The journalist and commentator Simon Jenkins has attacked the Chilcot inquiry into the 2003 Iraq war.

Interviewed by Today presenter Evan Davis at the end of the inquiry's first week, Mr Jenkins said that politicians "are trying to get John Chilcot to do their dirty work for them" and predicted that the House of Commons would "bury" the inquiry's findings.

He told the programme that the point of the report was to uncover the politics behind the decision to invade Iraq and that there was "no point" in hearing evidence from a succession of Whitehall mandarins.

Mr Jenkins' comments come a day after Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK's ambassador to the UN in 2003, said that the was was "questionable legitimacy" even though it was unlikely to be proved illegal