Military to Corbyn : Don't apologise, it'll mean we did something wrong

Colonel Richard Kemp is turning purple at the thought of the next Labour leader issuing a formal apology for the party taking Britain into the illegal and disastrous Iraq War -

"[Corbyn] would not only be telling those troops and their families their sacrifice was for nothing but also their actions were illegal, immoral and dishonourable."

Rubbish.  The troops were bravely doing their duty and following instructions, which ultimately came from a government run by the Labour party. Indeed, one of the groups Corbyn will presumably be apologising to is the families of British soldiers killed during the invasion, who were every bit as much victims of Blair's illegal actions as the Iraqi dead were.

"Or will Mr Corbyn be apologising for the deaths of perhaps 219,000 Iraqi civilians killed following the 2003 invasion?  Maybe he is unaware that these tragic people were not killed by British or US forces..."

Woah, woah, woah.  Is the colonel really saying that NONE of those civilians were killed by British or US forces?  I think he might find that claim rather difficult to sustain.  And of course the more pertinent point is this : regardless of who killed each individual, how many of those civilians would still be alive now if Iraq had never been illegally invaded in the first place?

I'd suggest that the colonel start to reconcile himself to an apology.  It's been several years since Nick Clegg denounced the invasion as illegal while speaking on behalf of the government at Prime Minister's Questions.  At around the same time, the incumbent Labour leader publicly admitted the war was "wrong".  Corbyn will now go a step further and apologise.  He'll probably never do so as the occupant of 10 Downing Street, but the direction of travel is unmistakable - a government apology for Iraq is as inevitable as the Bloody Sunday apology was.  Let's just hope it doesn't take quite as long.

*  *  *

Our old friend "TSE of PB" -

"After a decade of ‘austerity’ perhaps the country will want to try something different, particularly if it is felt that austerity contributed to a future recession. If you’re a Scottish Nationalist, you might want to skip the next paragraph."

Not at all, old chap, it's just more of the standard "too wee, too poor, too stupid" fare, and we've got fairly strong constitutions after the nonsense that was chucked at us last year.  But there again, TSE, you might want to skip this link.  You might also want to resist the temptation to re-read your embarrassing pre-election piece about how Labour needed to steer clear of any deal with the SNP, because the SNP slate of candidates were of such "low quality".  That assessment seemed to be mostly based on sniffy articles in the Telegraph about Mhairi Black being twenty years old and working-class, and Chris Law having a ponytail.  Oooh, the horror!

Wisdom on Wednesday : Some politicians didn't require the benefit of hindsight to make the right judgement on Iraq

"Will the approach that is being taken work?  The argument is that it will be a salutary lesson, that a dictator will be taught a lesson and that that will help us in dealing with other dictators.  I suspect that the cost of the action - I do not doubt the military outcome for a second - will be so high in a number of ways that it will not provide a platform for an assault on North Korea or Iran, which form the rest of the "axis of evil".  I do not think that the policy of teaching one dictator a lesson and then moving on to other dictators can work.  Most of us know that it will be a breeding ground for a future generation of terrorists."

Alex Salmond, MP for Banff and Buchan, and future First Minister of Scotland, speaking in March 2003 during the parliamentary debate on committing British forces to an illegal invasion of Iraq.

It's my lucky day - again

Real stroke of luck this morning - it seems my money problems are over for good. A woman from Burkina Faso was kind enough to send an email offering me fifteen million dollars, acquired by a foreigner from a secret oil deal with Saddam Hussein. Nothing unusual so far, you might think, but what was slightly different about it was this little aside...

"Though this medium (Internet) has been greatly abused, I choose to reach you through it because it still remains the fastest medium of communication."

Tell me about it - all those bleedin' scammers spoiling it for the people who genuinely want to send fifteen million dollars to a total stranger.

