On leaving Downing Street in 2007 Tony Blair famously accused the media of hunting like a “feral beast tearing people and reputations to bits”.

He might well have reflected on that statement when he surveyed Thursday’s national press coverage of the Chilcot report on the Iraq war. The newspapers savaged him and tore what remains of his reputation to bits.

Almost every front page treated the former prime minister to critical headlines, whether sober and straightforward - “Chilcot report into Iraq war delivers harsh verdict on Blair” (Financial Times) - or more colourful and interpetative: “A monster of delusion” (Daily Mail); “Weapon of mass deception” (Sun); “Blair’s private war” (Times); “Blair is world’s worst terrorist” (Daily Star) and “Spinning on their graves” (Independent).

Several editors picked up on his instransigent stance: “I can’t say sorry for Iraq... I’d do it again” (Metro); “I’d take the same decision” (Daily Telegraph); “Blair defiant as Chilcot delivers devastating verdict on Iraq war” (Guardian); “Shamed Blair: I’m sorry but I’d do it again” (Daily Express); and “Defiant Blair: I’d invade Iraq again” (i).

And the single line in Blair’s memo to George Bush eight months before the invasion - “I will be with you whatever” - featured boldly on the front pages of the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mirror.

From that “private promise”, said the Guardian, “every abuse of public process would flow, as well as that pervasive, poisonous sense that the government was not playing it straight.” Blair “fatally compromised his own preference for constructing a UN-blessed route to war, by preceding it all with the bald vow that Washington could count on him.”

By blindly following Bush, he had been guilty of ruining a country, shattering trust and trashing his own reputation.

Consider the victims, it said. Estimates of the lives lost vary from a quarter of a million to 600,000. Many more were injured. The number of people displaced from their homes amounts to “somewhere between one in 10 and one in six of the population.”

Chilcot’s report was “a withering verdict” on Blair’s conduct before the 2003 invasion and his failure to create a proper plan for its aftermath, said the Times.

The report will serve as the definitive account of a military experiment that went disastrously wrong for want of basic planning and due diligence. The price of removing Saddam Hussein from power “has been immeasurable... Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have perished in a revival of historical Sunni-Shia bloodletting that grinds on to this day.”

The Financial Times agreed, viewing the report as an excoriating verdict on the UK’s political, military and intelligence establishments, with misjudgments and occasional ineptitude.

For the Telegraph, the report was “a litany of sorrows”. Although “the worst post-war decisions were taken by Americans with little regard for British views, that does not excuse poor UK preparations... The impression given by the report is of a Downing Street too absorbed in fixing the political case for war to worry much about its aftermath.”

The Daily Mail, pleased that it was not “another establishment whitewash”, thought the report “devastating.”

“In pitiless detail,” it revealed “the duplicitous, dishonest, secretive, shallow and incompetent conduct of Tony Blair... More disturbing still... it lays bare the appalling shortcomings of the constitution and establishment, which failed to restrain the former prime minister’s excesses or protect our troops from needless danger.”

The Sun, which was gung-ho for the war at the time, accused Blair of “a monumental delusion” and of being negligent and naive.

He “accepted dubious evidence” of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction “without question” and “used them to sell the war to parliament, the nation — and the Sun — with his silky oratory.”

Blair “deserves to be vilified,” said the Express. But it concentrated its fire on the Ministry of Defence for its failure to provide troops with the equipment they needed.

“Blair must accept his damnation”, said the Mirror, viewing the report as “a devastating indictment”. It continued: “From exaggerated intelligence about WMDs to justify going to war and revelations of Blair’s poodle-like pledges to George Bush to a fatal lack of planning for the occupation and failure to properly equip our troops, Chilcot is damning, damning, damning.”

Its said that “Blair’s insistence he neither lied nor misled parliament will be disputed by many, yet what’s beyond dispute is that his reputation is in tatters.

“But rather than accept his monumental error of judgement, Blair, astonishingly, maintains he would make the same decision again.”

And there was plenty more of the same from columnists and commentators. Blair’s tense two-hour press conference made no difference to what the “feral press” thought of him. In winning a war he has lost his reputation.