but an intelligence source with the codename Daisy. Sarah Helm is the author of A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE, published in 2005 (and LAURA, of course, had been working on something similar, page 36). One can’t help thinking that Daisy sounds more like one of SOE's codenames than, say, Curveball.

But is there any point in spending time on these or other minor, or not so minor, details and discrepancies? Well, many of the Hampstead theatre-goers, and most of us who will ever read the play, inevitably find themselves lost in a no man’s land between Cowper-Coles’ “not literally true” and his “many or most of the details [which] are remarkably accurate”. We are hardly helped by him also telling us:

Naturally the details of the play's plot are fiction, and have to be, not least for legal reasons.

so we are left to our own devices in trying to make any sense of it all.

There is an unprecedented amount of official and other documentation in the public domain about the Blair government and Iraq to pore over, even before Sir John Chilcot’s report next year. Not only is Powell’s own book available (and several of LAURA’s narrations align with incidents he describes less dramatically), but Lord Hutton’s Report can easily be downloaded, and similarly Lord Butler’s Review (and, of course, evidence to the Iraq Inquiry). Lastly, Gordon Corera’s well-regarded, The Art of Betrayal: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, might provide rather more insight into what went on than Loyalty, which, come to think of it, is the opposite of Betrayal – shame Pinter got there first.

Alongside this welter of information, Loyalty may be doomed to fail as a roman à clef because it tries hard to get close, but inevitably ends up being tangential. In the end it’s neither documentary nor metaphor. Adam Lang, the subject of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, is Blair-like, but in neither his book nor Polanski’s film are we left in any doubt that we are engaging with a fictional thriller, from which we can draw wider moral lessons about the nature of modern politics if inclined to do so.

If forced to draw conclusions, I would be reluctant to accept that Jonathan Powell habitually breached the rules for custodianship of official secrets like Nick Beeching did. I’m also uncertain as to how much credence to give the Observer and Private Eye stories about the effect on the progress of Chilcot’s inquiry of a play which clearly declares itself to be a work of fiction. On the other hand, Powell in The New Machiavelli mentions “my future brother-in-law, the journalist Toby Helm” (page 68) who may be the same Toby Helm as the Political Editor of the Observer – if so, things become even less clear. To be honest, like I suspect nearly everyone else, I’m in the same position as Alexander Armstrong’s Geordie window cleaner, the one who always concludes his monologues with "but what do I know?":



PRIVATE EYE 14 October 2011 (Issue 1299, page 5)

When Sarah Helm’s play Loyalty opened at the Hampstead Theatre this summer much was made of the fact that she is married to Tony Blair's former chief of staff Jonathan Powell. Since the drama featured Downing Street discussions before the invasion of Iraq, as the Observer noted*, “the question that will be asked in Whitehall is to what extent the play is art mirroring life”.
Sir John Chilcot seems to have asked himself the same question when he saw the play in August. Certain scenes - such as a conversation between Tony Blair and MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove - included details that hadn't been mentioned by Dearlove himself when he gave his testimony (in private) to Chilcot's Iraq War inquiry. After his night at the theatre Sir John asked Whitehall to supply him with more secret files, even though Dearlove and co had supposedly already handed everything over in a spirit of full cooperation.
Chilcot has now obtained the new files - and they confirm what Helm revealed in Loyalty. Although the play was billed as fiction for legal reasons, it appears to have been rather: more informative than some of the evidence from the spooks!

*“as the Observer noted” is a reference to an article on 15 May written in advance of the staging of Loyalty.

Iraq Inquiry Update

The last reference to Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry on this blog was on 17 October in the form of an update to an earlier posting. The Observer had learnt that the Inquiry report might not be published until June 2012. Late on 16 November, there were media reports of the following statement, now available in full on the Inquiry’s website:

… The Inquiry has advised the Government that it will need until at least summer 2012 to produce a draft report which will do justice to the issues involved. Very considerable progress has already been made, but there is still much to be done.
As well as drafting the report, the Inquiry will need to negotiate the declassification of a significant volume of currently classified material with the Government, to enable this to be quoted in, or published alongside, the Inquiry’s report. That process has begun, but there will be a series of further major requests as drafting progresses. The Inquiry has made clear that it will need co-operation from the Government in completing this in a satisfactory and timely manner. …

which confirmed one aspect of the Observer story, except ‘at least summer 2012’ might well be interpreted as later than June.

Coincidentally, the Inquiry had been mentioned earlier on 16 November by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, in an address, Securing our future, about ‘the role of secret intelligence in foreign policy’. As well as the use and importance of the Intelligence Agencies’ contribution, he:

set out what the Government is doing to tackle the lessons of the past, and to strengthen the independent and Parliamentary oversight of the Agencies for the future

and he later stated:

This Government believes that Britain’s national interest is served best when diplomacy is informed by Intelligence, and Intelligence is balanced by diplomatic assessments.
This means that Intelligence is weighed and assessed alongside all other sources of information available to us including diplomatic reporting and the insights of other government departments; judged in the context of the Government’s overall strategy and objectives; and brought together to make careful decisions which are considered in the National Security Council.
We also recognise that serious issues have been raised by the events of recent years that have to be addressed decisively and with clarity.
Intelligence throws up some of the most difficult ethical and legal questions that I encounter as Foreign Secretary, with which my predecessors in this position also have had to grapple.
Some of them relate to the past use of Intelligence in reaching and justifying decisions in foreign policy – the most controversial instance of this, the Iraq War, is currently the subject of an Inquiry.

He went on to deal with allegations of UK complicity in extraordinary rendition, and, should such matters come to court, put forward

:… proposals to ensure that cases involving national security information can be heard fairly, fully and safely in our courts, and that we protect British interests by preventing the disclosure of genuinely sensitive material. This includes intelligence information shared with Britain by intelligence partners overseas.

He then went on to make the point:

The ability of other countries to share Intelligence with us without fear we will have to disclose it here or overseas is absolutely vital to our national interest. This is managed under the Control Principle, a strict rule of intelligence sharing whereby any further use or disclosure of intelligence requires the agreement of the Agency that provided it in the first place. If we cannot uphold the control principle and others do not share information with us, the very real risk is that our security will be jeopardised.

And to underline this:

Intelligence really is like a jigsaw in which we very rarely have all the pieces, and rely on others to share the pieces they have with us just as they often rely on us to help them in the same way. It is the analysis of information from our partners along with our own intelligence that enables us to piece together each snippet of information with others to create the fullest possible picture of the threats to our national security and to act against them.

