The Chilcot report may ruin Blair but it must not neuter our future leaders

AMOCKINGBIRD is going to be killed this week by 12 angry men – maybe more. There is a verdict coming on Wednesday. On Tony Blair and the Iraq war in the Chilcot report. The men with the pitchforks and the torches can hardly contain themselves.

If it doesn’t utterly condemn Blair others will, quicker than you can say ‘whitewash’. I was always against the Iraq war and said so at the time when – and this is often forgotten – public opinion was in favour of it. But let me tell you why I will stand shoulder to shoulder with Blair as others condemn him.

First let’s look at the short-term politics of it. As Jeremy Corbyn continues to squat in the Labour leader’s office, unable to fulfil any of the duties required of him, he will cling to Chilcot.

His own inadequacies, he thinks, can be masked by denouncing Blair as a war criminal and thus, cynically, disqualifying any Labour MP who voted for the war from challenging him. That is what passes for principle in Corbyn’s Labour Party these days.

And then there is Alex Salmond. He has three motivations to feast on Chilcot.

One is his vanity. Salmond believes he is the best politician of this or any other age and so will allow his breast to become even more puffed up – if that is possible – by seeing the demise of Blair. Alex wants to prove he was better than Tony, simple as.

Mistakes

Two, he believes it will help destroy the Labour Party, which he has always detested.

More sinister is reason three. Being a potent power that can take decisive military action is, he believes, part of the Britishness he wishes to destroy. That is why he always opposed any kind of intervention by the UK.

It is why he saw ethnic cleansing continue in the Balkans and condemned action against it as an ‘act of unpardonable folly’. Strangely he also has praised Vladimir Putin for restoring Russian pride through military might.

But there is a greater principle which we must preserve despite the noise created by the self-obsessed and inadequate Salmond and Corbyn and others.

It is the right of our leaders to make mistakes. We elect them to make decisions so that we don’t have to.

When they get them wrong we cannot howl derision without some kind of splashback upon ourselves. If Chilcot concludes that Tony Blair sent British troops into war without the proper equipment, then Blair deserves condemnation. If he says that Blair didn’t prepare properly for the aftermath of the Iraq war, we should listen.

But if the conclusion of all of this leads us as a nation to say that we will never again intervene to do what we think is right to keep the nation safe, make real our values and oppose dictators, then we will have become neutered as a country.

Perhaps that is what the likes of Corbyn and Salmond want. As Vietnam did to the United States, the people of this country were repulsed by what was done in our name because it was televised.

We saw it every night. It was worse than a gory EastEnders. But that is what we have always asked our servicemen and women to do to keep us safe. To risk their lives and kill others. We just haven’t seen it so graphically before.

The Falklands War we heralded as a victory. We saw few pictures of the bloodiest fighting.

I wonder if this generation had seen, instead of the Pathe News propaganda of the Second World War, the reality of the Blitz and the bombing, would we have sued for peace? Would our guts have knotted? Our resolve dissolved?

I believe that Tony Blair got the decision on Iraq wrong. I just thank God I was never in the position to have to make it.

We will never know whether the decision to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein was the right one. But there is a greater peril in an ever more perilous world.

Our failure and danger is we always fight the last war. So scarred by the horrors of the First World War, we as a nation refused to stand up to Adolf Hitler and allowed the conditions to develop that led to the second one. Scarred by that, Anthony Eden decided to head off Egypt’s Nasser in the disaster of Suez.

Will we allow Iraq to similarly shape our place in the world? I wonder if we saw what is happening right now in Syria whether our compassion to help would be drowned by our fear.

This week we marked the folly of the Battle of the Somme. I have a personal reason to mark it. My grandfather, whom I never met, had been wounded twice – in the face and losing part of his shoulder. He was finally invalided out of war when he was bayoneted at the Somme.

When he arrived at Derby to a convalescent home for the wounded a woman handed him a white feather. A symbol of cowardice given to a man whose medals I proudly treasure. The mores of the time, perhaps. He subsequently died during the Clydebank Blitz, when the sound of the bombing heard from his home in Maryhill brought back the shell-shock and he suffered a fatal cerebral haemorrhage.

Condemn

I can rage that war deprived me of his presence. I do condemn the failure of politicians that led to him, as a young man, spending his youth in a water-filled trench trying to avoid death.

But, right or wrong, he volunteered to fight for things we believe in. Of that I am immensely proud.

If the lessons of Chilcot are learned, it will be how we prepare properly to play our part on the world stage, not whether we should. Tony Blair’s reputation does not matter to me. Questions of right or wrong always will.

Sandwiched between a Tory leadership ballot on Tuesday and Thursday, perhaps the Chilcot report will not get the coverage we might have anticipated.

We should digest it properly. Not what it says about one former prime minister but what signposts it gives future ones.

If this is seen as just the last nail in the coffin of Tony Blair, there will be other coffins to fill. The fact our fingerprints aren’t on them is not necessarily a sign of honour.

If we allow the likes of Corbyn and Salmond to interpret it as a reason never again to try to help our fellow human beings, to oppose dictators and take action to make our country safe, we will have fundamentally changed the purpose of this country.

And we will have shaped the mores of our time – with a white feather humanity will curse us for.