Opponents of the war complain that the questioning of Tony Blair by the Chilcot panel wasn't very testing. They're right. I could have posed him tougher questions and I'm no lawyer. For example, Blair went back on what he'd said to Fern Britton in December - that he still would have wanted Britain to support a US invasion had he known there were no WMD in Iraq. Others treated this statement as damning of Blair, when it isn't. But the Chilcot panel might have probed, and put him to the trouble of explaining why he'd said it and had now decided to go back on that. But they failed to.
At the same time, most of those grumbling about the fact that Blair wasn't sufficiently challenged in the questioning of the panel plainly think the latter isn't adopting a robust enough anti-war perspective - as if Blair should be on trial. You don't see any of these commentators regretting the failure of the Chilcot panel to tax other witnesses, witnesses whom the critics find more congenial, with tougher questions framed by assumptions more favourable to military intervention. Given that this is an inquiry and not a trial, there's no reason for those critics not to want vigorous questioning of all witnesses. Strangely, however, they don't.
