Truest statement of the week

The first thing to say is that I noticed Tony Blair in his evidence to you, kept saying "I had to decide, I had to decide", and, indeed, that's how he behaved, but that is not meant to be our system of government. It is meant to be a Cabinet system, because, of course, if you had a presidential system, you would put better checks into the legislature. So we were getting -- his view that he decided, him and his mates around him, the ones that he could trust to do whatever it was he decided, and then the closing down of normal communications and then this sort of drip feed of little chats to the Cabinet. Now, that's a machinery of government question and there is a democratic question, but, also, there is a competence of decision-making question, because I think, if you do things like that, and they are not challenged and they are not thought through, errors are made, and I think we have seen the errors.

-- Clare Short, testifying to the Iraq Inquiry in London last Tuesday.