Iraq inquiry: Manning’s insider account of Crawford summit

At the Iraq inquiry where Sir David Manning has given us the first insider’s account of the infamous Crawford, Texas summit of April 2002 where Tony Blair and George Bush are supposed to have signed up to go to war.

He says they did nothing of the sort and mainly talked about the Middle East. But his account of Tony Blair saying how important it is that the US, post 9/11, doesn’t act alone sounds a bit like a man who’d decided to be with them if he possibly could.

Sir David has also given us our first timeline on early UK requests for military options, starting in June 2002.

Sir Lawrence Freedman just surprised a few of us by asking a lengthy question about why more use wasn’t made in Whitehall of the excellent Chicago 1999 speech by Tony Blair without putting it on record that he helped to draft it.

Related: The Iraq inquiry is light on documents. Here’s why

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