He said the Government intends:

to make the Intelligence and Security Committee a statutory Committee of Parliament, reporting formally to Parliament, and to enable it to take evidence from any Department or body in the wider intelligence community. It also proposes careful consideration of extending the Committee’s remit to include retrospective review of certain operational aspects of the work of the Agencies where there are matters of significant national interest. We also propose that the Committee be given the power to require information from the Agencies, bringing it more in line with Parliamentary Select Committees, but with this power subject to a veto only from the Secretary of State where national security so requires it.

Together, these statements suggest that the Iraq Inquiry may have its work cut out if it is to ‘negotiate the declassification of a significant volume of currently classified material with the Government, to enable this to be quoted in, or published alongside, the Inquiry’s report’. Also, if there were a need for a similar Inquiry to Chilcot’s in the future, presumably it would fall under the remit for retrospective review of the statutory Intelligence and Security Committee.

The Iraq Inquiry and ‘Warning Letters’

After last month’s media firestorm over phone hacking, quite a few people in Fleet Street and in Downing Street must have been pleased to see the headline of 31 July’s Mail On Sunday (MoS) focussing on something quite different: ‘The damning of Tony Blair: Former PM to be held to account on Iraq in Chilcot report on war’. David Cameron had attempted some hosing down of ‘Hackgate’ on 20 July in the Commons when he made a ‘Statement on Public Confidence in the Media and Police’ and took questions at length. During one of his replies he said:

[Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the shadow Chancellor says, “We didn’t hire Andy Coulson.” Look, you hired Damian McBride. You had Alastair Campbell. You had Alastair Campbell falsifying documents in government. You have still got Tom Baldwin working in your office. [Interruption.] Yes. Gotcha!

Whether the remark about Campbell was an unguarded response to Ed Balls, who the PM seems to find very irritating, or whether it was a ‘gobbet’ intended for release in response to any criticism of the PM's having employed Coulson, we may never know. However, as explained on his blog, Campbell immediately emailed the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell (GOD):

Dear Gus,
The Prime Minister said in the Commons today that whilst working in Downing Street I falsified government documents. He said this without qualification, and without providing any evidence to substantiate the claim.
As you know, I have appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee, and the Hutton Inquiry. All three thoroughly probed allegations made against me with regard to inserting false intelligence into government documents in the run-up to war in Iraq, and all three concluded that the allegations were unfounded. Similarly, no evidence has been presented to the Chilcot Inquiry, to which I testified for several hours, that I falsified government documents.
I am writing to ask on what basis the Prime Minister made the claim that he did, under parliamentary privilege, and what evidence he has to justify it.
If he concludes that no such evidence exists, I would hope that he could withdraw the allegation via a letter from you.
Yours, Alastair Campbell

It took over a week, and presumably a fair bit of aller retourner between No 10 and the Cabinet Office, and perhaps others, to produce GOD’s letter in reply on 28 July:

Dear Alastair,
Thank you for your email and apologies for the delayed response.
The Prime Minister is aware that the allegations made against you in relation to the WMD dossier presented to Parliament by his predecessor in September 2002 have been investigated by several inquiries. Let me assure you that, contrary to some of the media reporting of his comments about you in the Commons, that was not what the Prime Minister had in mind.
In what was a very lively Commons debate, the PM was referring to the briefing paper you commissioned on Iraq’s infrastructure of concealment and deception which, because of the failure to attribute material taken from the work of an academic, became known as ‘the dodgy dossier’.
Whilst I know you were unaware of the mistake by a member of your team which led to this controversy, you did take responsibility for it at the time, when you appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee.
You are well aware of how heated things can get in the Commons and I can assure you the Prime Minister’s statement about you was no more than political knockabout which got a bit carried away.
I hope you will accept my assurances. I understand that No10 have and are continuing to make it clear that the PM was casting no aspersions whatever in relation to this, and it is right that they do so.
Yours,
Gus

Campbell concluded:

Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell today replied to my complaint of a week ago about the allegations made by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons that I falsified government documents. I am very grateful to him for the reply, and to the Prime Minister for the explanation offered; that this was ‘political knockabout which got a bit carried away,’; that contrary to some of the media reporting of his statement last week, he was not referring to the WMD dossier presented to Parliament by Tony Blair in 2002, and that he was ‘casting no aspersions.’ So far as I am concerned, that is a satisfactory conclusion to the matter.

Three days later (or probably the next day, Friday, when the Sundays usually decide on their main stories), the MoS claimed:

The Mail on Sunday has been told that the former Prime Minister will be held to account on four main failings:
* Bogus claims that were made about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
* Not telling the British public about his secret pledge with George Bush to go to war.
* Keeping the Cabinet in the dark by his ‘sofa government’ style.
* Failing to plan to avoid the post-war chaos in Iraq.
Well-placed sources say the reputations of Mr Blair and key allies will suffer major damage when the report by Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq War inquiry is published this autumn. Mr Blair, former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and ex-Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell are all expected to be criticised.
…
The Mail on Sunday understands that the inquiry rounds on Mr Blair for telling Parliament that intelligence suggesting Saddam had WMDs was ‘beyond doubt’.

Most of the MoS’s report was a selection from material published by the Inquiry which supported the main thrust of their story:

The inquiry report is also expected to criticise spin doctor Mr Campbell, whose denial that the dossier on Saddam’s weapons was designed to ‘make the case for war’ was challenged by former spy chief Major-General Michael Laurie, who was head of intelligence collection for the Defence Intelligence Agency.
…
And earlier this month an unnamed MI6 officer said Mr Campbell acted like ‘an unguided missile’ in work on the intelligence dossier. The spin doctor had ‘a propensity to have rushes of blood to the head and pass various stories and information to journalists without appropriate prior consultation’.

However, the MoS statement that:

… Sir John Chilcot's Iraq War inquiry is published this autumn

was contradicted in the London Evening Standard (LES) the next day: ‘Sir John Chilcot Iraq verdict won't be published until January’. This was because:

Under the rules of public inquiries, anyone taken to task must be told in advance and given chance to respond. But the so-called "Salmon letters" have yet to be sent out, and a source said the process would put the report back until the new year.

- not quite the expectation of the MoS. It will be interesting to see which paper is right, and whether the LES ‘source’ turns out to be closer than the MoS’s ‘well-placed sources’.

So what is ‘the process’? According to the Inquiry website’s FAQs:

35. Will you notify witnesses/individuals before you mention or criticise them in the report?
The Inquiry’s Witness Protocol makes it clear that if the Inquiry expects to criticise an individual in the final report, that individual will, in accordance with normal practice, be provided with relevant sections of the draft report in order to make any representations on the proposed criticism prior to publication of the final report.

