The military and the civil service both asked for more clarity on whether force would be legal. Goldsmith did so but failed to provide written advice explaining his decision. Sir John Scarlett

Fiona immediately got in touch with them, and for the last six years has been part of a campaign for equal civil partnerships, which has meant we and many other couples and families can enjoy the same rights and protections as the married, but without the cultural baggage of marriage. Williams, who was Campbell’s counterpart at the Foreign Office and was also a former political editor at the Daily Mirror, is quoted in the Chilcot report offering various media strategies.Eliza Manningham-Buller leaving the Chilcot inquiry after giving evidence in 2010. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images The report notes that “it was the responsibility of the chiefs of the defence staff and the chief of joint operations to ensure that appropriate rules of engagement were set, and preparations made to equip commanders on the ground to deal with it effectively. They should have ensured that those steps were taken.” On a long drive to Scotland a few years ago we happened to hear another unmarried couple, Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld, being interviewed on the radio about their legal challenge to the UK government about this injustice.

Straw contends the options had been exhausted. He also said that he did not take at face value the intelligence claiming there had been weapons of mass destruction. Houghton, noting in 2006 the problems with equipment, said: “Do not look for too big a dividend this year … The reality is that Warrior [an armoured vehicle] gives us confidence and a protective edge … The boys can manage Snatch - just: but they have no inherent confidence in it.” Alastair CampbellOur politics is a mess. We have leaders who can't or shouldn't be allowed to lead. We endure governments that lie, and seek to undermine our democratic values. And we are confronted with policies that serve the interests of the privileged few. It's no surprise that so many of us feel frustrated, let down and drawn to ask, 'But what can I do?' Well, now Tony Blair's consigliere, Alastair Campbell, has stepped forward, after editing down more than two million words into a still-formidable volume, to tell us that in all those years when the author was firing off abusive letters to television stations, tearing a strip off inadequate journalists and threatening elected members of the Labour party with the termination of their halting careers, he was secretly suffering agonies of self-doubt, wondering whether the price he and his family were paying was far too high, and despairing daily of how he might ever again lead what he calls a normal life. At a Celia Johnson-ish moment in their second election campaign, he and Tony Blair stop in a Dorset café by the sea. "Don't you sometimes wish," says Blair, apparently scripted by Noël Coward, "we had a normal life like the people who live over there?" You could fairly say of Campbell's period of tenure that it only accelerated a dance of death between media and government that had been going on in Britain since Suez. And yet the attitudes that dance has fostered - pathological arrogance on the part of the press, neurotic secretiveness from government - have done little to advance the democratic process. The Blair Years is essentially the account of an administration that, imagining it could control the domestic agenda, found instead that events from abroad could overwhelm it. The virtues of pride, aggression and solidarity forged in the heat of New Labour's difficult evolution proved pitifully inadequate to contain a neoconservative ally far more ruthless than itself. Facing the challenging question of how the west - and more importantly, the world - should deal with the murderous regime in Iraq, it was no longer enough to be on-message. Sadly for the lives of so many, it turns out you had to be right as well.