The timing was poignant. Having been summoned before the foreign affairs select committee to check that he was actually still alive, Sir John Chilcot’s first task was to pass on the news that Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the members of his Iraq war inquiry, had died the night before.
“I would like to make a brief statement about where we are now,” said Chilcot. Brief in Chilcotspeak is a relative concept. His report is now at least five years later than anyone imagined possible and as he meandered on – “It’s been very difficult” – it gradually dawned on the committee that part of the delay was down to Chilcot’s inability to use one word when several thousand would do. Like all good mandarins, his attempts at precision only ever confuse things and he was determined to make sure that this session would be 90 minutes of everyone’s lives they never got back.
The committee chairman, Sir Richard Ottaway – there were a lot of sirs in the room and at one point we had two Sir Johns and a John Baron, who isn’t actually a baron, talking to one another – eventually interceded. “This is going on a bit,” he said, ever so gently. “Could you hurry up a bit, please?” Chilcot demurred. Of course he would be happy not to answer any questions as well as he possibly couldn’t.
Did he think the inquiry had gone on for rather a long time? Chilcot sighed; it’s not easy dealing with people who haven’t spent their entire lives in Whitehall. Actually, all things considered, the inquiry had been a total rush job, he implied. Ideally, if the report was going to be at all accurate, he should have been allowed to work in real time. He had been asked to report on a nine-year period and he should have been given at least that long. As it was, he was being rushed into snap judgments about events that only happened 12 years ago.
Chilcot was also at pains to stress that he didn’t have opinions on anything that might be at all political and as far as he was concerned everything about the process had been pretty much tickety-boo.
Yes, it had taken quite a long time to get clearance from the cabinet office and the US on the Blair-Bush correspondence but he didn’t detect any dragging of heels. In fact, it had all gone through unfeasibly quickly compared to getting someone in the civil service to order new printer cartridges. How long had it taken? “Um, let me see. August 2013 to September 2014,” he said, though he was reluctant to commit himself to how long that actually might have been. A junior passed him a piece of paper. “I’m told it is indeed 13 months.”
The glacial pace continued when the committee moved on to suggestions that those who had received Maxwellisation letters – “Maxwellees,” Chilcot interrupted – had deliberately tried to delay the process.
“Not at all,” he said. “People in receipt of those letters need to have a reasonable, if not an indefinite, amount of time to reply.” What was a reasonable time? That entirely depended. Some people might need a definite amount of infinite time, while others might need an infinite amount of definite time. Some Maxwellees might even have had 100 pages to read and you couldn’t expect them to read more than a page a week.
OK, said the committee. Can you tell us how many people have had Maxwellisation letters? “No,” said Chilcot. “Why not? “Because it’s a secret and it wouldn’t be fair.” Any concept of fairness to the British public was a sideline here. Realising he wasn’t making quite the positive impression he had intended, Chilcot tried to end on a conciliatory note. “We are getting to the tail of the evidence,” he said, before noting that some dinosaurs had very long tails. And was there any chance of publishing his report before the election? No chance. Didn’t the committee realise how close 2020 was? But by 2025 for definite. Or definitely infinite.
