TONY BLAIR denies responsibility for constant delays in completing the Chilcot inquiry, but he has always had a problem with putting his hand up.

Whether it is Blair personally, his lawyers or accomplices who have elected to spin out proceedings by raising one pretext or another, the inquiry, which has already lasted six years and will take another, is a prime example of the political and legal Establishment pulling together to frustrate public sentiment.

Blair took Britain into the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003, honouring his pledge to George W Bush the previous year.

It beggars belief that the people of this country, and especially the families of the service personnel who died at his behest, should still be waiting over 12 years later for our rulers to cough up some elements of the truth concerning the real reasons for this conflict.

Bush made no secret of his determination to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the once extremely close US and British ally who had become an irritant to Washington.

As a lawyer, Blair understood that stating this openly would be problematic under international law, so his case for war accused Baghdad of possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in breach of UN security council motions.

Both Bush and Blair stressed that the Iraqi dictator had used poison gas against his own citizens in the Kurdish region in 1988, but neither mentioned that this had happened against a background of Saddam’s unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, which Washington and London actively supported.

Indeed the US government went so far as to blame the gas attacks on Tehran.

There was no call for action to be taken against Iraq for the atrocities visited on defenceless Kurdish civilians.

Saddam was certainly a murderous bastard, but he was our murderous bastard. That was the US line until he miscalculated, invading the corrupt emirate of Kuwait in the belief that the administration of George Bush Snr had signalled tolerance of his expansionism.

The Iraqi people paid a heavy price for his adventurism, suffering a vicious 12-year UN sanctions regime that more than doubled the child mortality rate.

Hundreds of thousands perished, leading one US politician to speak of “infanticide masquerading as policy.”

The United Nations sent teams of weapons inspectors into Iraq charged with detecting and destroying chemical and biological weapons and their means of delivery.

This programme was carried out successfully by 1995, as Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, reported in 2002, but his testimony was misrepresented by Blair who needed Parliament to believe — or affect to believe — his lies that Iraq was armed to the teeth with WMD.

The Bush-Blair axis forced the evacuation of new teams of UN weapons inspectors in early 2003 by rigid adherence to the March invasion date decided the previous year.

Criminal conspiracy to prevent a peaceful resolution of the WMD “crisis” and to launch a war that would claim the lives of up to a million Iraqis and prepare the ground for the growth of the Islamic State (Isis) death cult should not be the subject of interminable polite legal diplomacy conducted by Chilcot.

The Morning Star has always insisted that the correct forum for Blair and his closest associates to answer for their deeds is the International Criminal Court.

Punting the enormity of the Iraq invasion into a genteel “lesson-learning” exercise, as Gordon Brown did, was a betrayal of the war criminals’ victims — the people of Iraq and the service personnel directed to invade and die there.

Whatever soggy long-winded compromise eventually emerges from Chilcot, Blair and company cannot escape the guilty verdict of history.