Who knows what proportion of Guardian readers made it to the anti-war march of February 2003; one can imagine the organisers claiming two-thirds, and the police denying it was more than a quarter. There are, of course, no real figures, but it was certainly A Lot. Without denigrating our own tribe, however, what made the occasion was not the reliably anguished middle classes or leftist malcontents. It was all those pillars of Middle England who had never demonstrated before, and yet boarded trains in the commuter belt to make for the capital.
A decade ago, Tony Blair was lifting his sparkling rhetoric to new heights, whipping up fears of an imminent threat, claiming to hear echoes of Munich, and encouraging dreams of a post-Saddam world where tyranny was in retreat. As the forgotten and fraudulent second dossier was being foisted on journalists, he was perfecting the lines that would soon carry a belligerent majority in the Commons, lamely indulged by Iain Duncan Smith's excuse for an opposition. Most politicians, and too much of the media, swallowed it all wholesale. The public, however, smelled a rat. While the drumbeats of war – and the impulse to rally behind troops – briefly produced pro-invasion majorities once the fighting began, during the long buildup the polls were consistently against. The London marchers really did speak for England, or at least thinking England.
Mr Blair once fancied he would be absolved by history, but after years of civil war Iraq eventually fell into the nasty sectarian grip of Nouri al-Maliki. Many accounts of the war remain plausible. Those sceptical Tories who always like to say "it'll never work" about any grand project have seen nothing to prove them wrong. Neither have liberals, who warned that brushing the UN aside would produce a lawless world, and not – as Mr Blair promised – a new order, with justice for Palestine and many other splendid things. Radical leftists who always denounced a "war of imperial aggression" on America's part still have a cogent case; it needs tweaking only to the extent that this proved a case of imperial overstretch. It thus makes sense that the two-to-one anti-war majority uncovered by our Guardian/ICM poll holds right across the spectrum.
But there are interpretations that will no longer wash – that Iraq was a war fought for the mass of Iraqis, or a campaign to create a more secure world. It will be years before a British leader can again run the (occasionally necessary) line about knowing something we don't, and – with the Chilcot inquiry still weirdly silent – more damage to trust in authority could still be done. But this pales next to the damage that was, directly and indirectly, unleashed on the Iraqi people. With the passage of time, the judgment of those who took to the streets against the rush to war only looks wiser.
