Who’ll be the judge of Brown’s Iraq war inquiry?

Gordon Brown will announce an inquiry into the Iraq war this week. My sources tell me that this will not be chaired by a judge, senior or retired. It will be chaired instead by a historian.

The hot tip in Whitehall is that it is likely to be the respected Churchill and Holocaust scholar Sir Martin Gilbert.

There are enormous risks to reputations – not least that of Tony Blair as he strives to become president of Europe (a real prospect). Securing that post for Mr Blair is said to be one of Lord Mandelson’s many responsibilities.

The government wants the build-up and political decisions that led Britain to war to be the focus of the inquiry. With judges such as former lord chief justice Lord Bingham having declared the war “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law”, there was never any expectation that the government would risk a judicial inquiry with the power of subpoena. And it may believe it has a safe pair of hands in Sir Martin Gilbert.

But Gilbert’s passion rests in contemporaneous documents. He will want the release of the mass of email traffic, the extraordinary secret service stuff that intersected with the dodgy dossier and the rest. He’s likely to insist on getting them. A historian can’t do much without the paperwork.

Critics argue that if the inquiry is chaired by a layman like Sir Martin Gilbert, then as with the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the make-up of the panel that sits with him will be critical. Many have felt that Macpherson would never have arrived at the concept of “institutional racism” in the police without the input of those who sat with him.

Another chapter in these “interesting times”.