pumpkinstrokemarrow

The first event was arriving at the doors to the conference centre to be greeted by a collection of people wearing the sort of thing the people in police firearms units wear - baseball caps and blue woolly sweaters. They were manning the bomb detectors, while the more diverse crew usually on duty at places of this sort waited in the background.

The second event was flashing my freedom pass (cut price Surrey variety) at the checkin. 'Haven't you got a passport or something like that?' the checkin operative asked me. But my freedom pass is a travel document issued by a local authority and as such is on the list of approved photographic identifiers. Oh, said the checkin operative, is it. OK then. What about your utility bill? And after presenting same, I am in.

The third event was discovering a minature version of the boxes you often find outside the sheds on industrial estates containing rat poison. This one was a neat white affair, carefully placed at the base of some ventilation panels. Such a smart modern building too. My neighbour, who used to work in a food processing industry, assured me that the thing was indeed a mouse trap. This discovery kept me amused until the off.

Very sober, maybe sombre, mainly male, establishment inquiry team. But maybe the best one can do. One needs establishment people who can be trusted to see most of the material and who know their way around the system. I was impressed how most of them could sit still doing nothing most of the time. Pretending to pay attention. Perhaps actually paying attention. (Which was not really necessary as they would always have the transcript afterwards). Something that I was very bad at when I used to go to meetings. Couldn't bear to sit there doing nothing, which meant that I was prone to say far too much and brass everyone else off. Only slightly better than falling asleep. Things got better when I started going to meetings where it was OK to sit behind one's laptop, provided that the chairman (very rarely a chairwomen or member of any other minority in this part of this particular outfit) did not catch one out by asking a question when you were clearly deep into something entirely other than his meeting and hadn't got a clue what he was on about. The Microsoft people we were working with at this time were very good at this game and were quite hard to catch out, even one got to play chairman and could have a go oneself.

Mr Blair very smartly turned out, had clearly retained the services of a superior couture person. Polished, if over rehearsed performance sustained through the day, despite appearing rather nervous. Being the centre of attention does help keep one going. He was very keen on the word 'calculus' which must have had dozens of outings during the day. The calculus being one of the things which changed beyond recognition after 9/11. But which did not seem to extend to calculating how many Iraqis might die as a result of intervention or thinking about what the rest of the Muslim world might think about it.

Other parts of the calculus seemed to go like this. Iraq was a rogue state and Saddam Hussein was very evil. Rogue states are rather unpredictable in their behaviour and are not too fussy about who they share their military equipment with. This rogue state had been very keen on getting lots of fancy military equipment and was not at all shy about using it, albeit mainly on its own people and albeit that sanctions had made continued procurement of such equipment difficult. This rogue state presented a threat to our way of life and it was our duty to stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies in order to do something about it. How would things look now if Saddam Hussein was still alive and well in the Iraqi chair? I was more impressed by calculus than I expected.

Despite the various flaws, such as the mistakes (to call them by no worse name) in the intelligence assessment, the failure to get proper UN authority for intervention, the failure of countries a lot nearer the scene of action to feel the need to intervene themselves and the failure of most of the governing classes of this country to exert effective restraint or check on their leader. He had decided to go for it and most of the rest was window dressing.

And the rather unsavoury sight of someone far more concerned to prove that he had been right all along, rather than to ponder about how things might have turned out better or to express any sorrow at the cost. Unsavoury in the same way as the failure of both him and his deputy to admit that there was anything that they might have done, perhaps with hindsight, to steer clear of the banking iceberg.

So I was left thinking that Mr Blair's position was not stupid, even if I thought it was mistaken. Also that he has become a fallen idol. Everybody rushing in to trample on him, without much regard to their own position at the time. (My own position at the time was more or less neutral with Mr Blair never having been any idol of mine).

Also that it is very hard to establish exactly how decisions are taken after this lapse of time. It seems quite likely to me that the people taking them might well not really understand the balance of forces which led to this or that decision. Perhaps never really articulated them at the time. But this inquiry was not a bad shot. Conducted by decent people, more or less in public and not dragging in lots of lawyers or dragging on for a very long time.

Also that we should not be in the business of chopping off our leaders' head when we decide that they have made a mistake, even a costly mistake, after the event. The idea of our indirect democracy is that we empower people to act for us. We share the responsibility for what they do. They embody our will. So while we might decline to re-elect them we do not punish them otherwise for what happened on their watch, that is to say our watch, short of flagrant abuse of power. And I am not sure that is what we have here.

Some time later, arrived home at Epsom to be greeted by a large team of police officers in the exit to the station. Including a slightly scruffy lady in the same baseball cap and blue sweater as the bomb detectors, but holding, instead, a large yellow labrador which I was asked not to pet, rather to walk past. Presumably so that he could sniff any illegal substance which I might have picked up in the big bad town. Not too delighted to be greeted in this way. At the very least the dog handler could have had a proper uniform on.