This Isn't About Blair's Future. It Is Much More Serious

[kskiska]

By Matthew d'Anconca

It is now routinely declared at Westminster that the row over Saddam's Hussein's weapons of mass destruction - and specifically the totemic "45 minutes" claim - will sooner or later cost Tony Blair his job. If only the stakes were so low. The Government's embarrassment over Iraqi WMD threatens much more than the Prime Minister's political future. Slowly but surely, this long-running fiasco is eroding Britain's commitment to the war on terror, and distracting attention from that global conflict towards a Whitehall farce as risible as it is parochial.

Who in the Cabinet knew that the "45 minutes" claim included in the September dossier referred only to battlefield weaponry rather than to strategic missiles, and when? The Prime Minister insists that he was not informed of the distinction before his speech to the Commons making the case for war on March 18. Robin Cook says that he himself knew before then, and that he had discussed it with Mr Blair. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, admits that he had been apprised of the specifics, but maintains that he did not pass these details on to the Prime Minister before the war.

This, frankly, is the politics of the prep school ("I'll ask you one last time, Hoon. Did you tell Blair what you just told me?" "No, sir. I didn't think it was important, sir. I was seeing matron, sir." "That's not what Cook says, Hoon. Cook says Blair knew all about it before speech day. Now what would your father make of this, I wonder?" "Oh, sir!" etc). The impression is less one of monstrous deceit but of stupendous incompetence and amateurism.

(snip)

I do not object to the Government making the most of the intelligence at its disposal. Politicians exhale propaganda in the way that the rest of us exhale carbon dioxide. What is really worrying is that the Prime Minister does not seem to have known what the propaganda referred to. His crime, it appears, was not duplicity but ignorance - a much more worrying shortcoming in a leader taking a nation to war.

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