Blair: no secret deal with Bush
Updated on 29 January 2010
The former prime minister Tony Blair told the Iraq inquiry today that he did not agree a secret deal with President Bush to attack Iraq a year before the invasion.
The ambassador to Washington at the time, Sir Christopher Meyer, told the inquiry in November that it appeared an agreement was "signed in blood" by Mr Blair and Mr Bush at the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002.
Mr Blair has always said his aim was ensuring Saddam Hussein complied with UN resolutions.
And he said today: "What I was saying (to President Bush) was: we are going to be with you. The position was not a covert position, it was an open position."
He said he had told the president: "We have to deal with his WMD, and if that means regime change, so be it."
Mr Blair argued that Britain's relationship with the US was valuable. "This is an alliance we have the United States of America. It's an alliance I say to you very openly I agree with passionately.
"I never regarded 11 September as an attack on America. I regarded it as an attack on us."
Channel 4 News political reporter Cathy Newman writes –
A decade as prime minister gave Tony Blair ample experience of these Chilcot-style interrogations, so it's no surprise he's pretty adept at dealing with the questions thrown at him today.
And although he looked uncharacteristically nervous at first, he's so far given a pretty assured performance.
On the April 2002 meeting at President George Bush's Crawford ranch, Mr Blair swatted away suggestions from Britain's former ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, that he had "signed in blood" to go to war.
He said instead that although he agreed with the US president to "deal" with Saddam Hussein, they hadn't decided how that was to be done.
The former prime minister squirmed slightly when asked about his interview with Fern Britton, in which he suggested he'd still have wanted to remove the Iraqi dictator, with or without weapons of mass destructions.
He insisted he'd never used the words "regime change" in the interview, and that if we'd known then what we know now about the absence of WMDs the "nature of the threat" would have been different, i.e. it's a hypothetical question.
