Tony Blair confided to a senior RAF officer about the extent of his knowledge of military affairs. ‘I know we have an Army, Navy and Air Force,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know any more'

For a major new book on the former PM, top investigative reporter Tom Bower interviewed dozens of senior government officials, all the Cabinet Secretaries from the Blair years and successive junior ministers and Cabinet ministers. For the inside track on Blair’s war-mongering, he also interviewed dozens of senior military officers and all four Chiefs of the Defence Staff. In total, he spoke to 200 people. Today, in the second part of our exclusive series, he reveals the devastating truth he uncovered about the build-up to conflict in Iraq...

Soon after stepping into Downing Street as Britain youngest Prime Minister since 1812, the 43-year-old Tony Blair confided to a senior RAF officer about the extent of his knowledge of military affairs. ‘I know we have an Army, Navy and Air Force,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know any more.’

It was an astonishing admission for a man who now had his finger on the nuclear button. To overcome this deficiency, he opted to rely on General Charles Guthrie, the Chief of the Defence Staff until 2001, to educate him. ‘Call me Tony,’ said Blair as they sat on the sunlit terrace of Downing Street’s garden.

‘I shall call you Prime Minister,’ replied Guthrie.

Blair, who had avoided serving in the cadet force at school, was receptive to the blood-and-guts aura the general had acquired over his years of service. For his part, Guthrie understood the young politician’s ambition to change the world, using Britain’s military as what Blair evangelically called ‘a force for good’.

The men soon bonded over a mutual enjoyment of tennis and agreement about a newspaper article Blair had written, outlining his doctrine. ‘If good men do nothing,’ he had written, adapting Edmund Burke, ‘evil prospers.’ Neither Blair nor Guthrie anticipated to what degree those seven words would transform British politics.

Then President Bush and former PM Tony Blair following a press conference at Camp David Friday in 2001

From sending British bombers over Iraq in 1998 (the first evening of which, Blair spent watching the Harrison Ford thriller Air Force One), to the quagmire of Afghanistan, via Kosovo and Sierra Leone, Blair’s zeal for committing British troops to action was unprecedented, especially for a PM who neither understood nor particularly liked the military.

But of all his military interventions, none was to prove so controversial as the second Iraq war and the decisions that took us there.

The official inquiry into those events — chaired by Sir John Chilcot — is still not complete, more than six years after it began hearing evidence. Its findings are due to be published later this year. But now, based on exclusive accounts by many of those involved, the full devastating truth of the countdown to war can be laid bare.

The picture it reveals is of a PM who, through his messianic determination to tackle ‘evil’, dragged Britain to war through wilful deception of senior officials, his Cabinet, Parliament — and his country.

September 11, 2001: The day that changed the world

The day two hijacked planes crashed into New York’s twin towers changed everything for Tony Blair. In the battle between good and evil, he decided, his responsibility was to embark on a worldwide crusade to save civilisation. ‘We shall support America in anything they do,’ he excitedly told a meeting of ministers and the military.

Five days later, President George Bush informed Blair in a phone call that Al Qaeda — now known to be responsible for 9/11 — had possible links with Iraq.

Could it be true? As Blair busily flew around Europe, conferring with leaders, he was accompanied by MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, who was already convinced — without any concrete evidence — that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

A suicide bomber, he told Blair, might even trigger a nuclear explosion in London. The warning sank in. Dearlove quickly became ‘unusually close’ to Blair, according to shocked officials.

Late November

Seemingly out of the blue, Blair told his foreign affairs advisers: ‘I’d like a strategy paper on Iraq.’ The seeds for an invasion were already being sown as officials searched for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

The White House noted that Blair was more hawkish than its President. And at least one British military chief was seriously disturbed.

Fearing an invasion of Afghanistan would end in a quagmire like Vietnam, Admiral Mike Boyce — the newly appointed Chief of the Defence Staff — used one of his regular meetings with Blair to explain the pitfalls of invading distant Muslim countries.

