Revelations about the invasion of Iraq just keep on coming. Sir John Scarlett told the inquiry into the invasion that intelligence indicating that battlefield munitions could be made ready in 45 minutes were misinterpreted by the government as referring to chemical or biological weapons - WMDs.

Now Tony Blair has disclosed that he would have thought it right to invade Iraq even if he’d known that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

I would be the first to admit that Saddam Hussein was a very unpleasant dictator (although this didn’t stop the US government from backing him for many years) but the UK and US broke international law in the most flagrant way. Their actions will be used as an excuse to annex attractive neighbouring countries by despots the world over. British security services warned the government before the invasion that it would increase rather than decrease the terrorist threat to the UK and there is every reason to believe that they were right.

This has been one of the most disreputable foreign escapades since the days of Cecil Rhodes.