What might ‘in accordance with normal practice’ involve? For non-lawyers, a helpful explanation is available on law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse’s website in the form of ‘A practical guide to commissioning and conducting investigations and inquiries’ by Ed Marsden and Martin Smith. Among many other things, it explains the “Salmon letter” mentioned by the LES:

For inquiries conducted under the Inquiries Act 2005, the Salmon letter procedure has been codified in to a process of “warning letters” (see section 13 of the Act). This provides that the chairman may not include any explicit or significant criticism of a person in a report unless he has sent a warning letter to a person who:
(a) He considers may be, or who has been, subject to criticism in the inquiry proceedings; or
(b) About whom criticism may be inferred from evidence that has been given during the inquiry proceedings; or
(c) Who may be subject to criticism in any report or interim report.
Section 14 of the Act creates a statutory duty of confidence between the recipient of such a letter, the inquiry team and the recipient’s legal representative. The duty persists until such time as the inquiry’s report is published or the chairman waives the duty.
The contents of warning letters under the Act are set out in section 15. They must:
(a) state what the criticism or proposed criticism is
(b) contain a statement of the facts that the chairman considers substantiate the criticism or proposed criticism
(c) refer to any evidence which supports those facts.

But is the Iraq Inquiry being conducted under the 2005 Act? Presumably it is, but some of the key provisions are not being exercised, eg Section 17(2): Power to take evidence on oath and Section 37: Immunity from suit. The latter is interesting, in that according to Marsden and Smith:

The law provides that where a statement is made by one individual about another which is false and damages that person’s reputation, that person may commence proceedings for damages on grounds of defamation.
Those conducting inquiries, and those giving evidence in such proceedings are as susceptible to an action for libel (in respect of written statements) or slander (oral statements) as anyone else.
However, where “qualified privilege” attaches to an inquiry it serves to protect the statement-maker where they make a false and disparaging statement in the course of the inquiry providing the statement is made in good faith. This is not the case, though, where the statement-maker is motivated by malice.
For inquiries conducted under the Inquiries Act 2005, section 37 codifies the previous common law understanding of the qualified privilege defence to defamation proceedings. Section 37(3) provides as follows:
37(3) for the purposes of the law of defamation, the same privilege attaches to
(a) Any statement made in or for the purposes of proceedings before an inquiry (including the report and any interim report of the inquiry)
(b) Reports of proceedings before an inquiry
As would be the case if those proceedings were proceedings before a court in the relevant part of the United Kingdom.

However, the Iraq Inquiry FAQs state:

27. What protection did [do] witnesses have to speak freely?
The hearings are not covered by Parliamentary or other privilege. The Committee expects all witnesses to provide truthful, fair and accurate evidence. The Inquiry welcomes the fact that the Government and Services have extended an immunity from disciplinary action to serving officials and military personnel who give evidence or otherwise assist the Inquiry, as this will help reassure witnesses that they can provide frank and honest evidence.

Returning to the ‘Salmon letter’, Section 14 of the Act (see above) refers to the ‘recipient’s legal representative’. Witnesses should have been offered the opportunity to bring a friend or legal representative to their interview, though it should have been made clear that the investigators’ questions will be directed to the witness. Of the three whose reputations the MoS expects to see suffering major damage, two, Blair and Straw, were barristers before entering politics. Whether they or Campbell (who met up with a well-known and eminent QC about 25 minutes into Episode 7 of Jamie’s Dream School, as broadcast on Channel 4 earlier this year) have sought, or will be seeking, legal advice on how to deal with any criticisms from the Inquiry, we may never know. But one cannot help wondering if the other witnesses, in making their comments, fully appreciated the possible implications of an absence of privilege, if this is actually the case. Presumably, in the event of a legal action concerning a defamatory statement, the defence costs would be borne by the witness’s employing department. In these circumstances, however, evidence would be under oath and subject to cross-examination by a barrister.

As for the MoS’s ‘four main failings’, I don’t see the latter two (sofa government and post-war planning) being made that much of – the former already addressed by Lord Butler and the latter potentially awkward for the present incumbent of No 10, given the uncertain outcome in Libya. As for the ‘bogus WMD claims’, the Inquiry might feel it should come up with something new. Going back to GOD’s letter above, the ‘dodgy dossier’ was explained, and apologized for, by Campbell at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC) on 25 June 2003: 

Q1152 Sir John Stanley: I would like to turn to another apology which I think is very seriously outstanding and on which you may wish to correct your evidence. If I heard you correctly you suggested the Government had made an apology to Mr al-Marashi. Mr al-Marashi's work was lifted off the internet without attribution; it was used in a highly political context to help make the Government's policy case for going to war against Iraq which was a matter which concerned him very greatly. His thesis or his article in the Middle East Review in certainly one crucial respect was substantially changed to suggest terrorist linkage between the Saddam Hussein intelligence agency and al-Qaeda which was not what he said in his Review article, and members of his family were endangered. I questioned him on the issue as to whether he had had an apology, "Has the Government made any expression of regret or apology to you for the plagiarisation of your thesis? Mr al-Marashi: I have never been contacted directly, either by phone call nor in writing, since February 2003 up to the present. Me: Do you think you might be owed an apology. Mr al-Marashi: I think the least they can do is owe me an apology." I do not believe he has received an apology, I think Mr Campbell you said earlier he had, I hope he will receive a personal apology from you.
Mr Campbell: As I say, I take responsibility for that paper. I have explained why the mistake was made. I am happy to send an apology to Mr al-Marashi on behalf of the entire communications team at No 10 and the CIC, I am happy to do that. As I said earlier, the moment this mistake was exposed by Channel 4 and subsequently by Mr al-Marashi himself on Newsnight, that next morning the Prime Minister's spokesman has never attempted to avoid it, hands up, it should not have happened, we are going to look at how it happened, we are going to put procedures in place and that has been done. I have no desire here at all to do anything other than deliver that apology and do that sincerely. If it would help to do that in writing to Mr al-Marashi, I am perfectly happy to do that.

Campbell also provided the FAC with a memorandum and a supplementary memorandum. The latter explained the drafting changes he had proposed during the development of the September 2002 WMD dossier referred to by GOD. Unless the papers seen by the Chilcot Inquiry invalidate this explanation, there doesn’t seem to be much justification for the MoS’s expectations of Campbell’s being criticised.

The other Blair failing cited by the MoS was ‘Not telling the British public about his secret pledge with George Bush to go to war’. Ignoring the point that British PMs invariably will have secrets they don’t tell the public, the ‘pledge with George Bush’ was addressed in the second Blair evidence session on 21 January 2011 (page 48 et seq):

[BLAIR] … So in a sense what I was saying to America was "look" -- and by the way I am absolutely sure this is how George Bush took it "Whatever the political heat, if I think this is the right thing to do I am going to be with you. I am not going to back out because the going gets tough. On the other hand, here are the difficulties and this is why I think the UN route is the right way to go".
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: The Andrew Rawnsley book quotes you saying at about the end of July, so it must be the same event, Rawnsley quotes you as saying, having said to President Bush, quoting from Rawnsley, quoting you: "You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I am with you." Is that about right?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: No, it is not what I said. What I said is what I said in the note, and with the greatest respect to Andrew Rawnsley I don't think he was present at the meeting.
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: No. He was quoting what you said to him.
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: What I said to him.
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: So I understand.
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: I have not heard about that.

