Daily View: Blair and Britton

Clare Spencer|09:55 UK time, Monday, 14 December 2009

Before his appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, Tony Blair said in an interview with Fern Britton that he would "still have thought it right to remove" Saddam Hussein, even if he had known that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction. Commentators dissect the interview and its on effect on the inquiry.

Jonathan Steele in the Guardian urges the inquiry to follow up on the interview:

"Yet Blair in effect admits he and Bush planned to launch a war even if they knew there was no chance of getting UN approval. In cases brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, political leaders who plotted large-scale illegal violence were described as collaborating in a 'joint criminal enterprise'. Here too is a fertile new field of inquiry that Chilcot must not duck."

Peter McKay in the Daily Mail says Tony Blair's supposed frustration about not getting his views out doesn't make any sense:

"Why is it necessary, then, for him to talk in secret to the Chilcot Inquiry while publicly excusing his actions in a BBC1 interview with Fern Britton?"

In the Times, the ex-director of public prosecutions QC Ken Macdonald calls Blair a narcissist:

"This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage."

Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph thinks Fern Britton has had more success than the Chilcot inquiry so far:

"Blair's remarkable pre-emptive strike comfortably overshadows anything so far said to Sir John Chilcot. It goes to the very nub of the issue Sir John is considering: was the war necessary, and was the prime minister's official justification, weapons of mass destruction, merely a pretext for something decided long before?"

Bruce Anderson in the Independent believes that Tony Blair's interview shows he lacks attention to detail:

"Moralists can easily fall into two traps: of believing that good intentions are enough and of assuming that their own moral superiority will guarantee a favourable outcome. Tony Blair did both."

Church of England priest George Pitcher claims in the Daily Telegraph that it's too late for Tony Blair to reinvent himself:

"There's something of the Jeffrey Archer to Tony Blair. If there's a past that doesn't suit him, he invents another one. According to Campbell now, the famous 'we don't do God' line was all a trifling misunderstanding. And according to Blair now, his whole life, from childhood to Oxford to Number 10, has been informed by his faith. He used to say that he denied it because he was afraid of being thought to be 'a nutter'. Now he's changing his plea to one of undiminished responsibility by virtue of sanity."

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