Blair misled us on Iraq, says ex-DPP
Updated on 14 December 2009
Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, accuses the former PM of ignoring public opinion to "mislead and cajole" the British people into a deadly war.
In an article far more damning than the evidence so far given to the Iraq inquiry by ex-civil servants, the former chief prosecutor criticises Blair for engaging "in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush", and taking Britain to war "on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible".
Macdonald attacks the former prime minister as "weak", saying his "fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power".
"Washington turned his head and he couldn’t resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him," wrote the QC, who now practises at Matrix Chambers, where Blair's wife Cherie Booth is also based.
"In this sense he was weak and, as we can see, he remains so.
"Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that 'hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right'.
"But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgement: it is certainly no answer to death. 'Yo, Blair', perhaps, was his truest measure."
Macdonald was head of the Crown Prosecution Service, the government department responsible for prosecuting criminal cases in England and Wales, from 2003 to 2008.
Blair said in a television interview with Fern Britton, broadcast yesterday, that he still would have thought it right to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, even had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction.
In response, Macdonald described the Iraq war as "a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions" and said "playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage".
Macdonald also criticised the Iraq inquiry, which will take evidence from Blair in the New Year, as "unchallenging".
"If this is born of a belief that it creates an atmosphere more conducive to truth, it seems naïve," he wrote. "The truth doesn’t always glide out so compliantly; sometimes it struggles to be heard.
Sometimes it takes cover in a shelter that is entirely self-serving." Yesterday the inquiry, led by Sir John Chilcot, insisted Blair would be questioned "very much in public" after claims that evidence on his meetings with US President George Bush would be kept secret.