A footnote explains: ‘Andrew Rawnsley in his book The End of the Party refers to interviews with officials as the basis for his material.’

SIR JOHN CHILCOT: I suppose just to round off on this, because it is very important and central as to how far there was a commitment and what the nature of the commitment was, thinking also about what you said to Donald Rumsfeld on 5th June, you said in your statement to us about that: "I could not and did not offer some kind of blank cheque in how we accomplished our shared objective." But if you used the sort of language that Rawnsley cites or that we have seen in the note you sent to President Bush, are those wholly consistent in terms of the understanding that the Americans formed?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: Sure. I don't think the Americans were in any doubt at all about what was being said and why it was being said. I can't recall all the precise conversations I had, but by the way, this is entirely also consistent with what I was saying publicly. I don't think it was a great secret that I was right alongside America after September 11th and continued to be, and one of the reasons why when we had the Crawford meeting there was so much international focus is that Britain and America were standing together.
What I was saying to the Americans was this, because I was trying to get them very substantially to amend their position. Their position had been "We are going to do it". Then their position had been because I had asked them "Okay with an ultimatum." Now their position with huge opposition within his system was going to be "We are going to put this back in the lap of the United Nations". Some of the people in his administration were saying "You are crazy. You are going to put it back into the bureaucracy of the UN. They will swallow it up. You will be back to all this playing around. In the meantime you have this guy doing what he is doing, sitting there and nothing happening."
So I was having to persuade him to take a view radically different from any of the people in his administration. So what I was saying to him is "I am going to be with you in handling it this way. I am not going to push you down this path and then back out when it gets too hot politically, because it is going to get hot for me politically, very, very much so."
I did this because I believed in it. I thought it was the right thing to do. I also believe it is consistent with my public statements and, frankly, whatever phrasing I used, I accept entirely I was saying "I am going to be with America in handling this. However, we should handle it this way". That was in the end what he agreed to do. The single thing that is most important over anything else in this whole business about the politics about the decision before we went to war, is that 1441 represented a huge compromise on his part and a huge opportunity for the international community to get its act together.
Once it became clear that Saddam had not changed but was carrying on in the same way, I think it would have been profoundly wrong of us to have gone back to the Americans and said, "I know we said that we would be with you in handling this, but now we are not".

The Chairman then concludes, rather opaquely:

SIR JOHN CHILCOT: Thank you. I'd like to ask Sir Roderic to pick up on Resolution 1441. Just before I do I think I would like to say for the record, because I said to the Cabinet Secretary that we were disappointed that it was not possible to see the statement, which, of course, we have seen, and that disappointment continues, but there it is.

Presumably he is referring to his introduction earlier to this part of Blair’s evidence (page 46)

… In the Inquiry's statement request to you, Mr Blair, we asked about two specific statements, the one you made to President Bush after the meeting of 23rd July 2002, and also to Defence Secretary Rumsfeld in June 2002.
The Cabinet Secretary would not agree to their disclosure. In communicating his decision to us, the Cabinet Secretary wrote and I quote:
"A UK Prime Minister may be less likely to have these exchanges or allow them to be recorded if he is concerned that this information would be disclosed at a later time against his wishes."
Are you content to tell the Inquiry what was in these statements?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: I am very content to discuss the basis of them. What I do believe and I am not going to hide behind the Cabinet Secretary -- it is not my way -- I think it is extremely important that the British Prime Minister and the American President are able to communicate in confidence, and if something is given in confidence it should be treated like that, but I am very happy to tell you the basis of what I said.

What the Chairman meant by 'it was not possible to see the statement, which, of course, we have seen, and that disappointment continues' is difficult to interpret. However, neither his remark nor Blair’s statement would seem to support the existence of a ‘secret pledge with George Bush to go to war’. Of course the Inquiry may have seen other documents which do. The MoS also states that the ‘inquiry rounds on Mr Blair for telling Parliament that intelligence suggesting Saddam had WMDs was “beyond doubt”’. Blair’s foreword to the September WMD dossier stated:

What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.

Although he later pointed out:

The case I make is that the UN Resolutions demanding he stops his WMD programme are being flouted; that since the inspectors left four years ago he has continued with this programme; that the inspectors must be allowed back in to do their job properly; and that if he refuses, or if he makes it impossible for them to do their job, as he has done in the past, the international community will have to act.
I believe that faced with the information available to me, the UK Government has been right to support the demands that this issue be confronted and dealt with. We must ensure that he does not get to use the weapons he has, or get hold of the weapons he wants.

Subsequently, as we all know, the evidence for Saddam’s WMD programme was not forthcoming. If only minor evidence had surfaced, the ‘beyond doubt’ issue would not have arisen.  Nonetheless, it is worth considering the alternative. If Blair hadn’t been so sure, would it have been in the UK’s interest for him to have gone to Bush and said “… we said that we would be with you in handling this, but now we are not"? Bear in mind that Blair had, with misgivings, supported Clinton a few years earlier over Saddam. Being able to say ‘we told you so about the WMD’ afterwards would hardly have helped restore the UK’s standing with the Bush White House. Waiting for Bush’s successor would hardly have been a practical optioneither, and, as it has turned out, Obama has been criticised by the Tea Party for many things, but not yet for anglophilia.

I quoted in an earlier post from Jim Naughtie’s The Accidental American about the significance of the UK/US relationship as perceived by Blair in 2004. Perhaps in 2011, if the UK is envisaged in some quarters as being on the way to minor power status (eg eventually abandoning its nuclear deterrent, aircraft carriers and a serious intelligence capability), keeping on good terms with the US is not seen as worth the price. However, the UK would need to be confident that it could address the current and future threats to cyber security without close cooperation with the US. London, the City and the services they provide, are fundamental to the UK’s returning to prosperity over the rest of the decade. The National Security Strategy published last year has as one of its key aims their protection, along with the rest of the nation’s infrastructure, against ‘Hostile attacks … by other states and large scale cyber crime’. It also states:

2.11 Our strong defence, security and intelligence relationship with the US is exceptionally close and central to our national interest.

On a more trivial note, is it really likely that the Iraq Inquiry report (assuming it appears in early 2012, a year later than originally envisaged) will, six months before the London Olympics, engage in major criticism of the former Prime Minister who secured them for the UK against French competition in particular?

UPDATE 17 OCTOBER

Yesterday, the Observer reported that:

The official inquiry into the UK's role in the build-up to the Iraq war might not issue its report until next summer at the earliest, more than a year after many expected it to be made public, the Observer has learned.

