A former cabinet secretary has said Tony Blair’s government was dysfunctional and misused intelligence, and claimed the former prime minister was caught in a trap over Iraq.
Speaking at the opening of a debate on the Chilcot report, Robin Butler, who served under the first Blair government, said it painted a picture “of a government which – with great respect to those who served in it – as a collective entity was dysfunctional”.
Lord Butler added: “Plans were not shared with senior ministers for fear that they would leak. The full legal reasoning of the attorney general was not made available to the cabinet. Official papers were not circulated.
“With hindsight, the Blair government’s disregard for the machinery of government looks not like modernisation but like irresponsibility.”
Butler said it had been a mistake to use intelligence assessments as part of a political process. “As countless examples from history show, intelligence is not uniquely worthy of belief, it’s uniquely worthy of scepticism,” he told the Lords.
“However, this should not lead us to the conclusion that intelligence is valueless or stop us investing in it. In today’s world, intelligence is crucial. When we have weapons which can be directed to land on a sixpence, it is all the more important to know which sixpence to direct them towards. We need to learn the lesson that intelligence is a very valuable – indeed, indispensable – aid to political and military judgment, but it is not a determinant.”
Butler said he had considerable sympathy for Blair “in the obloquy which is being poured on him. I have never believed that he lied to the British people, and I accept that he was sincere in believing that military action to remove Saddam Hussein was necessary as a last resort.
“The trouble was that he got caught in a trap in which a decision on whether or not to join the Americans in military action became unavoidable before other means of containing Saddam had been exhausted.”
Three days of parliamentary debate on the Chilcot report on the invasion of Iraq began on Tuesday with members of the House of Lords queueing up to condemn the way the UK went to war. The Commons will debate the 2.6m-word report on Wednesday and Thursday.
In a particularly scathing assessment, the bishop of London, Richard Chartres, acknowledged the pressures on Blair and members of his government but said political leaders needed to maintain a sense of historical perspective at times of crisis.
“Someone who dwells on history may be somewhat tedious, but at the same time someone with a sense of destiny and no sense of history can be very dangerous,” he said.
Opening the debate, Earl Howe, a defence minister, said the issues needed to be examined in a “frank and informed way”. Parliament owed it to the thousands of Iraqis, Britons and others who died to digest Chilcot’s findings carefully, he said.
Menzies Campbell reminded peers that Charles Kennedy, the former Liberal Democrat leader who died last year, had been accused of appeasement when he opposed the war, with one newspaper publishing his photograph above the word “traitor”.
Lord Campbell said: “Charles Kennedy’s principled leadership on this issue has been vindicated,” as had the stance taken by the late former Labour foreign secretary Robin Cook.
A number of former defence ministers and senior military figures mentioned in the Chilcot report are now in the Lords but were not among the early speakers in the debate.
