Sir Tony Blair has admitted that he “may have been wrong” over the Iraq War.

The former Prime Minister’s remarks are the furthest that Sir Tony has gone to date in acknowledging the criticisms around the conflict.

He discussed his decision to involve British troops in the war, which lasted from 2003 to 2011, during a wide-ranging conversation about his beliefs with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Sir Tony, speaking to the Most Rev Justin Welby for an episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Archbishop Interviews, said his political focus had been “primarily domestic” but was increasingly characterised by foreign policy in the aftermath of the Sep 11 attacks.

“People would often say over Iraq or Afghanistan even, or other things, that I took the wrong decision, but you’ve got to do what you think is right,” he said.

Your own instinct

“Whether you are right or not is another matter but in those really big decisions you don’t know what all the different component elements are. And you’ve got to follow in the end your own instinct.

“Post-9/11 for me, I decided we had to be with America in this moment, you know, the whole issue to do with the use of chemical, biological weapons, development of nuclear weapons, and so on. And we had to take a strong, strong stance on it.

“Now I may have been wrong but, taking those decisions, I had to do what I thought was the right thing. And I think that’s a very strong obligation on the prime minister in these situations. In the end, you just don’t know how things are going to unfold but it’s your job to take the decision.”

After the publication of the Chilcot report in 2016, he expressed “sorrow, regret and apology” but went on to reject most of the criticisms made and said he would “never agree that people made their sacrifices in vain”.

He had used a CNN interview the previous year to apologise for “the fact the intelligence we received was wrong”, but added: “I find it hard to apologise for removing Saddam.”

Sir Tony, who received a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours list, said he was “very conscious” that his decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan “were going to affect millions of lives”.

An estimated 179 British troops died during the conflict, which was justified by intelligence that would ultimately be considered wrong around Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, developing weapons of mass destruction.

Sir Tony pointed to the scale of suffering in Syria as an example of how “inaction has consequences as well as action”, and said there was “no easy answer” when it came to crises such as the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in summer 2021.

‘Contrary to our interests’

While the interview was recorded before the most recent escalation in the war between Russia and Ukraine, Sir Tony said: “You can say it doesn’t matter to people in Britain whether Ukraine is taken over by Russia tomorrow or not in their immediate lives.

“But I think that in the long term, it’s massively contrary to our interests to have an independent sovereign country on the doorstep of Europe essentially invaded and taken over.”

Elsewhere in his conversation with the Archbishop, Sir Tony reflected on how he felt he had become a “different type of politician” during his decade spent in Downing Street.

“In 1997 I was basically anxious to please all of the people all of the time. But your obligation, your duty, is to do what you think is right, because anything else means that you’re not really a leader in the proper sense.”