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Gerald Warner

Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general.

Chilcot Inquiry: 

Gordon Brown supported Iraq War, but Macavity was out mousing at key moments

 

By Gerald Warner Politics Last updated: March 5th, 2010

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Does Gordon Brown have a split personality? Or are there, perhaps, two Gordon Browns? The schizophrenic flavour of the Prime Minister’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry was baffling in its contradictions on one central aspect of the Iraq affair. Was Gordon in the loop or was he, as Clare Short told us some time ago, excluded from the main deliberations?

For the first 10 minutes or so of his appearance before Chilcot, it seemed the issue had been definitively resolved. Gordon was involved; Gordon was robustly on side; you could not put the proverbial fag paper between him and Tony Blair on the desirability of blasting Saddam Hussein into oblivion.

“It was the right decision and it was for the right reasons,” Brown said of the war. Throwing wide his purse-strings in his usual big-hearted way, he told Tony Blair there should be “no sense that there’s a financial restraint” on the Ministry of Defence. He had talks with Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon in June 2002 about what would happen in a war scenario. The Cabinet was “regularly kept in touch” with developments and he was “fully engaged” in deliberations over the weekend before the March 17 Cabinet meeting that approved the war.

So, Gordon was up there with the big beasts, well inside the tent. When it came to specifics, however, when all the key decisions were being taken, Macavity was out mousing somewhere and absent from the scene. Never mind “sofa government”, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer did not even see the Cabinet Office options paper prepared in March 2002. He did not attend the meeting at Chequers in April 2002, just before Blair left to meet George Bush at the Crawford ranch.

Gordon was similarly absent from the key meeting on July 23, 2002, presumably busy conducting an investigation into the loss of several boxes of paper-clips from the Treasury typing pool. Most startling of all, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most senior member of the Government, did not even see the legal opinion written by the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, on March 7 2003, querying the legality of the war.

By the end of this catalogue of absence, abstention and ignorance it would not have been surprising to hear Gordon announce that he had learned of the invasion of Iraq from the tea lady at Number 11. There is something far wrong here. Either Gordon is being economical with the actualité, as he is economical with so many other things, or this is the revelation of a totally fissured and dysfunctional government.

Tags: Chilcot inquiry, gordon brown