The Iraq Inquiry, also referred to as the Chilcot Inquiry after its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, was a British public inquiry into the United Kingdom's role in the Iraq War. The inquiry was announced on 15 June 2009 by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with an initial announcement that proceedings would take place in private, a decision which was subsequently reversed after receiving criticism in the media and the House of Commons.

The inquiry was pursued by a committee of Privy Counsellors with broad terms of reference to consider the UK's involvement in Iraq from mid-2001 to July 2009. It covered the run-up to the conflict, the subsequent military action and its aftermath with the purpose to establish the way decisions were made, to determine what happened and to identify lessons to ensure that in a similar situation in future, the UK government is equipped to respond in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country. The open sessions of the inquiry commenced on 24 November 2009 and concluded on 2 February 2011.

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He resigned from all of these positions in June 2007.

Blair was elected Leader of the Labour Party in the leadership election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his predecessor, John Smith. Under his leadership, the party used the phrases "New Labour" and "New Socialism" to define its policy, and moved away from its support of state socialism since the 1960s and created a new version of the ethical socialism that was last pursued by Clement Attlee. Critics of Blair claim that "New Labour" did not adhere to socialism as claimed, and that it effectively advocated capitalism. Blair subsequently led Labour to a landslide victory in the 1997 general election. At 43 years old, he became the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. In the first years of the New Labour government, Blair's government implemented a number of 1997 manifesto pledges, introducing the minimum wage, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and carrying out devolution, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (Arabic: صدام حسين عبد المجيد التكريتي Ṣaddām Ḥusayn ʿAbd al-Maǧīd al-Tikrītī; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organisation Ba'ath Party – Iraq Region, which espoused ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup, later referred to as the 17 July Revolution, that brought the party to long-term power of Iraq.

As vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and at a time when many groups were considered capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam created security forces through which he tightly controlled conflict between the government and the armed forces. In the early 1970s, Saddam nationalized oil and other industries. The state-owned banks were put under his control, leaving the system eventually insolvent mostly due to the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, and UN sanctions. Through the 1970s, Saddam cemented his authority over the apparatuses of government as oil money helped Iraq's economy to grow at a rapid pace. Positions of power in the country were filled with Sunnis, a minority that made up only a fifth of the population.

Andrew Stuart MacKinlay (born 24 April 1949) is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Thurrock from 1992 until he stepped down at the 2010 general election.

Andrew Mackinlay was educated variously at St Joseph's School, Wembley [1]; Our Lady Immaculate Primary School, Tolworth; the Salesian College (grammar school, now called Salesian School) on Highfield Road in Chertsey; and Kingston College.

He worked for ten years from 1965 as a committee clerk with Surrey County Council and from 1975 until his election to parliament he was a union official with the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO). He joined NALGO in 1965 and the Labour Party the following year. He was elected as a councillor in 1971 in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames and served for seven years.

He stood unsuccessfully for Labour in the following elections:

In 2003, he famously described Dr. David Kelly as "chaff" during Dr. Kelly's appearance before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. His question was:

Clare Short (born 15 February 1946) is a British politician, and a member of the Labour Party. She was the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood from 1983 to 2010; for most of this period she was a Labour Party MP, but she resigned the party whip in 2006 and served the remainder of her term as an Independent. She stood down as a Member of Parliament at the 2010 general election. Short was Secretary of State for International Development in the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair from 3 May 1997 until her resignation from that post on 12 May 2003.

Clare Short was born in Birmingham, England in 1946 to Irish Catholic parents from County Armagh, Northern Ireland.^{[dead link]} She would later be supportive of peaceful Sinn Féin initiatives, although she was never a supporter of IRA violence, some of the worst of which was inflicted in a 1974 bombing of her home city of Birmingham.

Short was briefly married to a fellow student at 18 after she had a child at 17. Their son was given up for adoption, and did not make contact with his birth mother until 1996. She discovered that her son was a staunch Conservative who worked in the financial sector in the City of London, and that she was a grandmother of Toby's three children, Sophie, Alice and Emily and had a daughter in law, Annie. Her second marriage, to former Labour minister Alex Lyon, turned to tragedy: he suffered from Alzheimer's disease and died in 1993. Short is a cousin of Canadian actor/comic Martin Short (their fathers were brothers). Her uncle, Patrick Short, was known as the proprietor of Shorts Bar in South Armagh.