Christopher Meyer at the Iraq war inquiry: a vain popinjay
The Iraq war inquiry, which began during November, is the last redoubt of the tie. These are fast disappearing from public life, superseded by the studied informality of open-necked shirts. But, seemingly in defiance of sofa government, they fly like pennants here at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster.
Indeed, the proceedings are really just an elegy for chaps in suits—an affecting display of the varieties of masculine thinking and ways of being of a particular sort of man: not just military types or politicians, but public service man. As we went to war, the witnesses were at the height of their careers. Because of the generation that it was, they were also all men. Most of the inquiry members are chaps, although the secretariat that serves it is the blonde, feminised future (though they all wear black suits too).
There is a hint of melancholy wistfulness to the procession of witnesses. Tall, handsome, saturnine military men; small austere men; charming men; creepy men; and diligent men. Then you have the oddity of our former US ambassadors: the vain popinjay Christopher Meyer, condemned to the hell of being himself, alongside the impressive David Manning—both seeming, as do the others, like overblown roses.
In the inquiry room, you watch them look back to when they did large things routinely. You can almost see them contemplating the way the busy heyday years are behind them. Whether they got it right or wrong, these chaps worked hard, they were intelligent and effective—they carried responsibilities we can hardly imagine. But now they are being held to a different kind of account, and perhaps they wonder how to communicate what their work was like. Was it useful? Has it turned to dust?
The atmosphere is quiet, even, steady. There is a courteous decency, and a pleasing thoroughness to it all. But this makes it more, not less, deadly. It is human drama alright, but more Racine than Shakespeare. Important evidence is placed down carefully, like precise incendiary devices. The testimony of John Scarlett, the former head of MI6, for example. He drew up the dossier with the infamous 45-minute claim. Scarlett insisted there was no attempt to “sex up” the dossier but that “something had been lost in translation.”
But there is no great palaver about it, no courtroom pouncing and preening, no displays of self regard or moral indignation. The choice to be investigative, not inquisitorial, was a good one. It removes one barrier of defensiveness. Yet they know well enough what is at stake: how they did, and how the nation did on their watch.
There is a certain kind of theatre here, too. The inquiry members bustle in through the same door as the audience, in a friendly, unassuming way. But the witnesses entrance and exit more dramatically, through a side stagedoor.
John Chilcot, the eponymous chairman and former senior civil servant, has a benign, interested, but ultimately uncommunicative face. It looks evolutionarily adapted over many years of public service for keeping his counsel. That said, being misread has no doubt been a useful tool in his armoury. He has the air of a swot relishing a particularly tough essay.
Usha Prashar, a crossbencher in the House of Lords, is head girl, a rather inspiring woman, posing common-sense questions but with a seriousness that brooks no dissembling. Roderic Lyne, a former diplomat, is the committee rottweiler, while historian Martin Gilbert ponders and orders. Foreign policy academic Lawrence Freedman is worldlier, sharply reminding a witness that their recall is being checked against the written record.
At first, the inquiry team seemed disconcerted by the lights and the alarming exposure. They know the inquiry is more on trial than the witnesses. They know also that the journalists, next door in the sociable yet cynical trading floor of the press centre, declared them guilty of whitewash and bunkum before they began.
Meetings, memos and the sheer bloody obduracy of government cram the room. These chaps are connoisseurs of what meetings can, and cannot, do. They speak of “delivery,” by which they mean their attempts to get the army into the right spot, with the right bits of kit, while still planning it all in secret. Brows furrow at the memory of chasing vital equipment sprawled along the supply lines of three continents. The frustrations of getting Whitehall to work in concert are grappled with, casting back to when the hoity-toity fellows at the department for international development used their principles to obstruct other chaps’ planning, and talked of thinking how we might assist the Iraqis after we’d invaded them. Across it all, there is a perception that these men were in a kind of frontline themselves: trying to make British power work. This is, at least, what they try to communicate, if discreetly.
Deities are pursued in the hearings room, but none greater than the calm justice of proper history. For how do you reconstruct just what happened, in order to slay the convenient myths of the present? Outside is the Everest of documents: the human detritus of position-taking and raw reality that is the inquiry team’s secret weapon. Making sense of the papers, to use an Irish phrase, is like “minding mice at a crossroads”; an ordering of mess. Journalism paints in the stark colours of blame and guilt, but history is ultimately still more damning.
At the end of this, Iraqis died in un-numbered hundreds of thousands. But the real force that the inquiry is searching out is the magnetic field of power. It distorts and pulls, it is necessary but fluid, as alive in informal exchanges and ways of seeing the world as in big choices.
It is the quest for where power lay, and how it worked, and whether it was squandered, that makes the business in the inquiry room so gripping.
But we who watch can do little more than hope that this machine, the inquiry, a relentless reputation calibrator, can do more—and make sure that lessons are learned.