'You do not speak for Scotland, sir'

Gerry Hassan has written a very detailed analysis of last night's Newsnight debate on 'the future of the Union'. I must say that personally I wouldn't be quite so effusive about Rory Stewart's performance - he's undoubtedly very articulate and has a 'screen presence', but he got himself into very unwise territory when he flatly informed a Scot in the audience who gave primacy to a Scottish identity that "you do not speak for Scotland, sir". Stewart's proof for this assertion was that his own father is Scottish, lives in Crieff and is "very proud to be British". This, of course, is the classic Tory delusion that got them into such a pickle over the Poll Tax - forget about elections and opinion polls, authentic Scottish opinion is represented by their father or third cousin once removed, or that well-bred chap they once canvassed in Drymen. Admittedly, for as long as there is more than one view held among the public, no-one can literally claim to speak for all of Scotland, but what evidence we have on majority opinion is clear enough - the Scot in the audience was much closer to speaking for modern Scotland's aspirations than that British imperial throwback Rory Stewart, former Deputy Governor of two Iraqi provinces. No wonder Rory still thinks there is something terribly "precious" to be lost if the Union bites the dust - how many other thirtysomething Scots have been given the wizard opportunity to rule a conquered Middle Eastern country? Would never happen under independence.

While we've seen much worse from Paxman, he was scarcely the most even-handed moderator, allowing Michael Portillo to wax lyrical for several minutes about the supposed historic British tradition of anti-fanaticism, but almost biting Joan McAlpine's head off when she tried to introduce a bit of balance by pointing out that one of the first acts of the British state was a pogrom in the Highlands of Scotland. "Oh, we're not going back to that," he groaned after an apparent Damascene conversion about the unimportance of British history, "I want to look forward". Earlier, he had taunted McAlpine about the failure of the "Scottish banks", but ten seconds later airily brushed off a member of the audience who pointed out that many of the bankers in those "Scottish banks" were English. My own point would have been more that those banks failed under UK rather than Scottish regulation, but doubtless Paxo would have regarded that as a "cheap shot" as well. He's certainly the expert on those.

The other thing that leapt out at me from the debate was the utter incoherence of the argument put forward by the representative of the English Democrats. Once again, it seems that underneath the veneer they are classic right-wing Brit Nats, who are lashing out at Scottish and Welsh presumptuousness with an affectation of English nationalism. What England is crying out for is an equivalent of the SNP or Plaid - a left-of-centre (or at the very least centrist) civic nationalist party that believes in English self-government for the right reasons.

Baker blows his top

Well, it seems I've made considerable progress - Kevin Baker actually read my response this time, as evidenced by this intensely funny 4,300 word ranting retort which repeatedly brands me a bigot.

When someone starts equating your opposition to private gun ownership with anti-Semitism (yes, really) it's probably high time to heed Marcia's advice, and get on with enjoying Christmas. Just before I do, though, one of Kevin's grandiose assertions is so exquisitely ironic in the light of recent history that I simply can't resist having a very small nibble...

"That's because James does not understand the difference between warfare and despotism. Governments (and terrorists) use WMDs on other populations, not on their own soil."

In that case, clearly Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons attack on his own people at Halabja - used endlessly as a justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 - was a figment of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney's imaginations. Just to refresh Kevin's memory, here's the Wikipedia account of an incident which blows a hole in one of his articles of faith, ie. that privately-owned handguns are a meaningful protection against 'governments gone bad', because tyrannical governments always sportingly refrain from using WMDs against their own people...

"The Halabja poison gas attack (Kurdish: Kîmyabarana Helebce), also known as Halabja massacre or Bloody Friday, was an incident that took place on March 16, 1988, during the closing days of the Iran–Iraq War, when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The attack killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people and injured around 7,000 and 10,000 more, most of them civilians; thousands more died of complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack. The incident, which has been officially defined as an act of genocide against the Kurdish people in Iraq, was and still remains the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history."

Oh, but wait - Kevin has suddenly remembered this rather huge problem. A few paragraphs later he hurriedly backtracks -

"James does not understand that governments tend not to bomb or gas their own population centers. Oh, Saddam did it, but he only gassed Kurds, not, say, downtown Tikrit."

So despotic regimes only "tend" not to do the blindingly obvious and quell revolts using the weapons at their disposal. Or, to put it another way, they don't do it, except when they do. Oh-kaaay...

Oh, and to answer Kevin's final question - "coming from a bigot, this is not a surprise. How's it feel, James?"

How's it feel to have so much in common with the likes of Alan C Baird? It feels fabulous, Kev. Thanks for asking. Happy Christmas!

Cause and effect in Iraq

I'm intrigued by this line of argument that, by revealing the shocking details of the cavalier attitude to human life over the course of the war, WikiLeaks have put service personnel and Iraqis at risk. It could equally be argued that, by withholding shedloads of information that is so clearly in the public interest to reveal, the Americans have forced WikiLeaks' hand, and thus any negative consequences that follow should be considered the Americans' responsibility alone.

