I’m confident that the Iraq inquiry will provide at least some answers

By James Valentine

Phew, so we got there at last. Sir John Chilcot has opened his inquiry into the Iraq war.

I’ve been thinking back to Labour’s Deputy Leadership election, when, during the course of the first hustings in London, I asked the candidates about a possible new inquiry. British troops were of course still active in Iraq at the time so I simply asked the aspiring deputy leaders if they would support an inquiry – when the troops were all back home.

Blears and (surprisingly) Hain, dismissed the question out of hand. Benn gave an eloquent response, but it wasn’t an answer to my question. But Johnson, to his credit, took my question entirely seriously and said that he probably would support an inquiry, as did Cruddas and Harman.

The investigation will quite possibly end up seriously embarrassing certain politicians, but it would be wrong to see this as an excuse to beat up the Labour Party or to engage in self-recrimination. It will, we have been assured, re-examine the intelligence case in the lead-in up to the war and address the issue of its legality. And I hope it will allow wider questions of foreign policy to be addressed; the whole issue of whether, and to what extent, armed intervention is justified.

It’s taken long enough to get to this point and even now there are doubts – the possible length of the enquiry, when it will start calling witnesses, how much of it will take place in private, and so on.

But Sir John Chilcot is an impeccable establishment figure and I feel reasonably confident that this time it won’t be a whitewash and that for the service people and their families, as well as for anyone interested in the future of foreign policy, there will at last be some answers.