The former Labour cabinet minister Clare Short has suggested that the delays in publishing the Chilcot report into the Iraq war are because its first draft is “very poor” and needs to be rewritten.
But she was immediately contradicted by Sir John Chilcot, who issued a statement on Wednesday defending the process of “Maxwellisation” under which he sends partial drafts to those being criticised, allowing them to respond.
Chilcot said the process had “opened up new issues” and that he had written to lawyers acting for the families who had complained about the delay.
Chilcot began the inquiry in 2009 at the request of then prime minister Gordon Brown, and completed hearings in February 2011, but still has no deadline for the report’s completion.
Short told the BBC’s World at One programme that Maxwellisation was not the case as the deadline for responses had lasted only a few weeks and had passed a long time ago. She said: “Any individual criticised only sees a part of the report and then gets a chance to comment on that part.
“That’s the Maxwellisation [process] and there’s a time limit for everyone to comment, so the suggestion that Maxwellisation is causing all the delay, I don’t think is true.
“I think what might be true is that the draft is very poor and it’s as big as War and Peace, I understand. Lots of people have made serious responses and they are probably having to redraft. But I think the hope of it being a good piece of work that Britain learns what went wrong and we don’t do it again looks very, very poor to me.”
But Chilcot, in his first statement since the recent controversy over the delay, defended the inquiry process as essential to the fairness and accuracy of the report. Contradicting Short, he said the Maxwellisation process had not yet been completed. “It is critically important that the report should be fair to all who participated in the conflict and to those who bore the responsibility of taking decisions,” Chilcot said.
“The Maxwellisation process is essential not only to the fairness but also the accuracy and completeness of our report. It has already led, for example, to the identification of government documents which had not been submitted to the inquiry and which in some cases opened up new issues.
“We expect to receive the last responses to our Maxwellisation letters shortly. That will allow us to complete our consideration of the responses, to decide what further work will be needed, and to provide the prime minister and thus parliament and the public with a timetable for the publication of our work.”
He has written separately to the lawyers acting on behalf of the families who have complained about the delay.
Short confirmed a Guardian report that criticism of the Iraq war will not be confined just to Tony Blair and his inner circle, but will be spread across Whitehall.
“It’s not just politicians, the criticism seems to go right across Whitehall: senior permanent secretaries, the top of the civil service – everybody,” Short said. “I see it and think this means everyone’s to blame, no one is to blame, we won’t get a proper diagnosis and it won’t be helpful in finding out what went wrong with our system.”
Short, who was international development secretary at the time and was one of the opponents of the invasion, is among those lined up for criticism in the Chilcot report.
Short and her department (DfID) were strongly criticised at the Chilcot inquiry, principally by military commanders.
Admiral Lord Boyce, then chief of the defence staff, said British troops ended up having to carry out much reconstruction work without the support of DfID experts. “I thought DfID were particularly uncooperative, particularly as led by Clare Short,” Boyce said.
Military chiefs put the problem down to Short’s opposition to the invasion.
Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Short, who resigned from the cabinet after the invasion, criticised the cabinet for not holding proper discussions about the prospect of war, particularly over its legality.
The Chilcot inquiry has come under increased pressure over the past few weeks to publish the report.
The Guardian reported on Tuesday that Chilcot is to apportion blame for Britain’s role in the Iraq war much more widely than had been expected, going well beyond Tony Blair and his inner team, according to sources involved with his six-year inquiry.
While Blair will bear the brunt of the report’s criticism, one source said it would suit the former prime minister to see a wide range of targets blamed when it is published.
It has been assumed that Chilcot would concentrate on Blair and his closest advisers in Downing Street. However, the Guardian understands the inquiry intends to criticise a much bigger circle of ministers and officials, including Jack Straw, foreign secretary at the time of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Others in focus are Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, Short, and senior officials in the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office. The inquiry took evidence from about 150 people.
