The cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, Sir Jeremy Heywood, has denied he delayed the Chilcot inquiry by blocking the release of correspondence between Tony Blair and George W Bush.
Heywood, who served as principle private secretary to both Blair and Gordon Brown when they were prime minister, told MPs on the public administration select committee that the role he played in the inquiry had been “a very limited one” and he too had been “very frustrated” with the process, which no one had expected to go on so long.
Sir John Chilcot has reportedly claimed his inquiry was stalled because the cabinet secretary was seeking to block the release of correspondence between Blair, Brown and Bush.
Heywood denied that the process had been stalled but said there had been disagreement between departments about which documents should be published. He argued that he helped to resolve these disagreements to Chilcot’s satisfaction.
He told MPs he had a “bias towards transparency” and there would be a “very, very open approach to the release of cabinet minutes, the Bush-Blair memos, all those sorts of issues previously being disputed and held back by departments”, but a very small number of redactions would be made relating to diplomatic relations with other countries on non-Iraq matters.
Chilcot will appear in front of the Commons foreign affairs select committee on 4 February to give evidence on the reasons for the delays of his report. The report is not expected to be published until after the general election in May, meaning the process will have taken more than six years.
Heywood said he was not subject to the “Maxwellisation” procedure under which people whom the inquiry intends to criticise are given the chance to respond. He said it was not true to his knowledge that those who had been informed of criticism were delaying the publication.
“No, I have got absolutely no evidence to think that anybody in receipt of a Maxwellisation letter is deliberately trying to hold this up,” he said. “I am not saying they are deliberately trying to delay it … I don’t know, I’ve not spoken to them, I don’t know who they are … but they are in good faith, considering what has been said about them, and trying to reply within a reasonable time.”