A source close to the inquiry, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, a former Whitehall mandarin who has advised both MI5 and MI6, suggested that its findings are unlikely to be disclosed until June.

Just before the Olympics then , unless, of course, there's another postponement ...

The Observer  also said:

The inquiry's findings are expected to be critical of a number of senior politicians within the Labour government, their aides, and intelligence chiefs. There is speculation that the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, will bear the brunt of the criticism.

While Blair is expected to be criticised, in particular for not consulting sufficiently with his cabinet, there is speculation that he won't be condemned as strongly as some had expected. But his relationship with his chief legal adviser faces acute scrutiny. The inquiry heard that eight months before the invasion, Lord Goldsmith told Blair an attempt to topple Saddam would be a serious breach of international law.

Alastair Campbell and Iraq

In a post in April, I speculated about the impact on the Iraq Inquiry of the UK’s involvement in Libya. On 12 May the Inquiry website published additional witness statements, declassified transcripts and documents. Also, the Inquiry Chairman, Sir John Chilcott was reported as saying “… my colleagues and I hope to present our report to the Prime Minister later this year but not before Parliament’s summer recess.” The Libyan situation may well be resolved by then, Gaddafi’s removal presumably being the crucial factor.

One of the new documents published by the Inquiry was a submission sent on 27 January to the Chairman from a former Major General and member of the Defence Intelligence Staff, Michael Laurie, commenting on Alastair Campbell’s evidence to the Inquiry on 12 January. Laurie stated:

Alistair [sic] Campbell said to the Inquiry that the purpose of the Dossier was not “to make a case for war”. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used.

Campbell’s immediately responded using Twitter:

@BBCLauraK nothing to add to evidence to inquiry. Dossier not case for war. Set out why govt more concerned re IraqWMD. Never met Gen Laurie

Re media inquiries on Iraq inquiry please see tweet to Laura Kuensberg BBC @bbclaurak. Thanks. No point calling for interviews.

(BBCLauraK is Laura Kuenssberg, Chief Political Correspondent for the BBC News Channel)

On 19 May, Campbell wrote to the Inquiry Chairman:

As his [Laurie’s] letter to the Inquiry was specifically targeted at my evidence to you, and as much of the coverage it generated was inaccurate, I would like to make three points. The first is that I do-not know and have never met Major General Laurie, and was not aware of any involvement he may have had is the September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s WMD. Second, neither I - nor, so far as I am aware, anyone else in Downing Street - was made aware of his views at the time or at any time in the subsequent nine years, until he felt moved to write to you, and his letter was published. The third point is that witnesses who were directly involved in the drafting of the dossier have made clear to several inquiries that at no time did I put anyone in the intelligence community under pressure, or say to them or anyone else that the then Prime Minister's purpose in publishing the dossier was to make the case for war.

The Chairman, as to be expected, made a non-committal reply the following day, so we will have to wait for the report to learn what, if anything, the Inquiry will make of this apparent divergence of views.

I hope to post about the second volume of Campbell’s Diaries, Power and the People 1997-1999, which covers the first three years of Tony Blair’s government, when I finish it. But in the meantime, I think it’s worth pointing out that (as far as I can tell) Iraq first appears in Campbell’s record on 6 November 1997, when Robin Cook informs Cabinet of the dangers of Iraq and Saddam’s WMD (page 200 – note that the indexing of this volume is wrong, showing the first occurrence of “Iraq” per se as being page 280.)

On 27 January 1998. Bill Clinton (engulfed in his Lewinsky problems) rang Tony Blair [Campbell’s TB] (page 275):

TB took a call from Clinton. He said he and C[herie] B[lair] were thinking of them and anything we could do to support him, we would. BC was straight on to Iraq and the need for firm action against Saddam because of his latest challenge to UNSCOM. It was pretty clear to anyone listening that what Tam Dalyell [Labour MP] offensively was calling 'the war of Clinton's penis' was about to begin. He said I hope you can support us if it comes to military action.

In February, prior to Blair’s visit to Washington, what now sounds like a proto-dossier is produced (page 283):

We turned the factual briefing [provenance unclear] into a paper for the media showing the extent of Saddam’s capability and the damage he could do. (4 Feb 98)

On 23 March, there is a great Whitehall flap (pages 330/1):

The main enlivening issue of the day came when John Holmes [Principal private secretary and Foreign Affairs adviser, page xviii] came in to say that there had been a running battle between the Sun and the Treasury Solicitor, Roland Phillips, over a sensitive piece of intelligence the Sun got hold of. It showed up an Iraqi plan to get anthrax into the UK. They had agreed to hold off publication over the weekend but now said they intended to publish. Stuart Higgins [Sun editor] was at the Oscars so I was dealing with Rebekah Wade [deputy editor]. I said we did not want to injunct but we were going in that direction, unless we can come to some arrangement.

I spoke to TB who said we should try to do some kind of deal. I spoke to Jan Polley [Cabinet Secretary's office] and got agreement to get the Sun in. So by 4.45, with a 5.15 court deadline, we were round my table, me, various intelligence and security folks, with some other people from the Foreign Office, Tom Crone, News International lawyer, Rebekah and Trevor Kavanagh, John Holmes and Roland Phillips. Our bottom line was that we wanted to avoid any reference to sensitive intelligence which might damage relations. I raised the option of doing it as an all-ports-warning story, i.e. something they could have got from a source at a port or in the security services here, rather than from intelligence. They went for it straight away, if reluctantly.

I gave them a PMOS [Prime Minister's Official Spokesman] quote and after to-ing and fro-ing they agreed not to refer to intelligence at all, other than to say it was intelligence from Baghdad. They were pretty reasonable. Trevor stayed and wrote the story at my desk, based on the Sun saying they had a source with access to intelligence in Baghdad.

Iraq then recurs frequently, reaching a climax on the weekend of 14/15 November. On 12 November (page 560) the Cabinet had been told that Saddam had broken the ceasefire agreement and was rebuilding his WMD programmes, but on the Sunday Blair was unhappy with the US attacking Iraq (pages 564/5):

He said we had got the assurances from Iraq - whether meaningless or not they had been given - but the US were still talking about going in today. This was a nightmare, he said. Having taken the wrong decision, they think they can put it right by taking the decision they should have taken in the first place. But the circumstances have changed and they may be making the wrong decision again. Then word came through from the MoD that the US were preparing plans based on the assumption that the UK would not take part. Jonathan [Powell] and I went back up to tell TB. We cannot let that happen, he said. Whether we think they are in the right place or not, it would be disastrous for the transatlantic relationship if we pulled out on this.