The Prime Minister nodded politely. His instinct, he replied, convinced him that Afghanis would embrace Western-style democracy as Iraqis would later once Saddam had gone. Crucially, Blair already secretly supported ‘regime change’ in Iraq, which he knew raised legal obstacles. Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs would become his smokescreen to overcome them.

Frustrated by the PM’s disregard of history and the limitations of our Armed Forces, the admiral fired a broadside at No 10 with a speech to a military audience in London.

British soldier prepares to jump from a burning tank which was set ablaze after a shooting incident in Basra

British airmen shelter from the dust thrown up from a helicopter as they conduct a dawn airborne counter insurgency patrol in 2009 in Iraq

Bombing, he warned, would not defeat terrorism but would radicalise the Muslim world against the West. A conventional invasion of Afghanistan, and by implication Iraq, would fail to win ‘hearts and minds’ and would drag on for ten years.

‘The world,’ he said, ‘cannot afford non-states, black-hole states or failed states because such states breed terrorism. Therefore, we have to attack the causes, not the symptoms, of terrorism.’

It would be in Britain’s national interest, he suggested, for Blair to lay down red lines in his relationship with America and not be unequivocally associated with Bush’s putative adventure.

The instant reaction from an irritated Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, was to ridicule Boyce’s prediction that allied troops would still be fighting in Afghanistan the following summer. America’s high-tech war, he said, would crush the Taliban within weeks, and his country’s soldiers would all return home before the spring.

Blair was also irritated. He did not understand the admiral’s argument, but he did appreciate that annoying Rumsfeld was not in Britain’s interest. ‘Why do you have to be so gloomy?’ Alastair Campbell would later ask Boyce. ‘So half full?’

The admiral looked at him with contempt. ‘I don’t tell people what they like to hear,’ he replied, describing Campbell later as ‘irrelevant . . . he was trivial, not interested in real outcomes.’

December 4: A secret letter is sent to George Bush

Blair sent Dearlove and his foreign affairs adviser David Manning to Washington DC to hand over a personal letter to Bush, setting out his own ideas about ‘regime change’ in Iraq. None of the Prime Minister’s other senior officials was shown what he had written.

While in Washington, Dearlove — who knew he had Blair’s support — met CIA chiefs to discuss how to remove Saddam.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister shut the door on anyone who advised caution. He excluded anyone who could have warned him about the complexities of the Middle East’s history. No one was asked for an independent analysis of Iraq — which Saddam ruled by controlling irreconcilable divisions between religions, tribal clans and family loyalties.

Nor did anyone warn him that Dearlove’s sources were questionable. That was up to the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, but he would later say: ‘We didn’t see it as our job to second-guess the agencies on the reliability of their sources.’

As for Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, he was already being frozen out. Reports from the UK ambassador in Washington were now by-passing him and being sent directly to Downing Street.

Demonstrators protest outside the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in London where former prime minister Tony Blair gave evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry

Unusually, Blair was also encouraging Dearlove to bring raw intelligence straight to him. Not that there was much of it, as the intelligence chief lacked any sources close to Saddam. He could only speculate, drawing on second-hand and, more usually, unverifiable third-hand informants with questionable motives.

Whenever Dearlove arrived to brief the Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson was excluded. By flouting the tradition for a senior civil servant always to be present at meetings with intelligence officials or the military, Blair abandoned an essential safety net.

December 28

Bush received a memo from General Tommy Franks, outlining plans for an invasion of Iraq. Five days later, he made his ‘axis of evil’ speech, identifying Saddam as an architect of international terror.

Keen to join the battle against evil, Blair resolved to keep his own plans secret. Even his Cabinet Secretary wasn’t told the Cabinet Office had been asked to prepare an Options Paper on Iraq — which included plans for British troops to invade. As cover, Blair asked MI6 to intensify their search for WMDs.

