Chilcot delivers his damning verdict on Iraq... and this time Tony Blair sexes down the report

‘The report concludes there were no lies’ says Blair. No, but it does reveal a letter to George Bush, in mid-2002, that says ‘I will be with you, whatever’

Tony Blair responds to the publication of the Chilcot report (Screengrab)

Tony Blair’s voice never quite cracked, but it nearly did.

“I express more sorrow and regret and apology than you may ever know,” he said, embarking upon what initially looked like it was going to be a mea culpa but swiftly morphed into two hours of unrepentant self-justification for taking Britain to war in Iraq.

Even with all the power hindsight now allows, Blair repeated – time and time again – that he stood by that fateful decision to join the US in its invasion of Iraq in 2003.

What he was apologising for, was the “planning and process” that preceded the invasion.

But not the decision to go to war itself, and the worth of his apology will be for the families of British soldiers and Iraqi civilians to decide.

“I accept full responsibility, without exception and without excuse,” he said. “There will not be a day in my life where I do not relive or think about what happened. I acknowledge the mistakes and accept responsibility for them, but what I cannot do and will not do is say we took the wrong decision.”

Sir John Chilcot stopped short of calling Blair a liar, but he did say that the intelligence presented to the public “reflected Blair's beliefs more than the underlying facts”. That the information made public was “not an accurate description of the intelligence” given to him.

And in that sense, Tony Blair’s reading of Sir John Chilcot’s report, and the parts he drew from in his response to it, were true to form.

“The report concludes there were no lies, Parliament and the Cabinet were not misled, there was no secret commitment to war,” he said.

No, but it does reveal a letter to George Bush, in mid-2002, that says, “I will be with you, whatever.” But for Blair, “The Americans did not read this as a blank cheque for war.”

Sir John Chilcot had said military action was not, by March 2003, a last resort, but that military action might have been necessary in the future.

“I did not have the option of that delay,” Blair countered in the clearest justification of his decision to invade Iraq. “I had to decide. I took this decision with the heaviest of hearts. If we had withdrawn the threat of action and pulled back our forces, we would have found it almost impossible to reassemble our forces in that number. If someone’s going to say that the decision is wrong they need to spell out what they would have done.”

But he knows such things were far outside the Iraq inquiry’s remit, which savages Blair for not foreseeing the carnage that would arise in the aftermath of invasion. “It did not require hindsight,” the report says.

“I note,” Blair said, “That the inquiry fairly and honestly admits that even after this passage of time they have been able to identify alternative approaches that would have been more successful.”

Never in more than 20 years in the full glare of the public spotlight has Tony Blair looked so broken, so humbled, so defeated. But never, either, has he been more resolute. There is no doubt that he will relive his decision every day for the rest of his life. But there is no doubt, either, that he will ever come to agree with his massed ranks of detractors. That he made a mistake. That the decision to remove Saddam was the wrong one. He didn’t think it then. He doesn’t think it now.

For seven years the nation has awaited the publication of the Chilcot report on Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War. It has now finally seen the light of day, and at 2.6m pages long is one of the largest reports ever published. To help you make sense of it all, and get the latest commentary, we have published a series of articles on the inquiry and the fallout from the UK's intervention in Iraq.

People want me to say sorry for going to war – but I refuse to do that

Tony Blair convinced himself Iraq had WMDs – but intelligence 'did not justify' his certainty

The seven most important lines from the Iraq Inquiry

How to read the report in full

Intelligence on WMDs exaggerated to justify going to war, report finds

A timeline of the Iraq War and the disasters that ensued

What happened to the key players in the Iraq War?

Chilcot? Chaff? Dodgy dossier? an Iraq War glossary

Who is Sir John Chilcot, the ex-civil servant leading inquiry into the Iraq war?

The inside story of how Tony Blair led Britain to war in Iraq

Who were the 179 British soldiers who died during the Iraq War?

How many UK soldiers died in Iraq? And at what cost? The war in numbers

Tony Blair, the Iraq War, and the words of mass destruction that continue to deceive