Stephen McGinty: Brown puts on prime ministerial display

HE HAD clearly co-ordinated his wardrobe, so as not to clash.

While his predecessor in No 10 had worn the whitest of white shirts and a brazenly red tie, Gordon Brown was serious and sombre, the man in black, but nonetheless, judging by his masterly performance before the Iraq inquiry, "The Man".

While Tony Blair had to be smuggled in the back for his appearance in January, jeered by protesters all the way, Gordon Brown confidently pulled up at the front, flashing a grin like a Cheshire Cat with your cheque book, even at the chap brandishing a banner that declared he should be hauled off to the Hague.

Mr Blair resisted voicing any regrets for loss of life, but Mr Brown began with a lengthy tribute to the true cost of war which was "very sad indeed".

Fingers laced together, while his thumbs boxed each other, Gordon Brown stared down his inquisitors and, for the first hour or so, chanted his mantra: war in Iraq was "the right decision for the right reasons".

As for the WMD, he had believed the intelligence reports, but he conceded they were wrong. The trickiest point was when Sir Frederic Lyne asked him three times if he had been told what Mr Blair had promised US president George Bush, and so ornate was Mr Brown's verbal obfuscation that the audience began to laugh. In fact, according to Mr Brown's recollections, the decision to go to war was made at the very last minute and had not, as every other witness appeared to testify, been made months before.

He even claimed to have been unaware that the attorney general had doubted the legality of war.

Yet the most serious charge against him was that, as chancellor, he had drawn tight the purse strings and refused to relent while troops died in the field. They gave their blood, while he withdrew the treasure. The ground for this particular attack had already been prepared by a halo of charges brought by senior military figures which had exploded across yesterday's front pages, but Brown had his own secret weapon, one he wields like no-one else: figures. Each charge was beaten back with hundreds of millions here and billions there. No military operational request was refused and problems arose only when the MoD began playing fast and loose with its own accountancy practices, turning "non-cash" to "cash" in a manner which if replicated across every Whitehall department would have required taxes to be raised to foot an extra bill of 12 billion.

It was this which drove him to write a letter to Tony Blair about the "complete lack of budget control at the MoD".

During his almost five-hour wafting with lukewarm words – "grilling" would be giving the inquiry a credit sadly they did not deserve – Mr Brown appeared more prime ministerial than in months. He even managed to end on a note of poignancy: "War may be necessary, but it is also tragic."