Blair keeps Cabinet in the dark: March, 2002

British intelligence chiefs admitted that the intelligence on WMDs was ‘sporadic and patchy’. In fact, they’d failed to find a scrap of reliable information.

The British ambassador in Washington, Christopher Meyer, was briefed by David Manning that the PM favoured ‘regime change’ — and failure wasn’t an option. Meyer was surprised. Blair, he reflected, had become ‘more neo-con than the Americans’.

Suspicious of Blair’s messianic ambitions, Commons leader Robin Cook and Home Secretary David Blunkett now insisted on a Cabinet discussion of Iraq. Blair agreed — but told his staff that the Options Paper shouldn’t be shown to the Cabinet. ‘I don’t think it’s necessary for them to have it,’ he said. ‘They can rely on the media.’

A joint patrol with the British Army and the Iraqi police force in Basra

An RAF Tornado in the Gulf; in a Cabinet meeting Blair spoke only about ‘bombing Iraq’, invasion wasn’t brought up by the former PM

March 7: ‘It’s not a lie, it’s simply deception’

In the Cabinet meeting that day, Blair spoke only about ‘bombing Iraq’. Invasion wasn’t mentioned, though crucially he had already told Bush that America could ‘count on us whatever’. Andrew Turnbull, soon to take over as Cabinet Secretary, reflected later: ‘I wouldn’t call it a lie. Deception is the right word. You can deceive without lying, by leaving a false interpretation uncorrected.’

Mid-March

‘Can we have some papers on Iraq?’ Alistair Darling, then Transport Minister, asked Blair before a Cabinet meeting. There was no reply. Indeed, ministers would not be provided with a single policy paper on Iraq for 18 months.

Unknown to the Cabinet, the PM was in constant telephone and video contact with the President, establishing the timetable for ‘regime change’. This was the penultimate Cabinet discussion about Iraq until September.

April 2

Admiral Boyce and the intelligence services gave Blair a briefing on Iraq. Both Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon were absent. It was no secret among those assembled that the invasion of Iraq was being planned for the new year. At one point, Boyce protested that ‘regime change’ alone would be illegal. Blair replied: ‘Well, it’s both regime change and [Saddam’s] WMDs.’