Does that sound a bit contrived? Well, yes, frankly it does. But no more, I'd suggest, than the evasions of responsibility we've seen from the US and UK about civilian casualties throughout the conflict. No matter how avoidable or senseless a death was, it seemed, the blame could somehow always be traced back to Saddam Hussein "defying the international community" - either that or to the "turrrst bombers", few of whom actually seemed to be in Iraq until the invasion. Those who have repeatedly run away from the direct and devastating consequences of their own actions are hardly in a position to sanctimoniously lecture others on the same subject.

It's hard to criticise Ed Miliband for making common cause with the progressive bits of the coalition

So 72 hours and a keynote conference speech later, and it's still not entirely clear to what extent Ed Miliband represents an authentic break from New Labour. Iain Dale, for what it's worth, seems convinced that the younger brother's left-wing positioning during the leadership campaign was effectively a confidence trick, while much of the rest of the right-wing blogoshere is equally certain that we've just seen a return to a John Smith/Neil Kinnock-style Labour party. My guess is that Danny Finkelstein (someone whose analysis I usually don't have much time for) is closest to the mark in observing that, while Miliband is most certainly not "Red Ed", he is in fact slightly to the left of New Labour. If that's how his leadership pans out, my verdict would be - could be a lot better, but definite progress. It would be churlish to say otherwise.

Certainly it seems we can rest assured that the branding of the party as New Labour is now at a definitive end - Miliband used the term repeatedly in his speech, sometimes approvingly, but always in the past tense.

Despite my ambivalence over the content of the speech, I was slightly puzzled about Andrew Neil's assessment that this was an unalloyed dash back to the centre ground (what most of us in Scotland would call the centre-right), and that it was now hard to see where the differences are either with Labour's past or with the Cameron/Clegg coalition. Really? It was of course to be expected that there would be some distancing from the unions, but even just off the top of my head, can you imagine Tony Blair saying that :

* There should be a living wage over and above the national minimum wage?

* The gap between rich and poor does matter, and that the most equal societies are the most successful?

* The Iraq war was a mistake, was not a war of last resort, and undermined the UN?

* Civil liberties (or, as Blair used to put it, "that civil libertarian nonsense") have been too far eroded in the name of the war on terror?

And as far as any shared agenda with the coalition is concerned, that was to a considerable extent confined to the areas where the current government are on the correct side of the libertarian/authoritarian divide, and where New Labour were always on the wrong side. It's scarcely a departure from progressive values to accept that Ken Clarke may have a point about the futility of short prison sentences, for instance.

But I did have a number of concerns, and by far the greatest was the fair wind Miliband seemed to be prepared to give to Iain Duncan Smith, and to the havoc he might be about to wreak on the benefits system, leaving the lives of the most vulnerable wrecked in his wake. However, the extraordinary common ground between the two parties on this area has been a constant for a decade-and-a-half now, so I suppose we can't expect miracles. Tony Blair's humiliation in seeing his successor as Labour leader join mainstream opinion in denouncing the invasion of Iraq - and receive warm applause for it from the same party conference the former PM so very recently held in the palm of his hand - will have to suffice for today.

Blair's greatest performance was in his own mind

It's often been observed that Tony Blair was more of an actor or a showman than an authentic politician, and in last night's BBC interview to promote his memoirs he seemed surprisingly relaxed about owning up to the tricks of his trade - at least in relation to the one area of his legacy for which he can expect nothing but plaudits, namely the Northern Ireland peace process. With almost carefree abandon, he talked of the 'moral dilemma' he had to grapple with in deliberately using creative ambiguity - sometimes stretching the truth to breaking-point - on the basis that he knew he was 'doing it in a good cause'. It doesn't appear to have occurred to him that, for many people, there is an obvious read-through here to another campaign of deception he hasn't yet come clean about - the one paving the way for the Iraq War. 'Creative ambiguities' and 'truths stretched to breaking-point' in the pursuance of a good cause would seem to sum up Blair's strategy in early 2003 rather well - except that, in this case, the good cause only ever existed in his own mind. I'm inclined to believe it still lives on there, albeit it takes ever more mental effort to maintain the comforting illusion. The greatest testament to Blair's acting ability is that he convinces himself so reliably.

