I just read the transcript of the evidence given by John Chilcot, head of the Iraq Inquiry, to parliament's foreign affairs committee on 4 February. I was staggered to read in a footnote that they are going to publish 1,500 British government documents alongside the Chilcot Report itself (which will be hundreds of pages long).
The report refers to 7,000 government documents. They looked at 150,000 documents. These are big numbers.
The MPs on the foreign affairs committee tried to get Chilcot to say that his former colleagues in the civil service had delayed the publication of the report by dragging their feet over the declassification of relevant secret documents. Chilcot (who was permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office for most of the 1990s) avoided saying anything critical of the government, the civil service or the decision makers from 2003 who are going to be criticised in the report.