DOSSIER SO DODGY ITS WMD WERE WEATHER BALLOONS The first draft of the 2002 dossier by John Scarlett’s Joint Intelligence Committee admitted there was ‘very little intelligence’ about Saddam’s WMD programme. But just over two weeks later, Scarlett had hardened this up to: ‘Iraq could produce more biological agents within days . . . and nerve agents within months.’ No new proof had been produced for this new conclusion. The JIC’s judgment had been sharpened after Alastair Campbell’s intervention. Campbell had told Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, it required: ‘A substantial rewrite . . . It had to be revelatory and we needed to show what was new.’ Campbell relied on Scarlett, whom he called a ‘mate’, and the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, who was praised as ‘really helpful’, to deliver the goods. Scarlett’s solution was to offer a compromise: Saddam did possess WMDs, although he admitted the intelligence was ‘sporadic and patchy’. MI6 lacked trustworthy Iraqi agents. An Iraqi chemical engineer, who arrived in Germany in 1999, claimed to have worked in a mobile biological warfare laboratory. Codenamed Curveball, he was interrogated by German intelligence for two years. Dearlove accepted his eyewitness account of there being WMDs. There was also an assortment of information gleaned from high-ranking Iraqis who had flitted across the border to Jordan. Among them was Hussein Kamel, who said Saddam’s WMD programme had been destroyed in 1991. But intelligence agencies could not agree if Kamel was reliable or had been planted by Saddam. But, in 2002, there was a prejudicial mindset that Saddam was concealing his WMDs. So when an MI6 operative in Jordan was told by the head of Iraqi intelligence that Saddam’s weapons development had been halted by the Anglo-American bombing in 1991, the intelligence agencies didn’t believe it. They simply did not grasp the dictator’s unwillingness to admit his weakness. Scarlett, who was under intense pressure from Campbell to produce the most convincing case, deliberately omitted from the final dossier his damning summary that the evidence for WMDs was ‘sporadic and patchy’. Instead, he wrote that Saddam ‘continued to produce chemical and biological weapons’. Desperate for something new, on the eve of publication he made what he called a ‘last call for any items of intelligence that agencies think should be included’. That produced a golden nugget suddenly discovered by MI6. Based on information from an Iraqi informant, Scarlett included in the dossier hard new evidence that Saddam possessed ‘weapons’ that could be armed with chemical or biological warheads. ‘The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.’ Scarlett never publicly explained the genesis of that account or described the weapon. But he should have known MI6’s contact was an Iraqi brigadier passing on gossip about a short-range artillery shell and not, as was later assumed, a long-range rocket. B lair’s critics would refer to the omission of that detail as an example of ‘sexing up’ the dossier. Conditional words, such as ‘indicates’, ‘probably’ and ‘could be’, were removed. On September 17, Campbell emailed Scarlett, saying that, after reading the latest draft, Blair was pleased, but asked whether a ‘might’ and a ‘may’ could be replaced with concrete assertions. No sooner said than done. To reinforce the dossier, Blair decided to express his own opinion in a foreword (written by Campbell) to the JIC’s report. It made mention four times of ‘WMDs to be ready within 45 minutes’. Scarlett read the foreword but made no adverse comment — and his silence deceived Whitehall insiders. Three weeks after the fall of Baghdad, ministers heard that Curveball’s ‘mobile laboratory for the manufacture of biological agents’ had been tracked down. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a machine that manufactured meteorological balloons. Advertisement

April 7

Publicly, Bush continued to maintain he was undecided about an invasion. But when Blair visited his Texas ranch, both leaders privately agreed on the need for military action to bring about ‘regime change’, so long as Bush understood Blair’s domestic obstacles.

Britain, he said, ‘would support military action to bring about regime change’ if attempts were also made to negotiate a Middle East peace settlement, and only after the UN route was exhausted.

The Cabinet wasn’t told about these discussions; Blair didn’t trust them. Neither did he tell Boyce or the Defence and Foreign Secretaries. Instead, he again declared that no invasion was imminent.

Early July: U.S. forces are ‘geared up for action’

Admiral Boyce told Blair: ‘Bush is going ahead,’ and described how the U.S. forces had suddenly been ordered to ‘gear up for action’. Blair waved the admiral’s news aside. ‘I knew Bush had not decided,’ he would write later in his memoirs.

July 16

Blair told a Commons committee that no decisions had yet been made. Yet he also sent a private letter to Bush that began: ‘You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I’m with you.’

Blair’s position was now unprecedented. No other British Prime Minister had ever planned to start a war while distrusting his Chief of Defence, the Cabinet Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary and most of his Cabinet.

July 23

For the first time, Geoff Hoon, Jack Straw, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith and the Cabinet Secretary squeezed into Blair’s office for a meeting with Boyce and intelligence chiefs. After another visit to Washington, Richard Dearlove explained that the invasion was going ahead, with or without Britain. All that was missing was a way to sell the war. Blair was adamant: Britain had to stand alongside America.

In his long-winded manner, Straw protested that the case for war was ‘thin’ because Saddam wasn’t threatening anyone with WMDs. He succeeded only in irritating Blair.

All those in the room were sworn to secrecy. Later, Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador in Washington, called David Manning, to ask why Blair was giving the U.S. President unconditional guarantees. ‘We tried to stop him, but he refused,’ Manning replied.

July 25

At his monthly press conference, Blair reiterated: ‘Action is not imminent — we are not at the point of decision yet.’ Soon afterwards, he secretly approved the purchase of certain items of equipment required for the invasion.

