Seven am arrival at Liverpool street station, off the early train from Stansted, an enormous folded shed on the Cambridge fens, a bacon and ketchup sandwich for breakfast, blue-grey sky out the main entrance, and the bone-drenching wet cold. “You gonna get on the esc’lator or you gonna stan’ vere all effing day?”

Ah, blessed blighty, I would kneel down and kiss the ground, if i weren’t sure I’d catch something.

Two weeks ago, the whole of Britain was shrouded in snow, an occurrence that made for a rare burst of enthusiasm in a dreary and trying time. London and the south-east had its first white Christmas for decades, and millions got to engage in a series of traditional British activities, such as the instant suspension of the entire public transport system, and people freezing to death in their cars during routine expeditions to buy a microwaved pastie.

In a country where most people would rather talk about the weather than have sex, the big snow, combining the thrill of the extreme with the tedium of meteorology, has kept people going for weeks. It was understandable that it led the news bulletins at the time, but it is still leading them now — “… it’s cold, but nothing like it was two weeks ago, remember that? Wooooh” etc.

But Britons don’t have a lot to marvel at, at the moment. The grey indifferent skies reflect the mood on earth. The recession has bit hard, with half a dozen familiar store chains going bust, leaving big gaps in the high street.

The most spectacular and disturbing was the UK arm of the Borders book chain, which had huge flagship stores in Oxford Street and Soho, and just went pffft last November. Not a trading out, not a winnowing down — the whole chain just shut, the stores are still empty, and only a printed A4 notice directing inquiries to the administrator’s office gives any clue they were ever there.

For many, the collapse of Borders was a sign that a recession was really here. Woolworths had collapsed a year earlier — but it was simply a dying brand, waiting for the final coup. Others, such as the CD/DVD chain Zavvi, had been idiotic enterprises from the start. But Borders was slacker pomo lifemode distilled to its very chai latte essence, part of the furniture of contemporary existence. The fact that it can go in a heartbeat was a chilling reminder that a lot of other things might be less secure than was once imagined.

So it is a time for national doubt and introspection. A time when Britons are being borne back into the past more than the future, with the Chilcot Inquiry into UK participation in the Iraq War providing revelation after revelation.

Today, Jack Straw took the stand, the first currently serving cabinet member so to do — and promptly landed his erstwhile leader, Mr Tony, even further in it.

Looking, as he always does, like a shifty Nazi dentist caught in Bolivia, and frantically manufacturing an alibi for the years 1939-45, Straw claimed that the Iraq War decision had been his toughest and most wrenching decision during the Blair years, and that he had had “a secret plan to keep the UK out of the war” — by offering support, but no troops, pretty much the formula Harold Wilson used to stay out of active engagement in Vietnam.

There’s no reason to disbelieve him, but his opposition to the Bush-Blair scheme to launch a full-scale occupation and invasion wasn’t enough to prompt him to resign, as Robin Cook had resigned. Nor was there any likelihood of that happening — Straw knew it would split the government down the middle.

The real revelation in his evidence was that he believed Blair’s correspondence with Bush over the months leading up to the war took regime change and full occupation as a given, and that its tone was tantamount to a confession of breaching international law, and conning the UN.

“Would you have written to Mr Bush in the same way?” Straw was asked, and after some attempt at dodging through very English-style semantics (“… Well no since he and I are different persons, we’d do things differently” thank you, Wittgenstein) conceded that no, the tone — i.e. bellicose sycophancy — wouldn’t have been his chosen mode.

Since Mr Tony is to return to give evidence to the inquiry, Straw has landed him right in it — giving him near-solitary responsibility for the decision to run with total war at all costs. The last person Blair could turn to as a co-conspirator is … Gordon Brown. Which may be why Brown announced late this evening that he had now agreed to appear at the inquiry, before rather than after the election.

Whether explicitly so or otherwise, the decision was clearly contingent upon what Straw said and the Cabinet underlings are now united in a common plan — sheet it all home to Mr Tony, one way or another. Day by day, Chilcot is starting to have a Watergateish feel to it — a legal-political process put in train due to irresistible pressure, and now drawing all behind it.

Little wonder, with the spectacle of not one, but two prime ministers fronting up to explain themselves to a legal panel — and one being conducted in what looks like a third-floor conference room at the Birmingham Radisson hotel, the day after the Toner Cartridge sales annual meeting had vacated — other political news gets not much of a look-in.

The Tories launched their election campaign last week, but you’d barely know it (which is very much how they like it). In the aftermath of war, in the draughty, half-empty high streets, Britons are focused for the moment on what went wrong, less on what comes next.

This is the first dispatch in an ongoing series by Guy Rundle from the UK as he documents the run-up to the British election.