Sir John Chilcot, the chairman of the Iraq enquiry, has confirmed that he was involved in “very long and difficult and challenging discussions” with two successive cabinet secretaries over the release of secret government documents, including correspondence between Tony Blair and George Bush.
As he faced intense questions from MPs over the delay in the publication of his report, Chilcot spoke of how it took him years to reach agreement with the Cabinet Office.
Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, agreed last May that redacted versions of the correspondence could be published.
Lord O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary who was in post when the enquiry was established in 2009, had resisted publication on the grounds that it would make future US presidents reluctant to talk frankly with British prime ministers.
Chilcot, who informed MPs on the foreign affairs select committee that a member of his inquiry panel, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert had died overnight, indicated that the negotiations over the documents was a key factor in explaining the delay in the publication of his report.
Chilcot has been adamant that he could not publish his report without releasing the Blair-Bush correspondence. He also made clear that he could not begin the process of “Maxwellisation” – asking for comments from witnesses who are subject to criticism in the report – until he had reached agreement over the publication of the documents.
Asked by the former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell whether he rued the day that he took on the chairmanship – after being given 10 minutes to decide in 2009 – Chilcot said: “I try very hard not to rue the day. May I put it this way? All of us are determined to get this thing done. None of us thought it would take this long. We want to get it done.
“But we are not going to get it done by scamping the work or failing in the essential principles that we have set ourselves … everything we say and conclude must be based on evidence, it has got to be fair, it has got to be impartial, it has got to be rigorous.”
Chilcot said that Heywood eventually agreed last May to publish the notes of Blair’s discussions with Bush after lengthy negotiations.
He said: “The initial view taken by the previous cabinet secretary was that the notes, for example that Mr Blair had sent to President Bush, were not disclosable. There was a strong convention that interchanges of that sort should not be disclosed in public.
“As we went through, point by point, with the current cabinet secretary it became increasingly clear that on the balance of argument he would agree that a certain passage or a certain point could be disclosed because of the essential nature of our enquiry which related to the workings of our central government.
“That came to a point where it was no longer possible to sustain a doctrine that these documents, as a category, could not be disclosed. But it took a long time to get to that point.”
Chilcot confirmed that the enquiry had so far seen 150,000 government documents. The inquiry is negotiating over the declassification of some 7,000 documents. These negotiations are still ongoing though he said this is nearly completed and are not a reason for the continuing delay.