Early September: Blair told he’d unleash civil war

During his last days at Downing Street, the Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson noticed Blair was writing a note for a forthcoming telephone conversation with President Bush. ‘We will be with you come what may,’ was the summary.

He was surprised, as was David Manning, who told Blair, ‘You can’t say that, because you’re committing the British Army to an invasion which no one else knows about.’ Blair appeared unmoved.

Meanwhile, Jack Straw was concerned at the lack of an American plan for post-war planning in Iraq. In an attempt to warn Blair of this problem, the Foreign Secretary now introduced Michael Williams, a Middle East specialist, to the PM.

Williams explained that Iraq’s stability owed everything to Saddam forcibly keeping the Shias and Sunnis apart. Once this control disappeared, peace was unlikely. ‘That’s all history, Mike,’ said Blair. ‘This is about the future.’

Another warning was delivered by Peter Ricketts, director of the Foreign Office Middle East department. He said Saddam’s overthrow would lead to turmoil. He also cautioned that the scramble ‘to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda is frankly unconvincing’.

Blair avoided any response. He also sidestepped the legal advice offered by Peter Goldsmith that regime change without the approval of the UN would be illegal. ‘Well . . .’ Blair replied, his voice trailing off.

He’d decided to accept his lawyers’ advice that in public statements ‘we focus on WMDs and we do not mention regime change’. Any suggestion this amounted to deception would be fiercely denied.

September 23

One hurdle in Blair’s plan for war was the Cabinet. This was to be the ministers’ first serious discussion about Iraq since March. Blair forbade the Cabinet Office to prepare papers with the latest assessments.

There were to be no leaks until the public were persuaded that his cause was valid. Blair’s passion for speed and secrecy, realised Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull, was ‘not a bad habit he and Powell [Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell] had slipped into, but how they wanted to operate from the start’.

The Cabinet meeting was desultory. ‘They never asked for a discussion on the options for war,’ observed Turnbull about the approximately 25 ministers in the room.

The highlight of the meeting was a question from Robin Cook about the military options. Blair replied that no decision about joining the invasion had been made.

George W Bush and Tony Blair address the media at the White House in January 2003

Manning and Powell knew this was not the complete truth, as did Hoon and Straw, but the majority of ministers remained unaware Blair was committed to invading Iraq.

Turnbull was surprised by the denial. Cook himself suspected Blair had decided to go to war but few, he knew, would accept his conviction that his leader was ‘deluded’ and ‘a fantasist’ pursuing some higher moral purpose. In hindsight, Cook pinpointed that meeting as the birth of Blair’s Messiah complex, while others would call the moment the collapse of proper government.

September 24

The government published the now-infamous dossier on Iraq’s WMDs, based on intelligence reports. This claimed that Saddam not only possessed chemical and biological weapons but had also embarked on a nuclear weapons programme. In the foreword, Blair claimed that some of the WMDs could be deployed within 45 minutes.

October 17

Pressed by the military to decide on the extent of British involvement, Blair went for the maximum: 42,000 British soldiers supported by ships and planes.

Meanwhile, with Blair’s approval, Hoon summoned the troublesome Admiral Boyce to tell him his contract wasn’t being renewed. The admiral was shocked: to dismiss a Chief of the Defence on the eve of war would be careless, even irresponsible, he warned.

Realising that Blair hadn’t thought through the consequences, Hoon agreed that Boyce should stay on until the end of the war.

An Iraq war protester sets fire to a plastic mask of former Prime Minister Tony Blair outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference centre at the start of the second week of Sir John Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry

End of October

Blair arrived in the MoD’s bunker for a briefing. A lieutenant general explained the timetable for transporting 42,000 personnel and equipment to the Middle East, the preliminary plans for the invasion and the outline for occupation after Saddam’s defeat. Both the lieutenant general and Hoon noticed that Blair — never a master of detail — seemed uninterested and left without asking any questions.

