Tony Blair failed to ‘be straight’ with the public about Iraq invasion – Chilcot

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Former Prime Minister Tony Blair failed to “be straight” with the public about his decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sir John Chilcot said, exactly one year since he published his damning report into Britain’s role in the conflict.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the 12-volume report was published, Chilcot said Blair’s testimony to the inquiry was “emotionally truthful,” but the Labour leader had failed to act on the basis of facts.

“Any prime minister taking a country into war has got to be straight with the nation and carry it, so far as possible, with him or her,” Chilcot told BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg.

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“I don’t believe that was the case in the Iraq instance.”

The two-million-word report, which took seven years to complete, was published shortly after the EU referendum, somewhat blunting its impact.

Chilcot said Blair had drawn the UK into Iraq on the basis of questionable intelligence, which had suggested former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The report, however, found that Saddam’s regime posed “no imminent threat” at the time of the invasion in 2003, and the war had therefore been waged on “flawed” intelligence.

It added that Blair, who told MPs at the time that Saddam could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, acted with “a certainty which was not justified.”

Chilcot also suggested Blair may have failed to offer the inquiry a comprehensive account of the events that unfolded in the run-up, during and in the aftermath of the Iraq War.

“I think he gave an - what was - I hesitate to say this, rather, but I think it was, from his perspective and standpoint, emotionally truthful, and I think that came out also in his press conference after the launch statement.

“I think he was under - as you said just now - very great emotional pressure during those sessions… He was suffering. He was deeply engaged. Now in that state of mind and mood you fall back on your instinctive skills and reactions, I think.”