Bill Clinton in My Life (2004) provides a succinct summary of the outcome (page 833/4):

The Anglo-American assault lasted four days, with 650 air sorties and 400 cruise missiles, all carefully targeted to hit military and national security targets and to minimize civilian casualties. After the attack we had no way to know how much of the proscribed material had been destroyed, but Iraq's ability to produce and deploy dangerous weapons had plainly been reduced.

Within a month, Downing Street was unhappy with the BBC’s Iraq coverage (page 605/6):

I called Tony Hall [Director of News, BBC] … to say we had a lot of trouble with some of their coverage of Iraq - particularly [Jeremy] Bowen and [Rageh] Omaar [BBC correspondents]. He blathered on as he always did about how they always took our complaints seriously, but they felt their reporters were doing well in difficult circumstances. I said it was getting to a point where we would have to go public with our views that there was an inbuilt bias against us caused by their refusal to match their scepticism of what we said with scepticism of what the Iraqis said and showed them, in an environment where they were TOTALLY dependent on the regime for access and information. He said that would make it much harder to get any change in approach. (21 Dec 98)

This volume of Campbell’s diaries ends on 30 April 1999. Volume 3, due out in July, will cover the period to 11 September 2001. The Iraq Inquiry’s terms of reference state that “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.” It will be interesting to see, in the light of Campbell’s account, whether the Chilcot report will consider any aspects of the US/UK involvement with Iraq prior to 9/11, and how they might have conditioned later behaviours.

In the meantime, here is another extract from My Life (page 935) when, on 19 December 2000, Bill Clinton, about to leave office, meets with the president-elect, George W Bush:

He was putting together an experienced team from past Republican administrations who believed that the biggest security issues were the need for national missile defense and Iraq. I told him that based on the last eight years, I thought his biggest security problems in order would be Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda; the absence of peace in the Middle East; the standoff between nuclear powers India and Pakistan and the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al Qaeda; North Korea; and then Iraq.

[annotations above by me thus]

Libya and the Iraq Inquiry

An earlier post about the Iraq Inquiry wondered what issues its report would address that hadn’t been covered in 2004 by Lord Butler and his comments on the machinery of government. Now the Inquiry is faced with the problem that what will be known as the Chilcot report (after its Chairman who is likely to present it to the Prime Minister this summer) seems to have been overtaken by the UK’s becoming involved in the conflict in Libya. It’s worth repeating the Inquiry’s terms of reference:

"Our terms of reference are very broad, but 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."

Seemingly the Inquiry is not an academic or legal exercise but is aimed at assisting the current Coalition and future governments to deal with Iraq-like situations in an optimal fashion (note ‘best’, ‘most’ and ‘best’ again in the last sentence) from start to finish. However, lessons about ‘sofa government’ seem to have been applied anyway. According to Anthony Seldon:

… Cameron was equally clear that his premiership would see a return to formal Cabinet government. Cabinet meets for between an hour and a half to two hours each Tuesday. Regular meetings include the National Security Council [NSC], which he established at the outset.

and

On Libya, he [Cameron] is relying on Ricketts’ [Peter Ricketts, National Security Adviser] advice daily, not least at the daily meeting of the NSC’s Libya committee.

So presumably the making of judgements about the UK’s developing involvement in Libya is being very properly documented. This should please contemporary historians in years to come when (or if) the NSC files are released by The National Archives. They may even be able to conclude whether the formality of the decision-making made much difference when, inevitably, there were major uncertainties as to the course of the conflict and the nature of post-conflict Libya.

Arguably, the UK’s involvement in Libya is putting into practice ‘liberal interventionism’. This was the subject of an earlier post which looked at the contribution of Sir Lawrence Freedman, a member of the Iraq Inquiry Committee, to Tony Blair’s Chicago speech in 1999.

ADDENDUM JUNE 2011: This later post might also be of interest..

Libya - Liberal Interventionism Revisited

Just what the rest of the world, including the UK and our allies, should do, or will have to do, about the situation emerging in Libya is far from clear. On 8 March, Sir Christopher Meyer, formerly UK ambassador in Washington, wrote in the Daily Mail about the UK government’s foreign policy in reaction to the Arab Spring:

The very foundations of British foreign policy need to be examined, because all is muddle and confusion. We don’t seem to be able to think straight about when, if at all, it is right to intervene in another country. In an echo of Tony Blair’s doctrine of liberal interventionism, we appear to have foreign policy ambitions that once again outstrip our military capabilities.

This post revisits the origins of Blair's “liberal interventionism”, and, interestingly, it was in his 2005 book, DC Confidential, that Meyer had provided a well-informed view of the speech (‘The Doctrine of the International Community’) which Tony Blair had given in Chicago on 24 April 1999, and to which the concept now seems to be attached:

Blair delivered a speech of some significance. It completely blindsided the Foreign Office. Against the background of Kosovo he promulgated a doctrine of international community and humanitarian intervention, almost pre-emption: that it was justified to violate the frontiers and sovereignty of a state if within its borders genocide was about to be, or was being, carried out. This was not a million miles from one of the main arguments used to justify the attack on Iraq in 2003. They say, though I could not corroborate this myself, that the ideas underpinning the speech were borrowed from the foreign policy analyst and academic Lawrence Freedman.

The speech made a lot of people sit up. Some even went as far as to say that the basic principles of the modern nation-state, established after the Thirty Years War in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, had been overturned. In fact, it was not that radical. The right to intervene on human-rights grounds in the internal affairs of another country had, to all intents and purposes, been ceded in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the grand bargain between the western and communist halves of Europe, which became one of the pillars of détente.

The speech, eloquently delivered in Blair's evangelical style, was received with a thunderous standing ovation from the hundreds of Chicagoans who filled the cavernous ballroom of one of the city's largest hotels.

Sir (now) Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies and Vice Principal at King’s College, London, and a member of the Iraq Inquiry Committee. On 18 January 2010 he wrote to the Inquiry chairman, Sir John Chilcot, enclosing a memo, ‘Chicago Speech: Some Suggestions’, that he had sent to Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Chief of Staff at the latter’s request on 16 April 1999. (Powell was to give evidence to the Inquiry on 18 January 2010).