October 31: Blair refuses to order vital body armour

Summoned by Blair, Jack Straw and Hoon both agreed to the invasion plans. Admiral Boyce protested that the military needed more money. ‘Yes, we must fix that,’ replied Blair, without any intention of arguing with his obstructive Chancellor, Gordon Brown.

At another meeting, Hoon told the admiral: ‘Keep it all tight.’ The public should know nothing; even the defence chief in charge of logistics was not to be told about the invasion plans.

‘That’s crazy,’ said Boyce.

Dissatisfied, Boyce later confronted Blair. ‘Well, that’s how it is,’ was all the PM could say. Hoon, too, appealed to Blair: ‘We need to order machine-guns, body armour and other equipment.’

‘No,’ replied Blair. ‘I’ve got to keep the UN negotiations [with Saddam over allowing weapons inspectors to enter Iraq] going and I can’t act as honest broker if it’s clear we’re planning to go to war.’ British soldiers would later die because of the lack of sufficient body armour.

November 8

The UN weapons inspectors return to Iraq. Soon afterwards, Blair told Turnbull that he refused to appoint a War Cabinet ‘because we are trying to avoid war’.

Blair also vetoed any plans for a special committee dedicated to Iraq. Instead, Jonathan Powell would continue to invite officials to ad hoc meetings — from which Gordon Brown was excluded.

To his surprise, Kevin Tebbit — the civil servant who headed the Ministry of Defence, and whose career had also included long spells both at the Foreign Office and briefly at GCHQ — discovered he was excluded, too. He called Manning, asking, ‘How can you plan a war without the head of the Ministry of Defence?’

After checking with Blair, David Manning explained to Tebbit: ‘We can’t have you because we would then have to include the Permanent Secretaries of the Foreign Office and DFID [the Department for International Development].’

The Royal Regiment of Scotland at Basra Airport, preparing to patrol the city in 2006

By excluding the expertise of the MoD, Blair denied himself direct advice about the preparations for moving 42,000 men, tanks, ships, planes and tons of equipment to Iraq’s borders. Hoon could have challenged Blair over this, but chose not to do so.

In any case, Hoon was rarely included in discussions with the PM. ‘Blair didn’t care who the minister was,’ he realised. ‘Everything was run from the centre, No 10.’ (Later, Britain’s Defence Secretary would say: ‘I’ve never had a conversation with Blair about the war.’)

The underfunded and ill-equipped Armed Forces now calculated they needed another £2.6 billion every year to fulfil Blair’s ambition to be a ‘force for good’ — but this ‘negative’ message was intercepted by Blair’s staff and never reached him.

(In the end, Gordon Brown allocated £1 billion for the war — far short of what was required.)

Mid-November

Three Middle East experts were invited to Downing Street to describe to Blair, Straw and Manning what would happen after Saddam fell. Blair told them: ‘Don’t tell us not to invade, because we must and will.’

He then described his vision. Iraqi officers, he believed, would execute a successful coup before the Americans arrived in Baghdad and replace Saddam with an unknown leader. The new president would then convert Iraq into a proper democracy.

‘Well, I’ve just been speaking to Tariq Aziz,’ said one of the experts, referring to Iraq’s foreign minister, ‘and he warned that there’ll be a civil war if Saddam is deposed.’

Another told the Prime Minister: ‘You know it could take a generation to build a new country?’

‘I’m committed to that,’ replied Blair, adding, ‘but isn’t Saddam uniquely evil?’ (After the war, Blair was asked how he’d been influenced by this meeting. He looked blank. He had no recollection of it.)

January 9, 2003

Blair’s plans for Iraq were not discussed at the weekly Cabinet meeting. Nor were they mentioned the following week.