The Iraq war inquiry, which began during November, is the last redoubt of the tie. These are fast disappearing from public life, superseded by the studied informality of open-necked shirts. But, seemingly in defiance of sofa government, they fly like pennants here at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster.
Indeed, the proceedings are really just an elegy for chaps in suits—an affecting display of the varieties of masculine thinking and ways of being of a particular sort of man: not just military types or politicians, but public service man. As we went to war, the witnesses were at the height of their careers. Because of the generation that it was, they were also all men. Most of the inquiry members are chaps, although the secretariat that serves it is the blonde, feminised future (though they all wear black suits too).
There is a hint of melancholy wistfulness to the procession of witnesses. Tall, handsome, saturnine military men; small austere men; charming men; creepy men; and diligent men. Then you have the oddity of our former US ambassadors: the vain popinjay Christopher Meyer, condemned to the hell of being himself, alongside the impressive David Manning—both seeming, as do the others, like overblown roses.
In the inquiry room, you watch them look back to when they did large things routinely. You can almost see them contemplating the way the busy heyday years are behind them. Whether they got it right or wrong, these chaps worked hard, they were intelligent and effective—they carried responsibilities we can hardly imagine. But now they are being held to a different kind of account, and perhaps they wonder how to communicate what their work was like. Was it useful? Has it turned to dust?
The atmosphere is quiet, even, steady. There is a courteous decency, and a pleasing thoroughness to it all. But this makes it more, not less, deadly. It is human drama alright, but more Racine than Shakespeare. Important evidence is placed down carefully, like precise incendiary devices. The testimony of John Scarlett, the former head of MI6, for example. He drew up the dossier with the infamous 45-minute claim. Scarlett insisted there was no attempt to “sex up” the dossier but that “something had been lost in translation.”
But there is no great palaver about it, no courtroom pouncing and preening, no displays of self regard or moral indignation. The choice to be investigative, not inquisitorial, was a good one. It removes one barrier of defensiveness. Yet they know well enough what is at stake: how they did, and how the nation did on their watch.
There is a certain kind of theatre here, too. The inquiry members bustle in through the same door as the audience, in a friendly, unassuming way. But the witnesses entrance and exit more dramatically, through a side stagedoor.
John Chilcot, the eponymous chairman and former senior civil servant, has a benign, interested, but ultimately uncommunicative face. It looks evolutionarily adapted over many years of public service for keeping his counsel. That said, being misread has no doubt been a useful tool in his armoury. He has the air of a swot relishing a particularly tough essay.
Usha Prashar, a crossbencher in the House of Lords, is head girl, a rather inspiring woman, posing common-sense questions but with a seriousness that brooks no dissembling. Roderic Lyne, a former diplomat, is the committee rottweiler, while historian Martin Gilbert ponders and orders. Foreign policy academic Lawrence Freedman is worldlier, sharply reminding a witness that their recall is being checked against the written record.
At first, the inquiry team seemed disconcerted by the lights and the alarming exposure. They know the inquiry is more on trial than the witnesses. They know also that the journalists, next door in the sociable yet cynical trading floor of the press centre, declared them guilty of whitewash and bunkum before they began.
Meetings, memos and the sheer bloody obduracy of government cram the room. These chaps are connoisseurs of what meetings can, and cannot, do. They speak of “delivery,” by which they mean their attempts to get the army into the right spot, with the right bits of kit, while still planning it all in secret. Brows furrow at the memory of chasing vital equipment sprawled along the supply lines of three continents. The frustrations of getting Whitehall to work in concert are grappled with, casting back to when the hoity-toity fellows at the department for international development used their principles to obstruct other chaps’ planning, and talked of thinking how we might assist the Iraqis after we’d invaded them. Across it all, there is a perception that these men were in a kind of frontline themselves: trying to make British power work. This is, at least, what they try to communicate, if discreetly.
Deities are pursued in the hearings room, but none greater than the calm justice of proper history. For how do you reconstruct just what happened, in order to slay the convenient myths of the present? Outside is the Everest of documents: the human detritus of position-taking and raw reality that is the inquiry team’s secret weapon. Making sense of the papers, to use an Irish phrase, is like “minding mice at a crossroads”; an ordering of mess. Journalism paints in the stark colours of blame and guilt, but history is ultimately still more damning.
At the end of this, Iraqis died in un-numbered hundreds of thousands. But the real force that the inquiry is searching out is the magnetic field of power. It distorts and pulls, it is necessary but fluid, as alive in informal exchanges and ways of seeing the world as in big choices.
It is the quest for where power lay, and how it worked, and whether it was squandered, that makes the business in the inquiry room so gripping.
But we who watch can do little more than hope that this machine, the inquiry, a relentless reputation calibrator, can do more—and make sure that lessons are learned.
