Iraq inquiry: Clare Short's arsenal deployed

Gosh. Quite a morning, even if things sagged a little thereafter. The problem with Clare Short’s evidence was that she’s been so vocal (not to mention literary) since resigning from Cabinet in May 2003 that it was hard to be sure which of her battlefield munitions were new and which she’d deployed beforehand.

Cabinet jeered her – “Oh Claaaaaare!” – in March 03 when she alone asked the attorney general why his legal advice had changed (strong wafts of testosterone at this point). Goldsmith misled Cabinet. Blair misled her in September 02 when he claimed not to have been briefed on military options in Iraq.

The machinery of Government is unsafe, deceitful, secretive, driven by the 24-hour media, riven by leaks with no minutes, no scrutiny. Coffee sessions at which Brown said Blair was obsessed with his legacy, wanted a short war and a reshuffle. Blair “conned” her to persuade her not to walk out the door the same day as Cook. The US smeared Blix. HMG blaming the French for failure at the UN was a deliberate lie.

After a while we were out of breath in the room next door: trying not only to keep up with each allegation but to compare notes and consult Google to see whether she’d gone this far before.

Best line? Probably for me when she described cool relations with Chief of Defence Staff Lord Boyce, whom she thought No 10 had ordered to ignore her. He wasn’t very chatty, she said; but then of course he’d spent a lot of his career in submarines. “It showed.”

Conspiracy theorists will long debate why we got to hear applause at the end of her performance (Elizabeth Wilmshurst’s was faded out) but hearing it fair sent tingles down one’s spine, just a little like the impromptu clapping after Charles Spencer’s Diana speech. Or maybe I’ve just spent too long within the QEII’s austere walls. Probably.

Now look I don’t want anyone to accuse me of having shares in Roderic PLC but there was a simply classic Columbo this evening, right at the end of an otherwise serene performance by top FCO mandarin Sir Peter Ricketts.

This was his third Chilcot appearance (a record I think) so perhaps he thought that by now he’d nailed it. Oh dear. One wanted to shout panto-style ‘behind you’s as Lyne manoeuvred himself into place.

During his lengthy service at the FCO, he asked, had the witness ever heard before of a foreign secretary ignoring the advice of his legal officers? Slightest of pauses, then ‘No.’ And what about an attorney general ignoring their advice? No pause: ‘No.’

Was that the faintest of tremors from within the Justice Ministry, whose incumbent the former foreign secretary Jack Straw returns to the inquiry on Monday? Surely not.