‘Richard, my fate is in your hands,’ Blair told MI6 boss Richard Dearlove privately.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking at an inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq War

January 15-18: ‘Americans have it all sewn up’

In a series of meetings with the military, Blair did not disguise his intention to join the invasion. The service chiefs were dissatisfied. Since Iraq was not a war for national survival, they wanted a genuine reason why servicemen should risk their lives. They also wanted Blair to stop telling the public that he was focused entirely on seeking a peaceful resolution.

Keeping up this pretence, said Boyce, would lead to the troops fighting with obsolete equipment. The chiefs also wanted to know what plans were in place for post-war occupation.

‘The Americans have it all sewn up,’ said Blair.

The situation was becoming critical. Blair had isolated himself from Whitehall, military preparations were restricted, diplomats were chasing a mythical second UN resolution, and the intelligence chiefs were providing Blair with false information. But Blair was already hitched to Bush’s timetable for invasion in mid-March.

January 20

Going public at last, Hoon announced to the Commons that 26,000 troops and a fleet would be sent to the Middle East. This was the first time most Cabinet ministers realised Blair intended to go to war. A pumped-up Blair told heckling Labour MPs that, after Iraq: ‘We have to confront North Korea.’

January 30

peter Goldsmith, the Attorney General, warned Blair in a memo that a war without a UN resolution — declaring that Saddam had failed to disarm — would be illegal.

‘I don’t understand this,’ the Prime Minister wrote in the margin of Goldsmith’s note.

Early February: Armies line up along Iraq’s borders

As a huge Anglo-American army assembled along Iraq’s borders, Blair told a Sun journalist: ‘I’m acting on the say-so of a greater power. I feel the hand of fate on my shoulder.’

A British soldier from the Staffordshire Regiment patroling the southern Iraqi city of Basra

Early March

Boyce, dressed in his admiral’s uniform, visited Blair, who greeted him in jeans and an open-necked shirt. The Chief of the Defence demanded to see an assurance from the Attorney General that the war was legal. Unless that was forthcoming, said Boyce, he’d resign. ‘I understand,’ said Blair.

Blair and Goldsmith discussed how a different opinion might be produced. Goldsmith flew to Washington to make more inquiries.

March 7

It was now just a week before the all-important Commons vote on going to war. Suddenly unsure of his position, Blair considered resigning. Unknown to him at the time, his Cabinet Secretary was already investigating the mechanics of a handover of power.

March 11

To Blair’s embarrassment, Donald Rumsfeld publicly dismissed Britain’s participation in the invasion as unnecessary.

Then, to Prime Minister’s relief, Goldsmith called from the U.S. to say he’d changed his mind: another UN resolution was unnecessary after all. New ‘evidence’ from MI6’s Iraqi informant — code-named Curveball — had swung the balance. ‘Are you sure Saddam has WMDs?’ Blair asked Dearlove. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ he relied. ‘Categorically’. (MI6’s informant was a crude fabricator.)

A man looks for survivors near a burning vehicle after a bomb attack in Mahmudiya, 30km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, September 9, 2007

March 14

Rather than sending his revised opinion to the whole Cabinet — his legal duty — Goldsmith sent the 13-page document directly to Blair. Only Hoon and Straw were also allowed to see it; Boyce and the Cabinet were merely given a nine-paragraph precis.

The Cabinet was shackled. Never having seen any of the authoritative papers prepared by Whitehall, it had no ammunition to raise objections.

March 17

Every one of Blair’s docile ministers — with the exception of Robin Cook, who resigned from the Cabinet as a matter of principle — approved the war.

March 18, 2003

In the Commons, the majority for war was 263 votes. Blair looked relieved and the Tories cheered. Britain was going to war.

The bloodsoaked aftermath

A total of 179 British troops were killed in the Iraq war and its aftermath, alongside over 4,000 American allies and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. Afterwards, Blair told journalists defiantly: ‘I was right to have gone to war.’

‘But what if you’re proved wrong?’ he was asked.

‘I am right,’ Blair replied. Raising his eyes to the heavens, he added: ‘But someone else will be my judge.’