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A letter sent by Tony Blair to George Bush that is “critical” to the Iraq Inquiry has gone missing from official White House records, it has been reported.The publication of secret correspondence between the UK and US administrations in the build-up to the Iraq War has become a major stumbling block for Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the 2003 invasion.While the Cabinet Office has said privately that it wants to release as many of the Blair-Bush communications as possible, there is one letter which lawyers at the White House say they have “not been able to locate”.The letter, which was quoted from directly in Andrew Rawnsley’s book The End of the Party following interviews with David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy advisor, and Sir Christopher Meyer, then Britain’s ambassador to the US, predates the March 2003 Commons vote on whether Britain was to go to war.In its opening sentence, Mr Blair is said to have told the US President: “You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I'm with you.” The letter was reportedly hand-delivered by Manning to Bush’s national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.Yet according to reports in the Mail on Sunday, a British source involved in the ongoing efforts to get the Bush-Blair records released said: “The lawyers are taking months to evaluate the letters and decide whether to release them.“However, they claim not to have been able to locate the ‘with you whatever’ letter.”
