RUTHFULLY YOURS

Making his second appearance before the Iraq Inquiry, the former prime minister warned that it was impossible just to manage the threat.

The hearing opened with the inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot saying that Mr Blair had been recalled as the inquiry needed to ”clarify” certain aspects of what happened concerning the invasion in March 2003.

Mr Blair was then challenged by Sir Martin Gilbert about whether he regretted comparing the threat from Saddam Hussein’s regime to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Mr Blair replied that while he should not have suggested the circumstances were the same, he still believed that the ”calculus of risk” had changed following the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001.

He said: ”The single most difficult thing we have to face today – and we face it still – is the risk of this new type of terrorism and extremism based on an ideological perversion of the faith of Islam combined with technology that allows them to kill people on a large scale.

”Although this is a time where many people think this extremism can be managed, I personally don’t think that is true. I think it has to be confronted and changed.”

He said that is why he still believes the West needs to take a hard line with Iran over its nuclear programme.

Mr Blair said his Cabinet ministers realised from early 2002 that the Government had embarked on a policy that would probably lead Britain to war.

Inquiry panel member Sir Roderic Lyne, a former senior diplomat, quoted the evidence of the former prime minister’s European issues adviser, Sir Stephen Wall, who said the Cabinet would not have appreciated before January 2003 that military action was likely.

Sir Roderic said it appeared that the Cabinet had no discussions about Iraq between April 11 and September 23 2002, when the prospect of war was drawing ever closer.

He asked Mr Blair whether he felt he had the endorsement of the Cabinet for Britain’s increasingly aggressive policy towards Saddam in this period.

Mr Blair replied: “I honestly don’t think you could have a Cabinet minister around that table who would say, ‘oh my goodness, I didn’t know we were saying Saddam had to comply with the UN inspectors or we were going to take military action’.

“I mean, I was saying it. At every Prime Minister’s Questions I was being asked it.”

Mr Blair added: “Daily there were stories that we were planning and about to launch military action with the US.

“So the one thing nobody could have been in any doubt about was either where I stood on the issue or what the policy of the government was.”

Mr Blair said what concerned ministers most had been the prospect of entering an alliance with a right-wing Republican US administration against Iraq.

“Here we were. We had just been re-elected with another landslide, we were probably the most successful centre-left government in the world and you are about to go into an alliance with a right-wing Republican president. That was the thing that worried them most,” he said.

Mr Blair acknowledged that he had discussed the prospects for regime change in Iraq in a telephone conversation with Mr Bush in December 2001, even though it was not British policy.

“Regime change was their policy so regime change was part of the discussion,” he said. “If it became the only way of dealing with this issue, we were going to be up for that.

He added: “The Americans – from September 11 onwards, this was on their agenda.”