Whatever the Chilcot Inquiry finds will be as irrelevant as Tony Blair himself

Plus: The genius of Louise Mensch

Once, in happier times, Mr Tony Blair inadvertently cast himself as O’Brien, the clever, charming, sinister and insane Inner Party chief from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sampling O’Brien’s injunction to Winston Smith about the need to love Big Brother, Mr Tony said the New Labour project would only be complete when the party learned to love Peter Mandelson. Since then, alas, Mr T has morphed from omnipotent O’Brien into the impotent Winston Smith of Orwell’s closing chapter; the post-Room 101 burned-out husk of a human who is deemed too irrelevant to be worth killing off, and is allowed to wander bemusedly about as a warning about the result of hubris. In this respect, though the families of fallen troops will disagree, whatever Sir John Chilcot finally publishes will be as irrelevant as Blair himself. For there are things that we know we know, and what we know we know about Iraq we knew from the start.
The latest in a series of Mail on Sunday revelations concerns an unnamed Blair henchman’s instruction to those on a select distribution list to burn a memo. In it, the Attorney-General, Peter Goldsmith, raised more questions about the legality of the war  10 days before it began in March 2003.

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Let’s have more of this ‘anti-democracy’ from the House of Lords

The star recipient in this report was Geoff Hoon, the alleged Defence Secretary and stooge who discovered that military action had started from the telly. “A source close to Hoon” claims he refused to burn that memo, and in another country such a document’s possible existence would have led to him being questioned under oath by a more urgent investigation than Sir John’s.
Here, where muscular scrutiny of the executive remains as the very height of poor form, he may hide behind that “source close to” – just as Blair hides behind a spokesman’s non-denial denial that “no one ever said that [burn the memo] in his presence … It would be quite absurd to think that anyone could destroy such a document”.
And in a world bereft of Swan Vestas, so it would. If the truth of it is never confirmed, it matters very little. Memo or no memo, we know we know that Goldsmith doubted the invasion’s legality, and was bullied into changing his advice. We also know that whatever Chilcot concludes will lead Mr Tony neither to The Hague nor to salvation from his wretched half-life as an emblem of national humiliation. Every modern PM dreams of being compared to Winston. Blair’s curse was picking the wrong one.

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Sucking up to China won’t be an issue – we have plenty of practice

If ultimate judgment on Iraq fell to Louise Mensch, this nonsense would be done by teatime, with crumpets and vindication for all. In a typically profound Sun on Sunday analysis, Louise writes: “Blair was dumb to try for a second UN resolution … The UK is a sovereign nation. We don’t need UN permission for a goddamned thing.” And when you reflect on it, her theory that sovereignty entitles a country to do what it pleases beyond its borders is so brilliant that General Galtieri should have made it in 1982, or Saddam on annexing Kuwait in 1990. Too seldom does a columnist unilaterally redefine the core principles of international relations. Viva the Mensch Doctrine!

Dictators on parade

With barely time to recover from President Xi, we await the arrival of two more pin-ups from Amnesty’s Hall of Global Beauties. Egypt’s al-Sisi is over this week, and hot on his heels will be adorable Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan (a dear friend and apparent benefactor, like Sisi, of Blair). The poignancy about this festival of sycophancy is the sense of loss about the ones who got away. It’s only wild fantasy, of course, but one day genetic science might create Despotic Jurassic Park, so that a future British PM can stand outside No 10 posing gleefully with Torquemada, Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Leopold II of Belgium and the Emperors Caligula and Bokassa.

Ah, sisterly love...

Good to see Jess Phillips, the drollest and warmest of new MPs, perched on Andrew Marr’s BBC1 sofa in less combative mood than recently, when she invited her colleague Diane Abbott to “fuck off”. (Asked what happened next, Jess replied: “she fucked off”). The Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley reviewed the papers with Amanda Platell, who sympathised with her over a barrage of Twitter threats. (Amanda won’t use Twitter herself, because “it’s just relentlessly horrible”. That might have inspired a grin among readers of her Mail column.) Jess is the PPS to Lucy Powell, the Education spokesperson who had such a triumph masterminding Labour’s election campaign. A feeling in the bones whispers that those roles should be reversed.