Tony's pants still on fire

The PM says a lot of things, most of which we needn't take seriously

Richard Ingrams
guardian.co.uk, Sunday April 20 2003 03.30 BST

'I sat the kids down and said:"I could lose my job ".' So said Mr Blair last week, recalling the dark days of the past month in an exclusive interview with the Sun. Do we believe him? Or is this just as unlikely a scene as the one about Blair first discovering that his wife had spent £500,000 on two flats in Bristol for their son, Euan, when he read about it in the newspaper over breakfast?

Now that the war in Iraq is over after only three weeks of fighting, those millions of us who opposed it are being asked to eat our words, to admit that we were wrong.

Of course, the short duration of the war, the collapse of Saddam's army and the relatively small number of deaths are a matter of rejoicing for all - even Clare Short. But what such bring home to everyone that pretty well all of what we were told beforehand was a pack of lies.

We were assured by Blair that Saddam Hussein posed threat to this country; hat he possessed weapons of mass destruction; that he was busy making nuclear weapons and would soon have them in his armoury. None of this was true.

Blair's dossier proving his case was found to have been cobbled together from bits and pieces on the internet. The letters purporting to show that Saddam was buying uranium from the African state of Niger are revealed as crude forgeries, most probably the work of British intelligence. As for what Blair called 'rough linkages' with al-Qaeda - forget it.

Yet, armed with these statements, Blair recklessly, to use Short's word, joined the American invasion of Iraq. And he now says he supports the Sun's campaign for a victory procession through the streets of London.

But I very much doubt that, too. Blair may believe his own lies but he is shrewd enough to know that the protesters would outnumber the flag-waving Sun readers.

Licensed to kill

The publication of the Stevens report proving what most of us have known for several years, that the British Army was using loyalist murderers in Ulster to get rid of unwanted Catholics, has not come at a good time for the Army.

Just when we are supposed to be celebrating our troops' performance in Iraq, with frequent reminders of how many valuable lessons our boys learned in Northern Ireland, comes the official confirmation - to be ranked with Stalker and Bloody Sunday - that what Mr Sharon and the BBC tastefully refer to as 'targeted killings'were the order of the day for several years.

The Army and the Government must have known for some time what had been going on, even if, like the rest of us, they only saw it on Panorama.Yet the officer in charge of the operation, Brigadier Gordon Kerr, far from being cashiered or court-martialled, is currently the miitary attaché at our embassy in Beijing and wasdescribed last week as 'one of the Foreign Office's most prized defence experts'.

Given the fact that the brigadier's hit squads more often than not managed tobump off the wrong people, no one should derive too much comfort and reassurance from any of this.

All we can be grateful for, I suppose, is that Kerr has not been posted to Basra to try and knock some sense into all those excitable Iraqis.

My hero

Tomorrow, John Mortimer will be 80 and the nation should rejoice not only that he is still with us but still writing away as fluently and wittily as ever.

E.M.Forster once said, 'behave as if they were immortal and if society was eternal.'John certainly qualifies under both heads. Whatever the temptation for nostalgia, he lives resolutely in the modern world, even if,in many respects, it is not to his liking.

The word liberal is nowadays used by the likes of the Home Secretary David Blunkett as a term of abuse. Blunkett, who also referred recently to 'airy-fairy civil liberties', would no doubt categorise somebody ike John Mortimer as an airy-fairy type of character, full of airy-fairy ideals about justice, freedom and other airy-fairy concepts.

As one who has been defended in court by John Mortimer, I can confirm how wrong such an estimate would be. Behind his deceptively sleepy manner, he is a tough, strong-willed charac- ter with an abiding belief in liberty and the jury system, not to mention the remedial health-giving qualities of champagne. That New Labour should have managed to alienate someone of the calibre of John Mortimer is a worrying sign of how far the Blairs and the Blunketts, the Campbells and the Mandelsons have travelled from the ideals not only of old Labour but the old Left. As Rumpole's favourite poet, the old darling Wordsworth, put it: 'Where is it now, the glory and the dream?'