Tony Blair's testimony to the Chilcot inquiry on Iraq: which words did he use?

Tony Blair's testimony on Iraq electrified the nation. What did he say - and how often did he say it?
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Wordle of Tony Blair's Iraq inquiry testimony View larger picture
Wordle of Tony Blair's Iraq inquiry testimony. Click image for full size Wordle

It was the TV political event of the year. Former prime minister Tony Blair appearing before the Iraq war inquiry headed by Lord Chilcot. For an entire day last week, Blair answered - or not, depending on your view - the panel's questioning.

The full transcript has just been released by the inquiry, as a pdf (obviously - when will official bodies stop relying on pdfs?). And what is clear is that some themes mattered to him more than others. Thanks to the ever-wonderful Wordle.net, this is what that testimony looked like.

We've extracted just the words that Tony Blair used - not the questions - so you can really get a sense of his thinking. But, just to make it easy for you, we've also got the full transcript of the hearing as a Google doc.

There's a list of his top 200 words below too - see the attached spreadsheet. And a selection of them are summarised below.

Take a look and see if you can do something with them.

Download the data


DATA: download the full list as a spreadsheet
Full text of the Blair transcript

Can you do something with this data?

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Summary tables

Key words from Blair's testimony

Word
Frequency
Think 305
People 121
Actually 110
America/ America 70
Saddam 67
Iraq 65
Resolution 59
Reason 52
Want 46
Military 46
September 42
UN 35
Sanction 34
President 34
Force 31
Iran 30
Regime 28
Cabinet 26
Threat 26
WMD 24
Security 20
Breach 19
Bush 18
Weapon 17
Respect 16
Blix 15
Intelligence 14
Dossier 13
Troop 12
Inspector 12

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Wordle of Tony Blair's Iraq inquiry testimony

Wordle of Tony Blair's Iraq inquiry testimony. Click image for full size Wordle