Richard Lutz digests the first draft of history with the pubIication of the hardhitting Chilcot Inquiry report

It is 2.6 million words long and took eigh years to research, check and write.

The Chilcot Report on Tony Blair’s duplicity over the Iraq war will take weeks to digest and analyse. But even the release of the brief summary by the author, Sir John Chilcot, is of enormous importance. Not only to the families of those killed in the Blair/Bush incursion but also a dire warning to politicians who use equivocal ŵords to avoid the vital truisms they are dealing with.

This initial taste of the report showed that the former Prime Minister, who now faces a furious onslaught of questions, had a pre-determined agenda to begin war. He used selective facts along with half-truths and downright untruths to form a structure for invasion. His lawyerly skills were used to deceive the voters of the UK. He lied by omission and ensured that dubious assumptions and rumours became hard facts.

Amazingly, and possibly illegally, he never told his cabinet that he wrote to George W Bush (who, weirdly, is 70 years old today) eight months before the bloody invasion and promised in a secret memo:

I will be with you, whatever.

Former Labour Party leader and Prime Minister Tony Blair

This monumental subterfuge, this love letter to a moronic president, to deceive not only Britons but his own colleagues is enough to condemn the humiliated delusional ex-Prime Minister to the toilet bowl of Western history. It reveals not only Blair’s base instincts but the tools, the deviousness and the outright lies that politicians use, and abuse. And it casts into sharp relief the ephemerality of such things as Tory leadership battles, Labour infighting, the quackery of US political campaigns and, yes, even the EU vote.

They say we get the political leaders we deserve. Chilcot’s findings initially show we deserve better. And as the huge investigation reveals more, it will show we have been criminally betrayed.