Blair: I was clear over joining US against Iraq

Tony Blair said today that he had always been clear that he would join the Americans if it came to military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Making his long-awaited appearance before the Iraq Inquiry, the former prime minister denied he struck a private deal with President George Bush 11 months before the invasion to go to war.

He said he had always been clear publicly that the Iraqi dictator had to be confronted over his supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but he insisted that he had left open how it should be done.

Mr Blair confirmed that he discussed the issue of Iraq when he met Mr Bush for private, one-to-one talks at his Texas ranch at Crawford in April 2002 but he insisted that they did not get into “specifics”.

“What I was saying – I was not saying this privately incidentally, I was saying it in public – was ’We are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat’.

“The one thing I was not doing was dissembling in that position. How we proceed in this is a matter that was open. The position was not a covert position, it was an open position.

“We would be with them in dealing with this threat and how we did that was an open question, and even at that stage I was raising the issue of going to the UN.”

But pressed on what he thought Mr Bush took from the meeting, he went further, saying: “I think what he took from that was exactly what he should have taken, which was if it came to military action because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him.”

He said that the “calculus of risk” relating to Saddam’s supposed WMD changed “dramatically” following the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers the previous year.

“The fact is, force is always an option. What changed after September 11 was that if necessary – and there was no other way of dealing with this threat – we were going to remove him,” he said.