Leader: Tony Blair's dereliction of duty laid bare

Published on Thursday 27 January 2011 16:33

Going to war has such profound consequences that the decision to do so must be taken with the utmost concern for constitutional propriety and respect for democracy as well as the lives of service people. After the evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday by Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet secretary, there is now no doubt Tony Blair flagrantly flouted constitutional practice and paid only lip-service to democratic accountability when he took the country into the Iraq conflict.

Sir Gus told the inquiry Mr Blair failed properly to discuss plans for the invasion of Iraq with the Cabinet because he did feared they would leak the discussions, and this informal "sofa government" approach left insufficient records to examine the decision to go to war fully. The then prime minister also failed to provide the Cabinet with the full legal advice of the attorney general, crucial to the establishing whether the war was legal, and in so doing broke the ministerial code of conduct.

This evidence is a damning indictment of Mr Blair's conduct in the run-up to war, a conflict for which we are still paying the price to this day, in terms not just of the hostility to Britain in much of the Muslim world, but also the pain and suffering it inflicted on thousands of civilians and the members of the armed forces who served there. The inquiry is heading towards only one conclusion: that Mr Blair's cavalier and clandestine behaviour amounts nothing less than a dereliction of his duty to parliament and to the British people for whom he was elected to serve.