In continuing to justify the war now, he tells us (and himself) : "There isn't a single part of the Middle East that hasn't been touched by the problem we see in Iraq and Afghanistan today." Well, if he's talking about terrorism inspired by Islamic extremism, I can remind him of at least one Middle Eastern country that was relatively untouched by the problem before the Iraq invasion - Iraq. It had every prospect of remaining so but for the military intervention. So Blair's alibi for the invasion is the need to tackle a problem that was created by...the invasion. That's brazen logic, even by his standards.

He goes on to plead that the carnage in Iraq was "more terrifying than anyone could have imagined". Now, that's not quite true, is it Tony? No less a figure than Jacques Chirac gave an astonishingly accurate forecast of the forces that were about to be unleashed to Blair in person, and begged him to reconsider the rush to war. I believe the Prime Minister's reaction was a self-satisfied chuckle, followed by what must surely rank as one of the most un-self-aware observations of recent political history : "God, Jacques really doesn't get it, does he?"

One 'mistake' that a senior UK minister has correctly identified

Much as Nick Clegg isn't exactly going to be my nominee for Man of the Year, there was something symbolically rather satisfying about finally seeing a senior UK government minister stand at the dispatch box and unequivocally declare the invasion of Iraq "illegal". Spain had its 'purging' election in 2004 when the enthusiastic Bush cheerleader Aznar was ousted by Zapatero, and even the US itself eventually elected an opponent of the Iraq war as President. But it appeared that the British electorate were never going to have the opportunity to express their disgust at the events of 2003 in such a clear-cut way, due to the complicity between the Labour and Tory leaderships over the issue. Probably what happened today was just about the best we could ever realistically hope for.

And George Osborne and William Hague's faces when Clegg said the words were an absolute picture. They had obviously built themselves up to nod their heads furiously and shout "Hear, hear!" regardless of what Clegg said during PMQs, and they didn't quite manage to pull out of their approving facial expressions in time.

Labour leadership debate : Burnt ham

When Michael Crick mused that it was very difficult to tell who had won the Newsnight leadership debate, I couldn't help wondering if what he really meant was that Diane Abbott had been the most impressive, but it felt odd to say that out loud when we know (or we think we know) that she can't win the ultimate prize. I certainly agree with Crick, though, that the one definite conclusion we can draw is that Andy Burnham lost tonight. His delivery was wooden, and the content of some of his answers was distinctly peculiar, especially on Iraq. How precisely has the invasion of Iraq made it easier to deal with Iran now? Surely the polar opposite of that statement is true. And in the unlikely event that Tony Blair was watching, his jaw would have dropped to the floor to hear Burnham advance the eccentric argument that Hans Blix's weapons inspectors couldn't be allowed more time because it might have triggered a domestic uprising against Saddam Hussein. That drives a coach and horses through Blair's perennial excuse for why it had still been justifiable to invade in the absence of WMDs - namely that Saddam would otherwise have been certain to remain in power to this day.

It also became painfully obvious tonight just what a cynical campaign Ed Balls is running, and that there's almost nothing he won't now say in an attempt to neutralise his biggest perceived weakness - ie. his closeness to Gordon Brown. Dredging up the Gillian Duffy incident just to take a swipe at his old political mentor is a tactic that thoroughly deserves to backfire, and I suspect it will. Declaring Tony Blair his favourite Labour leader was a fairly obvious affectation as well. He also coined a phrase that may one day be cited as a textbook example of how not to wriggle out of responsibility for something - "In retrospect, as I said at the time..."

The other Ed was the slightly stronger of the two Milibands, and there were plenty of signs that he is indeed consciously tacking a little to the left - by denouncing the invasion of Iraq, by pledging to tackle the gap between rich and poor, by calling 90 days detention and ID cards a mistake, and by suggesting the 50p tax band should be made permanent. As always in leadership elections, the $64,000 question is - just a tactic, or does he (to use Blair's irritating phrase) "actually believe this stuff"? If the latter, there may be just a glimmer of hope for the progressive strain of opinion in the Labour party, for the first time virtually since the day John Smith died in 1994.

Could Saddam have averted war by looking slightly more guilty?

I finally caught up with Hans Blix's appearance on Hardtalk last night, and it brought home to me the most surreal (and that's quite an accolade) aspect of Britain's after-the-fact rationalisation for why an unprovoked invasion was justified without the presence of WMDs. The interviewer Jonathan Charles put this proposition to Blix - "the problem for Britain surely was that Saddam was never going to admit to having disarmed, because it would have made him look weak in the eyes of his enemies". Blix gave a rather bemused smile, and pointed out "but Saddam told us that he didn't have WMDs".

