Tony’s Legacy: Will it be Blair or Bliar when the Jury Returns?

With the sun at last shining and a General Election required within the next few weeks the view from my room is far from bleak. This is in contrast to the future which awaits the Blair Legacy. Tony Blair was seen by many as the antidote to Thatcherism and a way in which politics could return to principles of social cohesion and fairness. Of course, that is where the dream began to unravel since it soon became obvious that the principles which were to govern were nothing to do with political philosophy, but more to do with the principles of rhetoric, marketing and spin. Anyone who knows anything about this unholy trio will know that they are for the most part strangers to such principles, sometimes reserving the greater disdain for the principle of truth. For those who spin webs the fate that awaits them is often self entanglement. Such is the case with the Iraq War and it is that which will cast a shadow over the few achievements, whatever you think they might be, of Blairite New Labour.

About six years ago I was holding forth in a book shop in Hay to another customer about the shortcomings of Prime Minister Blair, when a homely lady emerged from behind an adjoining stack and admitted with some emotion, ‘ I’m so ashamed. I voted for that man: I feel betrayed’. I greatly admired her courage for speaking out as I suspect it has taken many of us sometime to approach the public confessional.

Tony Blair chose to play fast and loose with some fairly basic principles and institutions, including the Rule of Law, Cabinet Government, Collective Responsibility, Parliamentary accountability and International Law. Some of these featured in his own end of the Constitution Show that dreary Thursday morning of 29th January when he appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry. Outside the gathered crowd carried posters referring to him as ‘Bliar’, a point missed by the commentator I saw doing his bit to camera outside the building, while those with tickets filed in, in some cases in search of some explanation as to why their loved ones had died.

Before his appearance the case was forming in my mind that here was a man, whilst he endeavoured to be a ‘nice sort of guy’, was rather adrift in a sea of troubles unable to find neither guiding light nor sound anchorages to see him through. The book title which kept coming into my head on that dreary Thursday as I saw his robust debating technique gather momentum was that of ‘He knew he was Right.’ Of course Trollope’s character was far from being right and in Mr Blair‘s case he probably did sincerely believe that there were WMD’s beyond doubt. His problem now, like any scientist in the laboratory or lawyer in a court, is that we are now watching the process of seeing whether the facts on which it was based can be proved.

The justification he gave the Chilcot inquiry would seem to be no more than his assertion that he believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he believed this beyond reasonable doubt. This would not be enough for a jury to convict without a bundle of proved facts and inferences, the evidence, which removes all doubt from the mind of the jury: just one reasonable doubt should prevent a juror from finding guilt. It would seem however that Mr Blair is asserting that war was justified beyond his own doubt, period.

Whether or not the evidence was there to justify his certainty is what Chilcot should decide upon but in the meantime Mr Blair’s case presents several problems, some of his own making. If we run the clock back to Sunday 12th December 2009 he appeared in an interview with Fern Brittan. His expressed conviction at Chilcot as to the existence of WMD’s appears to have been undermined by his earlier frankness with Fern Brittan
I paraphrase the interview thus:
"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?"
Blair replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]",
Adding, "I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.".... "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it's incredibly difficult. That's why I sympathize with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision." Guardian 12/12/09
No wonder the search for the number one justification, the existence of WMD’s, had been such a scruffy affair with allegations of alleged plagiarism, sexing up of documentation, and a bogus 45 minute deployment time. Oh, and by the way, since the Detroit bomber was charged in the US, we now know, if we are to believe the Federal charge sheet, that WMD’s can been hidden in undergarments. If only the UN inspectors had known that when they were trying to do their job.

I must confess that I forced myself to watch the Fern Brittan interview as I had not yet had breakfast and I didn’t want to be put off my grapefruit by an apologist’s master class. My self denial was however rewarded, not only by the admission of the backup reason for going to war but also by his claim that when making decisions on matters of life and death, like War, his faith didn’t appear to come into it. Oh dear I thought, so what is the point of your Christianity? O.K., perhaps George Bush would seem to have been informed rather badly in these matters but in his case I suspect it was possibly a matter of deficient critical reading skills. But in Tony’s case I remain somewhat puzzled as to why he bothered to go in for the interview given that the programme’s brief is within the BBC’s religious/ ethical Sunday morning slot. As a sometime Anglican and now a Catholic, can we really believe that his faith was irrelevant?

By the time he was questioned at Chilcot about the interview it seemed he still hadn’t realised that he was in a hole and that the time for digging had long since passed. Not a bit of it. What on earth was all that business about having had a great deal of experience in giving interviews but he hadn’t been prepared for Fern? Was his rather fumbled comment an admission that he had inadvertently revealed something he would have rather left out? He defended himself by saying that he had not used the phrase ‘regime change’. Of course he hadn’t: it was superfluous. He had said that even without WMD’s it would have been right to remove Saddam. Was it any wonder that some MP s who had relied on his assurances from the dispatch box were now feeling somewhat peeved.

In effect this all combines to show that in the absence of WMD’s he would not have been able to convince Parliament, not least because International Law does not allow one nation to go into another’s territory to remove a nasty person other than by way of self defence. In the absence a legal authority it is no more than an illegal act of war. This was probably why the international lawyers at the Foreign Office were also somewhat peeved when Lord Goldsmith’s advice to Cabinet was preferred to theirs. It was pointed out by one of them when before Chilcot, that the Attorney General was not a practitioner of international law.

This is clearly the weak spot in the Blair justification. Witness the crumbling of Alistair Campbell when asked by Andrew Marr ( BBC 1: Sunday 7th February), that if Chilcot fails to find unequivocal evidence to support Blair’s assertions from the dispatch box, the conclusion will have to be that the Prime Minister mislead Parliament. At this the ex-Cabinet Office hard case broke down and, breathing somewhat heavily, made a halting reference to the vilification of an honourable man. None of the debate away from the placards in the street had struck me as that, so this must have touched a nerve. Was the alliance with Bush, the dislike of Saddam’s ghastly psychopathic oil -rich regime and all the hype, so powerful that it swept Blair and his henchmen along on a self made wave of enthusiasm into an unjustifiable and illegal war?

The evidence of Clare Short on the 2nd February seems to support this theory. Unlike Blair’s performance the abiding impression was that here was a witness who had nothing to fear from Chilcot because all she had to do was tell the uncomplicated truth. It would seem that from Tony’s performance to date, the truth is anything but uncomplicated. Like Thatcher before him, he adopted a presidential role whereby he chose to exclude his colleagues from the decision making process to the point where he now tells us it was all on his shoulders. He apparently had no friend to turn to and not even his faith could help him with the decision. In a system which professes a convention of cabinet collective responsibility, constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy this need not have happened. Having for some reason felt that his shoulders alone were broad enough, it is on his own head that it now shall be. The time for vilification has passed: the word ‘pity’ comes to mind but doesn't quite make the journey.