'Still something to learn' about media interviews

The remark was made as he tried to qualify what he told the TV

presenter about toppling Saddam Hussein.

In an interview screened last month, the former Prime Minister said he thought it would have been right to remove Saddam even if he had known beforehand that he had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

But appearing at the Chilcot Inquiry today he insisted he had not been changing the basis for the invasion of Iraq.

Mr Blair appeared in an edition of Fern Britton Meets..., which had primarily been about the faiths of prominent people.

He was asked: "If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?"

Mr Blair replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him."

He went on: "Obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat. I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons still in charge but it's incredibly difficult."

But speaking at yesterday's inquiry he said of the BBC1 interview: "I didn't use the words 'regime change' in that interview and I didn't mean in any sense to change the basis.

"Obviously, all I was saying was you cannot describe the nature of the threat in the same way if we knew then what we know now.

"It was in no sense a change of position."