Labour has been saying sorry for the Iraq war for five years. In his first speech as Labour leader in autumn 2010, Ed Miliband was emphatic: “We were wrong. Wrong to take Britain to war, and we’ve got to be explicit about that.”
Similar words have been said by other figures since, including leadership hopeful Yvette Cooper on Thursday, who on being pressed on what the New Labour government had got wrong immediately offered up one answer, Iraq.
Proposing a more formal apology for an invasion that’s now a dozen years ago might thus appear an unlikely way for Jeremy Corbyn to send another jolt through the leadership race – and yet it might do him good.
It allows him to point out, perfectly fairly, that he is the only one of the three candidates who were then in Parliament who made the right call on what has proved the worst mistake of British foreign policy since Suez.
The aftermath of the invasion left untold thousands killed, millions displaced and violent instability that has poured out across the region. It has indeed proved, as Corbyn says, an error “of horrendous proportions”.
But the move is about low politics, as well as high principle. After a few days in which Corbyn has faced interminable questioning about some of the anti-Israeli characters with whom he has shared platforms over the years, this is an attempt to move the conversation on by plonking what the Tory’s 2015 election chief Lynton Crosby liked to call “a dead cat” on the table.
It may be moving into the history books, but Iraq is one ex-puss with a posthumous power to shock. There are many reasons why Iraq remains charged with unique political poison – and the personal association with the divisive figure of Tony Blair is only the start.
Resentment is also kept alive by the ludicrous delays on the Chilcot report, about which even the rightwing press fumes.
After Lord Hutton stuck to his narrow remit about David Kelly, and Lord Butler fluffed the chance to write the damning concluding lines that his report justified, the small but not trivial part of the country that continues to regard Iraq as a live political question fears another whitewash.
It is surely doubtful, as Corbyn claims, that his apology move will do much to help Labour “to win in 2020”, 17 years after the great London march. But he is right that it continues to bear upon important questions of trust.
There is no need to wait for Chilcot: papers already in the public domain reveal that London knew that Washington was fixing the facts about the supposed Iraqi threat, and furthermore that the evolution and editing of the infamous intelligence dossier, and the attorney general’s legal advice, were unusual and suspect.
If there are many reasons why Britain has grown so alienated from its political class, Iraq is undoubtedly one.
There are dangers of picking at an old sore – not least vilifying all those Labour colleagues who made the wrong call in 2003, and overshadowing the achievements of the party’s last spell in power with its biggest mistake.
Corbyn was right in 2003, when his bitter enemies were mostly wrong. But even the staunchest of Labour opponents of the invasion will, at some point, have to agree that it is time to stop fighting.