With a few changes, Freedman’s memo provided the International Security section of the Blair’s speech. It is interesting to examine the non-trivial alterations (underlinings below are mine). Blair began following Freedman closely:

We now have a decade of experience since the end of the cold war. It has certainly been a less easy time than many people hoped in the natural euphoria that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Our armed forces have been busier than ever – delivering humanitarian aid, deterring attacks on defenceless people, backing up UN resolutions, and occasionally engaging in major wars, as we did in the Gulf in 1991 and are currently doing in the Balkans.

but then omitted Freedman’s subsequent cautionary sentence:

In the search for a peace dividend the armed forces of the west were cut back, but they can be cut no further and we are starting to worry about overstretch.

and that was in 1999, before current Western cuts/savings and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Later Freedman pointed to enlightened self-interest as a rationale for intervention:

As we address world problems, at the NATO summit and G8 meetings, we might be tempted to think back to the clarity and simplicity of the cold war. T here were arguments about the right strategy to adopt to contain the Soviet threat but the threat itself was well understood. Now we have the luxury but also the dilemma of choice. Our most vital interests demand very little of us these days. They are not at risk. Yet we can see values that we cherish being violated daily and images of humanitarian distress that touch our hearts and our consciences. We know that these are often symptoms of political upheavals that could have knock on effects that will eventually be felt at home.

Blair took only the first sentence here, and chose a more moral tone for value-spreading:

As we address these problems at this weekend’s NATO Summit we may be tempted to think back to the clarity and simplicity of the Cold War. But now we have to establish a new framework. No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer. As John Kennedy put it “Freedom is indivisible and when one man is enslaved who is free?”.

He then followed Freedman again:

The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts. Non -interference has long been considered an important principle of international order. And it is not one we would want to jettison too readily. One state should not feel it has the right to change the political system of another or forment subversion or seize pieces of territory to which it feels it should have some claim. But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as “threats to international peace and security”. When regimes are based on minority rule they lose legitimacy – look at South Africa.

except that Freedman had proposed “Non-interference … has long been considered a basic principle of international order”, (and also "foment", not the malapropism “forment”).

Then Freedman’s “five tests”, on the issue of when and whether to intervene, became, in the speech, five concise “major considerations”. Among these, Freedman’s:

2. Have we exhausted all diplomatic options? At times we must negotiate with evil-doers and negotiate seriously. This requires enormous clarity about our concerns and objectives. Of course a desperate desire for compromise can be exploited – but so can a refusal to compromise.

became Blair’s:

Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo.

and Freedman’s:

4. Are we prepared for then long-term? We have perhaps in the past talked too much of the need for `exit strategies’ for the good reason that we do not want our forces to be tied up indefinitely. But it is a matter of fact that once we have made a commitment to these unfortunate societies we cannot simply walk away once the fighting is over. There will always be a job of political and economic reconstruction. Better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than to return for repeat performances with large numbers.

became Blair’s:

Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers.

Blair then drew the International Security section of the speech to a conclusion, emphasising the role of the UN and the Security Council, with a similar, but much briefer, argument to Freedman's.

So what is to be done about Libya, particularly by the UK? In his Daily Mail article Meyer suggested:

Nor will the inevitable contradictions in British foreign policy disappear by baldly asserting that our democratic values and our commercial interests go hand in hand, or are, in effect, the same thing, as David Cameron and George Osborne have done in recent speeches. They are plainly not the same. If they were, Britain would do no more business with, for example, the autocracies of Saudi Arabia and China. But we cannot possibly cut our business links with these countries — were we to do so, tens of thousands of British workers would lose their jobs. What Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne would do well to remember is that the first responsibility of a British government is to the security and prosperity of the British ¬citizen — not to those citizens, however deserving, who yearn for freedom in foreign countries across the world.
We have to recognise that change and reform in countries come from within and not through the influence of outside powers. There is very little that we can, or should, do in Libya unless mass slaughter or genocide were to threaten. The last thing on earth Britain wants is to get sucked into a Libyan civil war. It is not a ‘vision’ Britain needs in its foreign policy, but an enlightened pragmatism.

No doubt consideration is underway relating to Freedman’s third test for intervention:

On the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations that we can sensibly and prudently undertake?

as echoed by Blair in the Chicago speech, and also to Freedman’s early point about overstretch which Blair had omitted. Presumably, if as seems to be the case, the UK is working closely with partners  on a Security Council resolution on a no-fly zone in Libya on a contingency basis, the UK expects to be able to make a contribution. However, the opportunity cost of committing to Libya and then not being able to act elsewhere could be high. On the other hand, as in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, how long can the rest of the world stand by and watch a dictator turn his armour and air power against a civilian population? The nature and extent of the involvement that the US is prepared to provide will, of course, be the key factor.

Blair and the Iraq Inquiry

Watching Tony Blair’s second appearance at the Iraq Inquiry on BBC News last month, it didn’t seem surprising that Cameron and Osborne are said to call him “The Master”, the soubriquet of another great performer, Noël Coward. It will be interesting to see how the Inquiry treats Blair in its report. Some of the more fanciful ideas put about by his detractors can be put in perspective by reading the Chairman’s statement of the Inquiry Terms of Reference:

"Our terms of reference are very broad, but 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."

At a guess, Blair will be told off a second time for not running a tight enough ship (see below for the first). To judge by their style of questioning, it will come naturally to the Inquiry to put any criticisms in an appropriately oblique and circumlocutious way. Of course, various lessons and recommendations as to how to do better will be offered. It would be surprising if these improvements to the machinery of government didn’t require a couple of new posts at Senior Civil Service Pay Band 3 (Deputy Secretary in Sir Humphrey Appleby’s day), and the upgrading of some others.

There may be some consideration of the size of UK forces to be committed to such affairs in the future (they can only be smaller) and improving the planning including the consequences, but how will the Inquiry deal with one key ‘best interests of the country’ issue: what would the US reaction have been if the UK had declined to participate? The evidence in 2009 from Sir Christopher Meyer (UK ambassador in Washington 1997-2003) suggests that it wouldn’t have been the end of the world (p71-5):

SIR RODERIC LYNE: If we had sat out the war, would it have damaged British interests in the United States if that's what they were saying to us?
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: It is impossible to say, it is impossible to say. We had a very high reputation at the time inside the United States. There was no great popular surge, as far as we could tell, in favour of going to war. Polls weren't particularly encouraging for the administration. I was travelling a lot around the United States at the time. I didn't come across anybody except an oil man in Houston who was keen on invading. I doubt it would have done a lot of damage.
...
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Apart from the applause factor that you mentioned earlier, what benefits to British interests did we gain, did we advance, by the role that we took?
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: That's a great question, and it is one that much pre-occupied me. I said to London, "The key thing now, quite apart from Iraq, is to translate this popularity into real achievements which benefit the national interest", and we failed. We failed, and I'll tell you where we failed. We failed on persuading the United States administration to liberalise air services across the Atlantic, a very big British interest. The other thing which was profoundly irritating was that almost on the day that 45 Commando arrived in Afghanistan to help with the war, the Americans slapped tariffs on exports from the UK of what they called speciality steel.
...
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Just to make sure that I have properly understood this. To summarise what you have just said, it wasn't essential for the defence of British interests that we actually played the part that we did choose to play in Iraq. It wasn't essential, for reasons of British/American relations, that we did so. On the one hand, there wouldn't have been necessarily massive damage if we had not done so, and, on the other hand, we failed to secure specific benefits and in some cases areas you have identified, steel and air services, that we should have done.

