An interesting start to today’s session when journos and bloggers in the press room were told that a date given by one of last week’s witnesses – Sir William Ehrman – was wrong and had now been corrected in the transcript.
Conspiracy theorists are already at work. Who is “fiddling”, asks one of this site’s followers. “Civil Service lawyers?”
Let’s hope it was a one-off because dates were central to today’s evidence.
Sir David Manning, as Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, was present at just about every meeting in the lead up to the war and today, in a detailed and often engrossing chronology, took us through them.
Some examples – George Bush first mentioned Iraq to Tony Blair on 14 September 2001, three days after 9/11. Already a link between Saddam and al-Qaida was mentioned.
7 September 2002: a meeting at Camp David where a surprise visitor was American Vice President Dick Cheney. Manning’s conclusion: President Bush wanted to “expose” the VP to those advocating UN diplomacy.
And most importantly June 2002: Tony Blair first asked for military options against Iraq – a good 9 months before we went to war. This is bound to get a different sort of conspiracy theorist exercised.
Sir David Manning had the insight and detail today to show he was Blair’s right hand man on Iraq. He also showed a degree of loyalty that some of the former diplomats and civil servants didn’t quite demonstrate last week.