Intermission

Jack Straw gave evidence yesterday to the Chilcott inquiry over his role in the run-up to the Iraq war. Writing exclusively for Chuckles, he attempts today to justify his actions to the British public, the people of Iraq, his conscience and his god.

Did I have doubts about Britain's involvement in the Iraq war? I absolutely did. Could I have stopped Britain from going to war in Iraq? I'm certain of it. Did I do everything within my power to rein in Tony's rampant ambitions? Sort of.

At the upper echelons of government, one is sometimes forced to make extremely difficult decisions, decisions which - it is true - may well carry considerable human costs. Our unenviable task is to balance this cost against the perceived benefits of a particular course of action for the greater good. Sometimes we have no better option than the lesser or least of two or more evils.

This is the position in which I found myself in the days leading up to the invasion. On the one hand: go to war, invade another country in an almost unequivocal contravention of international law, and for the remainder of our days bear some of the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. On the other: jeopardise my Cabinet career.

It was not a decision I took lightly, but in the end I believe I made the right choice. Like Christ at the pinnacle of the temple, I reasoned that I could better serve my purpose by not jumping, rather stepping quietly and humbly aside as Tony's unstoppable human-meat grinder barrelled past.

I have lived with this decision for nearly seven years, and to say that I've come to terms with it would be to imply - falsely, I might add - that some crisis of conscience followed in its wake. I will say categorically that there was nothing to come to terms with. I sleep well enough. In my dreams I'm tortured by their faces, contorted into almost impossible expressions of uncomprehending terror, but the sleeping itself is otherwise satisfactory.

Should I reasonably be expected to live in torment for the consequences of my actions, perhaps descend slowly into madness until I am found, years from now, decomposing in an anonymous council flat, several months after my lonely death, the words 'I HEAR THEM' scrawled six feet high on the wall in my own excrement?

Without wishing to be callous, people die. Every day, all over the world, people die in circumstances of unimaginable horror. Even in this blessed land of ours, this land of peace and prosperity, you yourself may return home from work one evening, somehow not noticing - perhaps you have a cold - the strong smell of gas as you flick the light switch in the hall. As the leaking gas ignites, spinning shards of metal or glass, maybe even a broken piece of crockery, might fly straight for your neck, passing through unimpeded and decapitating you in less than a second. It may take several more seconds for you to die, your clouding eyes staring out from your severed head in bafflement at your own corpse.

It could be that your soft belly catches the full force of the blast at its source, your guts exploding from your back as your spine shatters into thousands of tiny off-white splinters, the rest of your body following suit almost immediately, splattering your whole against the kitchen wall.

Should Franz San Galli, inventor of the radiator, therefore be held to account for his part in the development of modern central heating - and consequently for yours and countless others' grisly deaths? A man stands in Tentelevskoe Cemetery, unzips his fly and exposes his penis, holding it gently between thumb and forefinger. Seconds later, a magnificent arc of golden urine bursts from its tip and splashes, a good metre away from his feet, on to the ground above San Galli's remains. Is this man acting reasonably?

I shall leave you to make up your own minds. To mine, my hands are clean. I know they are clean because I scrub them obsessively, every morning and every night, for hours on end.