While writing his book, The Accidental American, Jim Naughtie seems to have had privileged access to Blair, including an exclusive interview in 2004. He reveals just how heavily the relationship with the US seemed to weigh on Blair (p164-5):

Blair also understood the power of the secret network from the moment in the course of his first week in office when he was inculcated into the secrets of the UKUSA Treaty of 1948, which established the intelligence relationship with Washington, and then signed the papers giving him control of the nuclear missiles that were part of the defence arrangement with the United States. For any incoming prime minister, these arrangements become a matter of day-to-day importance that is often unrecognized by the general public. For example, the government's vast listening station in Cheltenham-GCHQ-is not only the hub of electronic intelligence for Whitehall but a vital part of the listening apparatus of the National Security Agency in Washington. That is why more than half the budget for GCHQ is paid for by American taxpayers, a fact about which British governments have been naturally reticent.

As with all their predecessors, the relationship between Bush and Blair was built on this practical foundation. The niceties of a shared language (more or less), the threads of family history that still span the Atlantic, and the memories of World War II are often portrayed as being the essence of the partnership: in practice, the hard facts of intelligence and defence are the links that pull the two governments together. They are bound together by their weapons, their satellites, and the tentacles of their intelligence networks.

The Inquiry didn’t ask Meyer (or Blair for that matter) about this intelligence/ defence relationship, for example whether he thought the Blair-Bush exchange of letters in 2006 on maintaining Trident would have been feasible if the UK had not stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the US in Iraq. The realities of timing (Blair and Bush were aware that their respective departures from office would be in 2007 and 2009) and a different conjunction of personalities might have made securing Brown-Bush or Brown-Obama exchanges at a later date much harder work. Beyond the Inquiry’s remit, of course, it is arguable that Blair’s current ship, The Office of Tony Blair, might not have been such a capable vessel, and in a position to be performing so many good works, if he had been less highly regarded in the US.

Could next time be different? Blair is not alone in thinking that some sort of confrontation with Iran is inevitable. Cameron or Miliband could find themselves in a very similar position to Blair (if Cameron were leading a Conservative government he would find it easier to take his party with him than Blair did, but not the LibDem part of the Coalition). The officials and the politicians, as might be expected, have opposing views as to whether the existence of a more elaborate bureaucratic apparatus would make any significant difference.  Lord Butler in his report in 2004 (Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction) has already gone over some of the Inquiry’s ground:

609. In the year before the war, the Cabinet discussed policy towards Iraq as a specific agenda item 24 times. It also arose in the course of discussions on other business. Cabinet members were offered and many received briefings on the intelligence picture on Iraq. There was therefore no lack of discussion on Iraq; and we have been informed that it was substantive. The Ministerial Committee on Defence and Overseas Policy did not meet. By contrast, over the period from April 2002 to the start of military action, some 25 meetings attended by the small number of key Ministers, officials and military officers most closely involved provided the framework of discussion and decision-making within Government.
610. One inescapable consequence of this was to limit wider collective discussion and consideration by the Cabinet to the frequent but unscripted occasions when the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary briefed the Cabinet orally. Excellent quality papers were written by officials, but these were not discussed in Cabinet or in Cabinet Committee. Without papers circulated in advance, it remains possible but is obviously much more difficult for members of the Cabinet outside the small circle directly involved to bring their political judgement and experience to bear on the major decisions for which the Cabinet as a whole must carry responsibility. The absence of papers on the Cabinet agenda so that Ministers could obtain briefings in advance from the Cabinet Office, their own departments or from the intelligence agencies plainly reduced their ability to prepare properly for such discussions, while the changes to key posts at the head of the Cabinet Secretariat lessened the support of the machinery of government for the collective responsibility of the Cabinet in the vital matter of war and peace.
611. We do not suggest that there is or should be an ideal or unchangeable system of collective Government, still less that procedures are in aggregate any less effective now than in earlier times. However, we are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement. Such risks are particularly significant in a field like the subject of our Review, where hard facts are inherently difficult to come by and the quality of judgement is accordingly all the more important.

The second volume of Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, Power and the People 1997-1999, reveals the gulf between Sir Robin Butler (as he was when Cabinet Secretary) and Blair’s team when they arrived in Number 10. Campbell (40 at the time) records on 28 July 1997: “Butler struck me as very amiable but very out of date” – Butler was 59, Blair 44. “Sofa government” had arrived, not that two of the witnesses to the Iraq Inquiry saw much of a problem with it in retrospect. Here the Iraq Inquiry Chairman (Sir John Chilcot) is questioning Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff (a political post) on 18 January 2010 (p8-9):

THE CHAIRMAN: So turning to another and broader machinery point, much has been written about so-called "sofa government", and I do put that in quotation marks, characterised, perhaps not unfairly, with informality and, indeed, a degree of intimacy with close and trusted advisers and colleagues, and, on the other side, people have asked, "Is there some risk of exclusion of other colleagues still holding and sharing heavy responsibility?", but in particular asking, "Did that mean that action following such discussions characterised to some degree by informality, action points might be lost or lost in translation, as it were, into the government machine?" Would you like to comment on that?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: Yes. We had this criticism of sofa government. I think it is actually misplaced. I don’t think it matters whether a meeting takes place in the Cabinet room, where John Major used to hold meetings, or in the sitting room, where Mrs Thatcher or Tony Blair used to hold their meetings. I think the key thing is that you have the right people there, the people who need to be involved in a decision, that they are properly informed, have the proper material before them, in written or in oral form, and that decisions are taken, then recorded, and then distributed to government to be followed up. As long as that happens, I think it doesn't really matter if someone is sitting on a sofa or sitting round a table.
THE CHAIRMAN: It would be primarily your responsibility to the Prime Minister and the system to ensure that the outcome of such discussions were recorded and were transmitted into the government machinery?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: Inasmuch as it is my responsibility to make sure that everything in Number 10 functioned, yes. Although the notes in such meetings would be taken usually by civil servants who were at the meetings.
THE CHAIRMAN: Right. ...

Over a year later, on 3 February, Jack Straw (Foreign Secretary in the period of interest) was the final witness (his third appearance), and made a closing statement (p151):

[Blair’s] style was less formal than others and certainly less formal than mine but the fact he used soft furnishings rather than hard chairs does not make him a bad person, nor, to make a more serious point, do I believe that a more formal process would have altered either the respect in which he was held by colleagues, the influence he had, nor the outcome of the decisions, but equally the fact the process was, frustratingly for some, less formal than it should have been I don't think necessarily meant the decisions were of a lower quality nor that they lacked the fullest range of opinions in the input.