Civil servant who produced a damning report into the Iraq War
SIR John Chilcot, who died aged 82 of kidney disease, was a civil servant who eventually became Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, doing much of the backstage work that led to the Belfast Agreement of 1998. He was best-known, however, for the seven-year-long inquiry he conducted into the Iraq War, which in 2016 produced a damning indictment of the Blair government’s conduct and motives.
Sir John’s findings included claims that Saddam Hussein, at the time of the invasion in 2003, did not pose an urgent threat to UK interests, that evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDS) was over-stated, that the legal basis of the war was “far from satisfactory”, that war planning and preparation was “wholly inadequate”, and that military action did not achieve stated goals.
Tony Blair, the inquiry concluded, had not been “straight’ with the public as Prime Minister, and had presented Parliament with “beliefs, not facts”, while the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6),
Sir Richard Dearlove, had personally intervened to back evidence later found unreliable without having confirmed it.
The report was described as “damning” by the BBC, “crushing” by the Guardian, and “scathing” by the Daily Telegraph. This was all the more surprising because Chilcot had been widely seen as an establishment figure who had been under a barrage of criticism for the length of time he had taken to publish.
The inquiry, which was set up by Gordon Brown in 2009, was expected to take a year. Many imagined that Chilcot, who had served on the Butler Inquiry that exonerated the Blair government over the “sexing up” of the “dodgy dossier’ claiming UK bases in Cyprus could be threatened by WMDS, would produce a whitewash. In the event, his analysis was painstaking, and the delays in publishing his conclusions were in large part the result of his insistence on taking evidence in public – Brown had wanted it conducted in camera – and obtaining access to government minutes and correspondence, something fiercely resisted by both the Cabinet and Foreign Offices for more than a year.
It amounted to 2.6 million words in 12 volumes – longer, as some pointed out, than the King James Bible, the Complete Works Of William Shakespeare and Tolstoy’s War And Peace put together.
Blair’s reputation was badly damaged, particularly over his uncritical assurance of support to then US president George W Bush and his over-confidence he could influence US policy, but the most serious criticism was directed at the Joint Intelligence Committee and the security services. While Blair conceded errors had been made, he never apologised, and said he believed Saddam’s removal was justified.
John Anthony Chilcot was born on April 22, 1939, in Surrey, the son of Henry Chilcot, an artist, and his wife Catherine. He was educated at Brighton College, where he was a Lyon Scholar, and won an open scholarship to Pembroke, Cambridge, where he spent six years studying English and modern and medieval languages.
He began his Whitehall career in 1963 at the Home Office, and in 1966 became assistant private secretary to Roy Jenkins, then the home secretary. From 1971-73 he
was private secretary to William (later Lord) Armstrong, the head of the Civil Service, and then returned to the Home Office as principal, first to Merlyn Rees and then Willie Whitelaw.
Chilcot spent four years in the early 1980s at the Prison Department before returning to senior roles in the Cabinet and then Home Office, then going to his final post as the senior civil servant in the Northern Ireland Office in 1990.
While there he handled the approaches of those in Sinn Fein who claimed to want an exit strategy from armed struggle – to give up their weapons without being obliged to surrender – and he worked closely with Prime Minister Sir John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds. In his memoirs, Major described Chilcot and the Irish civil servant Tim Dalton as “tireless workhorses” and Chilcot remained crucial to negotiations even after his nominal retirement from the department in 1997.
After that he served, among other things, as staff counsellor to the security services, handling complaints from members of MI5 and MI6 about their working conditions until 2004, and, at the request of the Blair government, worked with his old boss, Jenkins, on an inquiry into the voting system.
He was president of the Police Foundation and a member of the National Archives Council, and served as chairman of the non-profit B&CE Group, which provided services to the construction industry. As well as the Butler Inquiry and his own, from 2007 he chaired a committee on surveillance of criminal activity.
John Chilcot loved music – he played the piano and was passionate about opera – travel and reading, but he was thwarted in his ambition “to become a really good squash player”. He lived in Dartmoor.
He was knighted in 1994 and advanced to GCB four years later; in 2004 he became a member of the Privy Council. He is survived by his wife Rosalind Forster, whom he married in 1964.
At 2.6 million words in 12 volumes the report was longer than the Bible, Shakespeare’s Complete Works, and War And Peace, put together