If there is to be another inquiry into the Iraq war, the (post-Blair) government won't want it looking too closely into the false case it presented to Parliament. Call for Ann Taylor, ex MP and now Baroness Taylor of Bolton.

Taylor was the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) during the dossier's drafting. Although the ISC is often wrongly described (and spun) as a parliamentary committee, it is in fact a function of the Cabinet Office and Taylor was appointed by Blair. She was asked, in this oversight capacity, to look at a late draft. She ended up making partisan drafting and presentational suggestions, including some that she gave directly to Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) chairman John Scarlett which have never seen the light of day.

When the row over the Gilligan/Kelly report broke out, Blair was suspiciously keen to say that an ISC inquiry would suffice. Neither he nor Taylor mentioned at that point that she had been on the inside of the process of drafting the dossier. What an honest person would have done was to declare this involvement and immediately disqualify herself from the inquiry. But Taylor went ahead and the ISC cleared the government of sexing-up the dossier and pulled its punches when Geoff Hoon blatantly misled it regarding the complaints made by the Defence Intelligence Staff.

When Blair set up the Butler Review, Taylor represented Labour and was reported in The Independent to be arguing strongly for criticism - particularly of Scarlett - to be toned down. Butler pulled his punches and Blair got off.

Scarlett also got off - the fall guy with the bungee rope. It appears that Taylor supplied this:

"We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for the current Chairman of the JIC, Mr Scarlett, to withdraw from his appointment as the next Chief of SIS. We greatly hope that he will not do so. We have a high regard for his abilities and his record." (Review Report Conclusion 38)

In return for services to the establishment, Taylor has now joined Hutton and Butler in the Lords. Meanwhile, Scarlett has been knighted.

So Scarlett takes the fall for Blair, Taylor saves Scarlett. Blair honours both of them.

Meanwhile, Butler appears to have found the words that Taylor talked him out of:

...neither the United Kingdom nor the United States had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons. The Prime Minister was disingenuous about that. The United Kingdom intelligence community told him on 23 August 2002 that,

"we ... know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988".

The Prime Minister did not tell us that. Indeed, he told Parliament only just over a month later that the picture painted by our intelligence services was "extensive, detailed and authoritative". Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him.

Butler also said:

I doubt whether any further inquiry is needed into the reasons why the United States and the United Kingdom went to war or even into the machinery of government questions... I think that we, and increasingly the British public, know what happened about that.

I agree that I don't think we need another establishment inquiry to conclude that everyone did their best in good faith in a difficult situation. We need the whole truth to come out.