Charles seemed momentarily confused by this, but of course on that point there is no doubt at all. The most memorable of the many occasions when Saddam told the world he didn't have WMDs was in his interview with Tony Benn, who simply asked him "does Iraq possess weapons of mass destruction?" At the subsequent PMQs, Tony Blair was sneeringly dismissive of Benn's interrogation technique - "I don't think Jeremy Paxman will be fearing for his job". But it seems in retrospect this was one of those instances where a simple, direct question elicits the most honest reply. It's what you might call the 'Fern Britton principle'.

So all this begs the question - what precisely is the difference between Saddam saying something on the one hand, and 'admitting' it on the other? Would it have helped if he had looked slightly more guilty when he said it? On such distinctions, we are expected to believe, hinged Britain's decision to launch an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country.

For all my years of experience of dealing with the media, nothing could have prepared me for a grilling by FERN BRITTON.

If it wasn't so unspeakably maddening, it truly would be comical. Step back for a moment from the narrative about Blair's peerless communication skills ensuring that there will never be a chink in his armour on Iraq, and the conclusion that he had in fact already skewered himself weeks ago would be inescapable. By conceding that he would still have wanted to remove Saddam from power even if he had known there were no WMDs, Blair had unambiguously demonstrated that much of the case for war was built on a conscious deception. How was that statement, for instance, even remotely consistent with his firm undertaking weeks before the war that "even now" Saddam could stay in power if he disarmed? It wasn't, and it was clear from his performance yesterday (for that, of course, was precisely what it was) that he knew that perfectly well. So no way out of that one, then? Oh, don't be silly - this is a) Blair, and b) the Chilcot Inquiry we're talking about. All that it took to get off the hook was a sheepish grin, and a suggestion that he's simply far too much of a novice to be expected to handle fiendish lines of questioning from heavyweight political interviewers like...Fern Britton. As ever, the brazenness is beyond breathtaking.

Listening to hours of Blair testimony is a bit like watching the Conservative party conference - eventually you find yourself being sucked into a parallel universe where black really is white. Some other choice examples from yesterday -

'If you want to deal with WMDs, you start with a regime that's used them before.' Well no, actually, what you do is you start with a regime that's actually got them. Like North Korea, perhaps, or even Israel, both of which have nuclear weapons, as opposed to Iraq which had...well, nothing.

'What was a surprise was that al-Qaeda and Iran got involved in Iraq.' Well, perhaps it wouldn't have been quite so much of a surprise if you had listened to the countless voices warning that, far from tackling international terrorism, the invasion of Iraq would actually fuel it. Blair might counter that nobody could have known any of that was going to happen, it was all just pure speculation. Well, quite. In that sense it was rather like the pure speculation that Iraq had an 'extensive and growing' WMD programme with which it planned to threaten its neighbours - speculation that was solely based, let's not forget, on 'sporadic and patchy' intelligence. So what was the difference between one lot of speculation in early 2003 and the other lot? Faith. Conviction. To coin a phrase, he simply 'knew it was right'. Even, apparently, the categorical proof we now have that it was wrong still doesn't mean it wasn't right. Now that's real faith.

'The really interesting question is the Iraq 2010 question - what would have happened if we had allowed Saddam and his sons to remain in power?' From a man who has just acknowledged that terrorists and malign Iranian influence ended up in Iraq as a direct result of the invasion (and yet in a way that was apparently completely unforseeable), it really is beyond satire to base the case for war entirely on his own 'foresight' of the unspeakably terrible things that would have happened otherwise. Blair even informed the committee in grave tones that important 'lessons' for the future needed to be learned from the way in which Iraq became a terrorist base. Perhaps chief among those lessons ought to be that this outcome (the real "2010 Iraq" outcome) could have been easily avoided by not invading Iraq, and that such a devastatingly simple avoidance strategy might have been rather wise with the benefit of hindsight?

'What made Saddam different from other dictators is that he was responsible for the deaths of a million people.' But to get to that figure, you have to include all the casualties of the Iran-Iraq war, on the basis that Saddam was responsible for every single one of those deaths because he started the war by launching an unprovoked invasion. That really is exceptionally dangerous ground for Blair to be treading on given the circumstances, and once again, extraordinarily brazen. And that's before you even recall the fact that the west seemed to be rather supportive of Saddam's bloodthirsty adventures in Iran at the time.

