Former No 10 press chief took sustenance from Psalm 56 before appearance at Chilcot inquiry:

Alastair Campbell once famously said: “We don’t do God.” But, as he turned up at the Iraq inquiry yesterday morning, he apparently took moral sustenance from a passage in the Bible. He has written about it today on his blog.

I am amazed … how many people, though they know I don’t do God, sent me passages from the Bible. As I walked through the media scrum on the way in, and on the way out, and listened to some of the overblown and agenda-driven commentary, I was glad to have read in the morning an email with Psalm 56 attached … ‘What can mortal man do to me?’ it asks. ‘All day long they twist my words, they are always plotting to harm me. They conspire, they lurk, they watch my steps, eager to take my life … ‘ I never detected a death plot among the British media, but the rest of it sums up the Westminster lobby to a tee.

It’s a very long blogpost and, as you’d expect, it contains the usual diatribe about the media. But it’s worth reading, not least because he describes how he prepared for the hearing and he makes an argument about how the government should defend its record. On the Bible, he says he agrees with Neil Kinnock, who said it was a shame he was an atheist because “some of the best lines are in the good book”.