Judgment and trust are central features of modern government and politics. This was highlighted in the decisions made by the British and United States governments to wage war against Iraq over the last two years.
Yesterday's report by the Butler inquiry into the role of intelligence in Britain's decision-making on the war reinforces the point. Its finding that there is little or no evidence of deliberate distortion, culpable negligence or of policy interfering with intelligence throws the issue back onto the basic assessment of whether the war was justified. The substantive question of whether Iraq had indeed weapons of mass destruction is addressed much less in its terms of reference and conclusions than these procedural aspects of intelligence.
In his robust defence of his government yesterday the prime minister, Mr Blair, took his cue from the report, whose conclusions he accepted in full. He repeated his conviction that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction on which he justified the decision to go to war last year for the British people. They will now have to decide whether this was a foolish political judgment and whether they can trust any future calls to arms based, potentially, on similarly flawed intelligence assessments.
Mr Blair is anxious to shift public attention away from Iraq and towards health and education, which feature so prominently in the spending plans announced this week. But the war keeps returning to dog him - and looks as if it will continue to do in the long election campaign now getting under way, with voting widely expected next year. A parallel process is under way in the United States, where the Senate Intelligence Committee reached similar conclusions about the flawed information on alleged weapons of mass destruction last week.
Mr Blair's credibility is certainly affected by this report, as the Conservative leader, Mr Michael Howard, said yesterday in the House of Commons. Such failings are relative, however. There is little or no indication of a surge towards the Conservatives arising from this report or from the Iraq issue more generally. Mr Blair has not been deeply wounded by it, as could be seen from his Commons performance yesterday. Suggestions that there will be a party heave against him if he loses two by-elections today receded after it. So did the likelihood that Mr Gordon Brown would initiate a leadership contest, however tempted he is to do so.
Mr Blair looks safer in office after one of the most difficult episodes of his political career. Partly this is because of a conjuring trick so characteristic of British establishment modes of governing and exemplified in this report. Nobody is blamed for the intelligence failures and its terms of reference precluded a close examination of the political responsibility for the decision to go to war on false premises. Political judgment, trust and credibility are the longer term casualties of this affair.