Of course the Chilcot Inquiry was never going to ask hard questions or reveal anything particularly damaging to the party which took us to war in Iraq, which remains in power and which established the Inquiry, chose its members and set the parameters within which it would work.

Of course it would control ‘evidence’ as far as it could. The Independent revealed yesterday that one witness – before his appearance – ‘was handed three files containing on-the-record statements relating to his role – suggesting this was effectively a guide to giving evidence that is already well known’.

Of course the Chilcot – or any other – Inquiry into how and why we got into the illegal war in Iraq is never going to arrive at a conclusion any of us will accept as right.

This is because there is an unbridgeable gap between what we ‘know’ to have been the heart of the matter and what, politically, will be kept well below the surface. There are far too many powerful vested interests in brazening it out without anything approaching truth reaching the point of certification.

The best we can hope for is, to some degree, what we are getting – more texture confirming what we already ‘know’ – a bit more depth in some places, a few embellishments to tease the pleasure of anger into being.

We are also left with increasing contempt for those now testifying to their personal objections to and anxieties about what was being done at the time – but somehow never mentioned them or made them stick when it mattered.

As one commentator said at the weekend, ‘he made me do it’ is not a grown up excuse.

However the Chilcot conclusions are finally couched, we will be left unsatisfied – if a formal judgment coinciding with our own is what we need.

Justice, however, in the mysterious way of things, is being done.

Tony Blair is the human equivalent of the Flying Dutchman of mythology. Read the Wikipedia definition – summed up below – of the ship and see behind the story the increasingly desperate Blair perma-grin. This is a man doomed to spend the rest of his life deprived of the one thing he values more than the personal riches he thought it was all about.

‘The Flying Dutchman , according to folklore, is a ghost ship that can never go home, doomed to sail the oceans forever. The Flying Dutchman is usually spotted from far away, sometimes glowing with ghostly light. It is said that if hailed by another ship, its crew will try to send messages to land or to people long dead. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship is a portent of doom’.

Blair needs to be accepted as important, to live in the spotlight, to be the focus of attention, to feel the flutter of the admiring and the lowly about his skirts.

That is not going to happen now. Uness you measure it by excessive spending and personal aggrandisement, he made no attempt to take seriously the sinecure he was given when he left office – the role of Envoy to the Midde East. He didn’t even break his holiday when the Gaza atrocities were being perpetrated. He never was a worker, only a presenter.

The Presidency of the European Union was his last throw, the prize he felt was his by right – and the European leaders, wisely, drew back from letting him have it.

He will spend the rest of his life, living, as now, mainly offshore, to avoid paying UK tax; talking  increasingly meaningless waffle about increasingly distant events to increasingly elderly rich people for decreasing lecture fees.

He will be rich beyond the imaginings of the rest of us – he already is – and he will live with, for him, the agony of peripherality and disdain.

We’ll settle for that as a just outcome.

Will it appease the shade of Dr David Kelly, whose family, oddly, have left the campaign to uncover the truths behind the strange circumstances of his inquestless death to the group of medical experts legally contesting the given  ‘facts’?

For now, let’s just enjoy the sight of Chilcot wriggling on the hook of the credibility he claimed. Karma’s on the case.

Related Posts

• Labour in melt down (1)
• Investigation into Salmond’s expenses claim for attempt to impeach Blair on Iraq (4)
• Blair back for election: start it in Argyll – turn him off, turn your back (1)
• Mail on Sunday reveals Hutton ordered David Kelly’s medical records closed for 70 years (0)
• Westminster: three snouts suspended from the trough (1)

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