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No 76: A Man Who Hires Out the Houses of Parliament.
“When people make political films set in Britain,” says Jeremy Boynton, “the script almost always includes a scene set in the Commons It seems such a good idea in advance You can stage terrific battles.. great speeches.. showdown between PM and Opposition… If he does another one, how about a TV advert with Jones in his swimming trunks catching a beach ball, and grinning: “Read my story of spooks who couldn’t find nukes, it’s spy-sational, it’s inquiring, it’s inspiring, it’s only in The Independent.”
More from Mark Steel. Except for Scott Ritter, previous head of weapons inspectors, Hans Blix, the current one, the United Nations, the governments of France and Germany, 90 per cent of Spain, the entire Arab world and, we now know, huge chunks of the intelligence service itself, such as Brian Jones, whose interview was in this paper yesterday.Incidentally, shouldn’t The Independent learn how to market these scoops properly. After all, given the evidence available, who could possibly have doubted it. I for one won’t miss him’.”?Now the tactic seems to be to claim they were misled. Why didn’t Reid say: “What David Kay actually said was, ‘Greg Dyke, he’s the idiot who lost the rights to Match of the Day.

But David Kay’s exact words were: “I think we have found probably 85 per cent of what we’re going to find”, which means almost the exact opposite, especially in the context of him resigning having said they’d got everything wrong. Reid said that if you looked at what David Kay actually said, he’d admitted they’d found 85 per cent of the stuff they were looking for. As recent as last week, John Reid on Newsnight was asked for a response to David Kay’s statement upon resigning as head of the Iraq Survey Group. We already have an abundance of evidence showing that the Government has been willing to twist the facts to try and prove the existence of those weapons. Whatever the dossier said, Blair was never going to say: “Ah, it seems Saddam doesn’t have much at all”, then ring Bush and tell him to call the whole thing off.Every piece of information has been deemed to prove their case. Instead of all this archaic language he’d just grab Blair by the hair and snarl: “You can deny it all you like, but your mate Hoon next door has already grassed you up.”It’s hard to see why we need an inquiry at all. Michael Mates resigned as a Tory minister because of his connections to Asil Nadir.

It seems you can’t get on this panel unless you’ve been of assistance to a crooked millionaire. Perhaps it’s like The Usual Suspects; the real reason they’re being brought together is to plan a major heist. Halfway through the inquiry the crown jewels will go missing, while Sir John Chilcot screeches down the Strand in the getaway van as Lord Butler yells: “Step on it Chilcot. If we’re not all back in the Royal Courts of Justice at 10 o’clock sharp they’ll start asking questions.”If the inquiry was supposed to be genuinely searching, why can’t it be carried out by a cop with a shaved head from Bermondsey, the sort anyone else would get if they were being investigated. Lord Butler once let off Jonathan Aitken, saying he’d done nothing wrong. For six months he’s heard screams of “we need an inquiry”, but he was thinking: “It doesn’t count because it doesn’t go ‘George Bush says’ first.”So now we have the inquiry and, to make it fair, the team of five that will run it are drawn from a wide cross-section of the aristocracy. My hunch is there’s something about Blair’s statement that doesn’t add up.” And Morse would say: “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from going down that road Lewis, let’s call it a day”, and that would be the end.The only reason there’s another inquiry at all is because of this elaborate game of “Simon Says” that Blair plays, called “George Bush says”.