Backlash at Chilcot Inquiry compromise

The Daily Mail continues to provide coverage on the backlash following the Chair of the Iraq Inquiry, Sir John Chilcot’s deal with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to publish ‘gists and quotes’ from some of the correspondence between the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and George Bush.

The ongoing rift being the Inquiry and the Cabinet Office regarding the correspondence between the two former leaders has resulted in the lengthy delay to the publication of the Chilcot report.

But the Liberal Democrat Home Office Minister, Norman Baker, in an interview with the paper spoke out against the deal struck and the ‘filleting’ of key documents hitherto withheld from the Inquiry.

Baker said: “The British people have a right to know what was done in their name without it being filleted by those who would like to keep some matters secret.

“Iraq is perhaps the most serious undermining of democracy for decades and we need the full facts. We are now led to believe Tony Blair is happy to have everything published. I urge him now to call for that publicly.”

The condemnation by Baker follows similar comments expressed by another former Prime Minister, Sir John Major, who called upon Blair to publicly urge for the letters and notes of phone calls to be published in full.

Major said that the compromise reached was a ‘pity’ because it would continue to allow conspiracy theories to ‘fester’.

It seems quite unlikely that the report will fully meet the expectations of effectively “[challenging] previous accounts of what happened” in the UK’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 given the limitations placed on information it is able to put in the public domain.