Andrew Gilligan
How can we punish Blair?
Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency.
Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency.
Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency. Expecting the usual concerned talk of deprivation, poor parenting, and high-rise flats, the interviewer was disconcerted to find both his guests averring that the only answer to youth criminals was to ‘cut off their goolies’. (It was perhaps funnier at the time — Britain then knew nothing of talk radio, or David Blunkett.)
This week, as Tony Blair finally appears at the Iraq inquiry, its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, is in the same position as that interviewer. Sir John has spoken in impeccably Church of England terms about the purpose of his hearings being to ‘learn lessons’, ‘establish what happened’, and not put anyone ‘on trial’. Sadly, however, all the British public wants is to cut off Mr Blair’s goolies.
According to a recent poll, only a third think that the former prime minister honestly believed the case he made for military action — and a quarter want to skip the inquiry and move straight to the war crimes trial. Our problem is not that we haven’t ‘established what happened’. We know what happened. The reason Iraq remains unfinished business for Britain is that none of those responsible has been punished for their actions.
So in the likely event that Mr Blair survives his Gas Mark Two roasting from Team Chilcot, how else could the great warrior-statesman be brought to justice? Tuesday’s testimony from the former Foreign Office legal adviser Sir Michael Wood and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, that the war was ‘unlawful,’ raised new excitement that Mr Blair could yet find himself in an orange jumpsuit, with Cherie sneaking cigarettes through the visitors’ room grille.
Alas, in all its torrent of legislation, one of the few things New Labour forgot to criminalise is the increasingly prevalent practice of taking one’s country to war by deceit. The laws Mr Blair has broken are rather vaguer. For all the cries that he is a ‘war criminal’, the Nuremberg Principles make clear that war crimes relate largely to atrocities committed in the course of combat or occupation. The act of war is not itself a war crime.
Nor does the Iraq war meet the legal definition of genocide or crimes against humanity. The latter has to be a systematic or widespread campaign of, for instance, murder, knowingly directed against a civilian population. Although the war did result in many civilian deaths, civilians were clearly not the targets. And although the disgraceful failure to plan for the aftermath caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, it might be hard to prove that this was done knowingly.
Mr Blair probably is guilty of the ‘crime of aggression’, the international law offence of which Ms Wilmshurst accuses him. But the problem then is enforcement. Unlike in cases of genocide, war crimes and the rest, the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction here. Mr Blair would have to visit one of the relatively few countries which has incorporated the offence into its own domestic law to be at risk.
If the handcuff possibilities for Mr Blair are small, there are certain other options with an exciting penal flavour to them. The Commons could, in theory, summon him to the Bar of the House for reprimand over the several provable lies he told them (until 1772, it was a requirement for offenders to kneel — that might be a tradition worth reviving).
Admittedly, the last non-MP to be dealt with like this was the Sunday Express editor John Junor in 1957. But if Junor’s offence (‘casting doubt on the honour and integrity of Members’) was reprimandable, Mr Blair must qualify for several hours of burning ears.
Mr Blair could be expelled from the Privy Council, like Sir Edgar Speyer in 1921, the last person to suffer this punishment. Sir Edgar, a German-British former chairman of the London Underground, was thrown out not for delays on the Northern Line but essentially because of a postwar press hate campaign against his dodgy allegiance to an overseas power (certain parallels there, surely?).
In these liberal days, however, we must resign ourselves to the fact that the state seems powerless to tackle prolific offenders such as Mr Blair. Rather like the teenage car thieves who get sent on white-water rafting courses, he will continue to be dispatched to the Middle East in a naive attempt to reform him.
But there are some sanctions outside the control of the authorities. In the week of a previous Iraq report, Lord Butler’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said that Mr Blair would be ‘called to account... at the Judgment Seat’ for his actions. More interestingly, he added: ‘The essence of judgment is simply to be face to face with the truth, and no escape.’
Even Chilcot is bringing Mr Blair face to face with the truth. So perhaps his real punishment is simply this: that, for the rest of his life, he will know that people see him for what he truly is.