Truth.

Upon his emergence from a day of giving evidence at the Chilcot Inquiry, Tony Blair was inevitably heckled by the families of some of those who died in Iraq.

Amongst the accusations levelled at him were that Blair never apologised for his part in instigating the war, that he had disgraced himself, and that he had failed to tell the truth. The latter of those is the most interesting to me.

There are some situations in which 'the truth' is seemingly not a matter of debate such is its self-evidence but, as we think about the paths which lead us towards that conclusion, matters inevitably become more complicated:

• The Tories won the General Election with an overall majority of 37 seats.

Such a broad statement effaces all the detail from a reasonably competitive election night. It serves as a (very) poor opening paragraph to a news story, in the sense that no word is extraneous - every single one earns its keep. It does, though, convey a fact which is indisputable, at least assuming that the Tories had won the General Election with an overall majority of 37.

• A 37-seat majority? That was a pretty bad night for the Labour Party!

The truth of the above statement is somewhere in between 'a pretty bad night' and 'could have been a lot worse.' Which of these eventually holds true in 'the public consciousness' depends on, amongst other things, the political persuasion of academics and opinion-formers, and the long view gained when events have been allowed to settle for ten years, twenty years....

• The deficit would've been less than 20 seats if Gordon Brown hadn't apparently mis-spelt the surname 'Janes' as 'James' in a letter to the family of another deceased soldier back in November 2009. That was a public relations disaster - you don't recover from that in this day and age.

Now we are guilty of extrapolating a macroscopic fact from an event which, although newsworthy for a good couple of weeks, is hardly enough to be significant in itself as the outcome of an election. We are guilty, also, of assuming that the outpourings of the media are in any way influential. Any number of other government decisions, or opposition decisions, may, or may not have, swung the result one way or the other.

There exists, then, at the intersection of human minds and recorded history, upon a river of supposition littered with ideas that died almost before they were born, acts of genius and utter stupidity half-planned or half-carried out, that are the unspoken truth behind the true, less true, and unverifiable statements written above.

That is: there exists an unidentifiable truth behind any situation of complexity which it is never possible to resolve. The British legal system know this - with 'on the balance of probabilities' and 'beyond all reasonable doubt' being the standards they apply.

Like looking for the truth of his own death in Umberto Eco's infinite library, Blair could well have stumbled upon the.... the.... the.... vectors..... all of them.... which combine over and over again to produce one version of the truth - not necessarily the most logical, or the one that we want it to be, but the one which (there will be another blog about this at some point) proves itself the fittest, in the manner of a Darwinian imperative.