Reuters: Blair at Chilcot

Tony Blair at the Chilcot Inquiry was always going to be a big deal so I’d asked Keith if I could come down and help Reuters cover it, imagining it to be an exciting time to be in their offices, which have incidentally moved to Aldgate.

I began the day, after little sleep, just writing up a quick story on Pete Waterman penning this year’s Eurovision entry. Keith and Mike were down at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre and Kylie had been outside reporting on the protests. I headed down there for the lunchtime break around half twelve to meet the protestors and hopefully the families of killed soldiers who had been watching Blair in the morning session.

The protest had none of the weight of previous anti-Iraq affairs. The numbers were relatively miniscule with many of those I spoke to wondering at the point of the Inquiry itself. Chris Nineham, who leads the Stop the War Coalition, told me throughout the day that support would build up and come to a crescendo when Blair left around 5pm so that the protestors could “confront Blair with the anger of the British people”. It never happened.

The media scrum tumbled over to Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, as she left for presumably a lunch break. She wasn’t impressed with Blair and gave us some good quotes. Unfortunately, with my second-rate shorthand and numbed fingers, I wasn’t able to get the best of these down.

Thankfully next to me was Paul Lewis from the Guardian, who I mentioned in my pieces about my time at that paper; he was the guy that broke and followed-up the death of Ian Tomlinson a few months ago. We went down to a café nearby and both emailed our quotes over to our editors. We swapped a couple and he gave me some advice about the Laurence Stern Fellowship at the Washington Post which I am keen to—but will not—get this year.

I’ve learned the importance of Twitter this past month. (I’m not talking about as grand a scale as with Haiti and Iran.) A lot of the journalists at Chilcot, notably Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard, update every few minutes and this was ideal for me outside the Inquiry needing to discuss with people their thoughts on what had been said. Paul Lewis was just as keen on updating the world and I was impressed that he cared so much about his followers!

I showed Paul my shoddy shorthand to which he told me that he didn’t know it at all before he pulled out a Dictaphone. I duly decided that it was exactly what I needed, regardless of how good my shorthand was. Keith then rang, from within the building, asking how I was getting on. We had a relatively long chat about the day’s events. I emailed him and Mike, from my phone, the quotes I had from demonstrators, Chris Nineham and Rose Gentle and said that I would continue to do so.



I then headed over to Victoria High Street to buy a Dictaphone and a phone charger. The protestors had thinned out hugely so I went back down to a fairly ornate building nearby (which housed the café Paul and I had been to) and charged my phone in the only place I could find plug points, in its lobby, until security chucked me out. That fifteen minutes of charge lasted the day thankfully.



Around 4pm things began livening up as the TV press came out in force for their end of day bulletins. The whole atmosphere became very agitated as everyone had had a long day—from Chilcot and his panel, to Blair, to the protestors who hadn’t made much ground
and of course the journalists who were on edge and freezing.

With the full moon ominously floating above the Houses of Parliament, the Inquiry ended for the day and people began leaving. I spoke to a few, and jumped in on a few TV interviews, with my new Dictaphone. The protestors at the exit didn’t help themselves or the press in that no one was keen to, or even able to, talk to the press with their noise. The TV crews were having the same problem. I spoke to a few but the most important was a TV interview I jumped in on half way through.

I asked the man being interviewed when he’d finished if he’d mind speaking to me and start by explaining why he had come down to the Inquiry. “The reason I’m here today is because my son, Major Matthew Bacon, was killed in Basra in 2005,” began Roger Bacon. He continued to tell me, very articulately, his thoughts on the day’s events and reasons for their importance.



As the day ended soon after, I called Keith to see if there was anything else he was after. He asked that I send over Roger’s quote as soon as, so I literally ran to another café—as it was way too cold to type out an email and not possible while holding a Dictaphone—to get the quote to Keith.

Keith and Mike used that quote and Rose’s in their two pieces on the day’s events. Keith seemed very pleased with my work over the day and it had certainly been worth going down for. It was one of my longest, but certainly among my most exciting, days in journalism so far.