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?"

Adventures in futility

Audience member on tonight's Question Time -

"Do we have to wait for Tony Blair's memoirs to find out the real truth?"

If ever there was such a thing as a futile wait...

My other observation is that Nick Ferrari seems to be mounting a serious challenge for David Starkey's 'Most Irritating Question Time Panellist' title. But at least he finds himself amusing.

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?

The inimitable Mr. Cameron

About a billion, zillion years ago - to be more specific it was probably about 1993 - I recall seeing the impressionist Rory Bremner being interviewed on the much-missed (ahem) weekday morning show Good Morning With Anne and Nick. He was lamenting the gradual erosion of his potential 'material', with the vivid political characters we'd been used to, such as bushy-eyebrowed Denis Healey, spluttering Roy Hattersley, and hush puppy wearing Ken Clarke, gradually being supplanted by a new generation of bland, made-for-TV politicians such as - and the examples he offered seem bizarre in retrospect - John Patten and Tony Blair. Those two could hardly have had more contrasting futures ahead of them - I doubt if more than about 2% of the population even remember who John Patten is (excluding those who think he's the former governor of Hong Kong), not withstanding the fact that the late Peter Cook found him so objectionable at the time that he wanted to consign the Tory Cabinet minister to Room 101. But of course Bremner could not have been more wrong about Blair, who was to become a staple of his show for the next decade and a half. Just a year later in 1994, Bremner had not only perfected the voice, but was also expertly capturing the basic rhythms of primordial New Labour-speak - "Tea for two. Of course, of course, tea for two. But, also...two for tea."

Fast forward to the present, though, and David Cameron is proving a very different kettle of fish, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his status as a Blair tribute act. More than four years after he became Tory leader, Bremner's impression of him still sounds more like Peter Mandelson (and strangely even has echoes of Keith Floyd) than Cammo himself. The satire doesn't have a lot of bite either. Jon Culshaw's Cameron is a little better, but still doesn't quite hit the mark, and the whole 'Where Does David Cameron Go At Night?' concept seems more than a touch random. A similar problem exists with a new website called David Cameron Facts, which consists of user-generated spoof 'facts' about the Tory leader. A great idea, but to my dismay none of them really made me laugh. People are shying away from the obvious target - poshness - and the problem is when you take that out of the equation all you're left with is a bland, essentially fictional character created for the media, which doesn't offer much to get your teeth into. Even after twenty minutes of thinking, the best I could come up with as a submission of my own was this -

"David is actually a very ordinary guy, but as part of a secret mission was required to attend Eton, acquire royal ancestry, join the Bullingdon Club at Oxford, and marry a millionairess – because in this country you’re not allowed to become Prime Minister until you’ve learned about how the other half live."

Unfortunately that's about five times as long as most of the other 'facts', so probably won't make it in. So if you think you can do better (shouldn't be difficult and heaven knows somebody needs to) you can submit your own Dave fact here.

The unmentionable downsides

Sticking with the Berlin Wall theme, I've just noticed an article published on the Guardian website a couple of days ago lamenting the collapse of communist East Germany. The author takes a predictable roasting for her efforts in the comments section, which I'm not entirely comfortable about. Of course her conclusion is wrong - the upsides of German reunification far outweighed the downsides. And more pertinently, it was the East German electorate themselves who freely chose that path - right or wrong - in the election of 1990, the first time they had been given the chance to choose their own destiny in decades. But it nevertheless shouldn't become unsayable to point out that the downsides existed. Indeed, there were horrors right across the former eastern bloc countries as a result of the end of communism - economic collapse, the abrupt withdrawal of familiar social safety-nets, a nosedive in Russian male life expectancy, and perhaps worst of all, the unimaginably brutal Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The film Goodbye Lenin concludes by offering a fairytale reconciliation between the west and east - an alternative reality in which the Berlin Wall is opened to allow refugees from the west to escape the capitalist rat-race. The point being that the reality of the oppressive socialist state was a grotesque parody of the ideals it had supposedly been founded on - but that those ideals on their own merits nevertheless remained inspiring. The trouble with the 'post-ideological world' that the aftermath of 1989 has bequeathed us (in truth that simply means a world in which most politicians are camped in the same narrow ideological space) is that there appears to be no ideals left at all - our leaders believe in nothing other than competitive managerialism. It was deliciously encapsulated in that moment when Tony Blair (as recently as 1994 an avowed socialist himself) was asked by one of his own backbenchers to provide a brief summary of his political philosophy. Blair responded by wittering on about investing in new equipment for the health service.

The worst President we'll never have (hopefully)

Encouraging to read the news at Slugger O'Toole that Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen has withdrawn his support for Tony Blair as the first fixed president of the European Council. Earlier I read with interest (and more than a little surprise) Jeff's invoking of the spirit of Tony the Tiger from the Frosties ads in explaining his support for the Blair bid, but I'm afraid I can't - to put it mildly - muster the same enthusiasm. When some of us say that Blair is simply unfit for high office as a result of the web of deception that paved the way for the illegal invasion of Iraq, it's actually not just empty rhetoric. The fact that the man was able to remain Prime Minister for four more years and receive a standing ovation in the Commons on his final day in office was distasteful enough to be getting on with.

Winning without stardust

I hadn't even been aware that today was decision day for the 2016 Olympic venue candidates until I caught about two seconds on the news this morning. So I had a quick rummage around on the internet in an attempt to ascertain which city is favourite. The first two results that came up - dated early September - said Tokyo is the favourite. The third and fourth results, from the last day or two, said Chicago is the slight favourite in a very close race, with only Tokyo now thought to be out of the running. That's quite a turnaround in the space of a few weeks, and I can't quite work out how it's happened. The only explanation I can find as to why Tokyo might not be considered suitable is that it's too close geographically to the 2008 host city Beijing - but wasn't that fact already known in early September?

Anyway, perhaps it's wrong of me, but my instinct is to hope that any city but Chicago wins, for two main reasons. The Olympics were held in Los Angeles in 1984, in Atlanta in 1996 - is there some kind of unwritten law that the games have to be held in the US at least once every two decades? Given that no South American city has ever been host, yet another trip to the US really would seem like overkill. My second reason is the sight of Barack Obama arriving in Copenhagen to press the case for Chicago. How is Brazil, Spain or Japan supposed to compete with that kind of stardust? And more to the point, why should they need to? I could never quite understand how Tony Blair supposedly had such an impact in sneaking London's victory four years ago, given that a) London is London regardless of whether it has a PM with a winning smile (yuck), and b) he was never going to be PM in 2012 anyway, so any assurances he offered the delegates were fairly meaningless. (Some would say all Blair assurances were meaningless in any case.)

On the basis that it's South America's 'turn', I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for Rio tonight.