'Some people thought there would be a humanitarian disaster in Iraq. We avoided that, actually.' Is this guy for real?

Goldsmith's broad range of one-sided soundings

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to watch Lord Goldsmith's evidence to the Iraq inquiry live, but after catching some of the snippets on the news a couple of questions are nagging away at me. Goldsmith claimed his biggest problem in arriving at his final legal opinion was the creative ambiguity of UN Resolution 1441, the wording of which meant very different things to the different countries that had voted it through. His moment of clarity seemingly arrived after speaking at length to US lawyers, and pondering on whether the US would really have allowed a resolution to be passed that gave the UN (and by extension France, Russia and China) a veto on war. But couldn't it just as easily be asked - would the French and Russians really have allowed through a resolution that in their view gave the US legal authority to attack Iraq without referral back to the UN? Of course they wouldn't, and in a sense this is a circular argument - if Goldsmith's starting proposition was that resolution 1441 was made deliberately ambiguous to suit everyone, it should hardly have been a surprise to him that US lawyers thought they had got precisely what they wanted out of it. What may be a surprise to others is that an Attorney-General who claims to have taken soundings from all quarters did not apparently see fit to make an equivalent trip to France or Russia to hear the interpretation of lawyers there.

Which leads me neatly on to my second question. Goldsmith claims to have been put under no pressure to change his original opinion that the invasion would be unlawful by Tony Blair or anyone else in the government. But in precisely what sense did the terribly helpful arrangement for Goldsmith of an itinerary of meetings with handpicked pro-war 'experts' in the United States apparently not constitute any 'pressure' at all?

Major what-if questions...

Interesting to see Craig Murray pay a back-handed compliment to John Major following his attack on Tony Blair over Iraq. Murray suggests that Major has been the best Prime Minister of his lifetime (ie. going back to the days of Harold Macmillan) - albeit "out of a deeply depressing bunch".

Personally, whenever I think of Major's legacy I find it hard to look past his boneheaded obstinacy over the Scottish constitutional issue. Scottish civil society let off a collective sigh of despair in the early 1990s when the realisation dawned that - by complete chance - we'd been landed with a Prime Minister for whom not budging an inch on Scottish self-government was a genuine personal obsession. For evidence of the latter point, we need look no further than Major's peculiar "The United Kingdom is in danger! Wake up!" speech in the midst of the 1992 election campaign. It's hardly likely that his advisers informed him that such a rallying-call was a big potential vote-winner on either side of the border, so I think we can safely assume he actually meant it. Under his leadership, the party became so instinctively intransigent on the issue that, when in 1993 Ian Lang produced his embarrassingly thin Taking Stock "reforms", an English Tory backbencher rose in clearly genuine anguish to seek reassurance that the Union wasn't being put in jeapordy by a few extra meetings of the Scottish Grand Committee!

But on the substance of the Iraq issue, it's a tantalising thought that under Major's premiership the UK might have taken a different course. Certainly nobody can have any doubt from his repeated angry exchanges with Paddy Ashdown that Major was far more sceptical about the merits of military intervention in the Balkans than his Labour successor. And the UK's shameful lack of initiative throughout the Rwandan genocide is perhaps another clue to Major's instinctive dislike of "adventurism" abroad. However, when it really comes down to it, I simply find it impossible to believe that any Conservative Prime Minister - whatever his instincts were telling him - would not have been joined-at-the-hip with the US over an issue as big as Iraq. Well, perhaps the pro-European Ken Clarke might have had the guts to chart an independent course, but there are very few others.

For a similar reason, my own choice for "best PM since 1958 out of a bad bunch" would have to be Harold Wilson - whatever his many and varied faults, at least he kept the UK firmly out of the Vietnam War. And he saw off a right-wing MI5-inspired coup plot against him - how many PMs can say that?

Massive evidence of weapons of mass destruction related programme activities

A rare treat to see Melanie "Wrong But With Conviction" Phillips give this old classic a spin on Question Time last night. It received its first outing way back in President Bush's first State of the Union address to Congress after the Iraq invasion. Just for a few seconds he appeared to have a huge revelation up his sleeve that was about to turn the media narrative completely on its head - "already the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction..." Really? No, not really. Sadly for Bush, he hadn't finished his sentence, with the remaining words being "related programme activities". Which begged the obvious question - what exactly is a weapon of mass destruction related programme activity, and how precisely does it differ from an actual weapon?