A routine lie

Gordon Brown says that it is down to Sir John Chilcot to decide whether the Iraq inquiry is to be held in public or behind closed doors. How was it then that Brown’s initial announcement was that the inquiry would be held in private? I doubt that Sir John phoned him up to tell him. Nobody can believe that Brown will leave the decision to a civil servant in practice, but he assumes that he can transfer to Sir John the opprobrium that accompanies the “in camera” decision. The saddest thing of all is that nobody in the media bothers to call Brown a liar. It is taken as read.