Norman Baker: Our democracy demands that Tony Blair is brought to book for Iraq betrayal

It will also be a novel experience for Mr Blair in another way too – he will be required to turn up for a public event without being able to charge a five-figure sum for the privilege.

For since his retirement from Downing Street, the accumulation of as much money as possible has been his driving force. And it has not

simply been the American lecture circuit, a traditional route, that has attracted his attention.

From combining his state- funded role as peace envoy to the Middle East with his lucrative work for JP Morgan (in May meeting the education Minister of the United Arab Emirates in the former role on the same day as meeting the UAE finance minister in the latter) to the opening of a methanol factory in Azerbaijan, home to the very unpleasant

dictatorship of Ilham Aliyev, there has been no activity beneath his dignity, no dictator too corrupt or no business too seedy, just so long as the price is right.

He would have us believe that he undertakes valuable international work in the positions he has, but the reality is that these are by and large simply ego-boosting titles that enable him to swan around the world,

mingling with the rich and famous, an activity it seems he never tires of.

It is beyond satire that as one of the two key men behind the Iraq war of 2003, he could have been made Middle East peace envoy.

Perhaps that explains why he spends such a large proportion of his time in the region holed up in his luxury hotel suite in Jerusalem.

In the meantime, he runs up a bill for the British taxpayer of over 600,000 a year, plus doubtlessly significant security protection costs, and for what?

Parliamentary answers I have received reveal he has, for example, not met a single Minister in our Department for International Development since his appointment.

It is all a shameless, and shameful, way for a former Prime Minister to behave. Tony Blair has become an embarrassment to Britain.

There is no doubt that the political weather has turned against him and this will serve to make tomorrow's appearance even more uncomfortable than it would anyway have been. Never have a Prime Minister's ratings

fallen so far and so fast since leaving office.

He is the political equivalent of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. No

wonder he needs a ring of steel to protect him at Chilcot.

But it will be especially uncomfortable because slowly but surely, the chickens are coming home to roost, and he has nowhere left to hide.

I spent a year looking at the events that led up to the Iraq war (including the highly suspicious death of David Kelly, which is clearly unfinished business but beyond the scope of this article), and was horrified by what I discovered.

It was obvious that Tony Blair had decided to support George W Bush in an invasion of Iraq at least 18 months before it occurred, and his political efforts thereafter were designed not to disarm Saddam

Hussein, let alone avoid war, but to create a public and parliamentary mood that would support a war.

Many fell for it (though I am proud that every single Lib Dem MP voted against), prepared to give the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt. They were betrayed, as this nation was betrayed.

The official advice to Tony Blair in July 2002, some nine months before the invasion, and recorded in an official Downing Street minute, said

this: "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

None of that stopped the hyping up of the threat, the dodgy dossiers, strengthened in their language by Alastair Campbell or, in one case, entirely lifted from the internet by him, or the claim the press were encouraged to print that we were 45 minutes from doom, a claim that

went uncorrected afterwards, even though it referred, at best, to battlefield weapons, never to a direct threat to this country.

That qualification too was removed from the dossier, as Tony Blair and his inner circle changed the question marks of the security services into the exclamation marks of the politicians.

Researching this in detail, I couldn't believe that Blair could have got away with it. Lord Hutton, in his inquiry, if it can be called that, concluded to widespread astonishment that the Government was guilty of nothing and it was all the fault of the BBC.

Former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler, in his inquiry, did get somewhere near the truth but wrote it in such impenetrable civil service-speak that nobody understood what he was saying. Chilcot looks like avoiding both those pitfalls.

His team's questions have been well informed and highly relevant, which may explain the rumours that Tony Blair has been up to 3am to prepare for tomorrow's examination.

In taking us to war in 2003, Tony Blair misled Parliament and misled the nation. For that he needs to be brought to book, certainly in terms of this episode, but also to ensure no Prime Minister ever again thinks they can behave as Tony Blair did and get away with it.

Our democracy demands no less.

Norman Baker is a Liberal Democrat MP.