):http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/ ... 71903.html
July 19, 2003
BLAIR’S SWAN-SONG?
by Srdja Trifkovic
When a politician invokes the verdict of history to justify himself, as Britain’s Tony Blair did on Capitol Hill on Thursday, you may rest assured that he is in serious trouble. “If we are wrong,” he said with reference to the non-existant Iraqi WMDs, “we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive.” He added that he believes “with every fibre and conviction” that he was right.
In Mr. Blair’s case that is considerably more fibre and more conviction than any sane person can imagine, but it probably won’t help him: a major crisis was starting to unfold in London as he was on his way from Washington to the Far East. Early on Friday, police looking for a missing Defence Ministry adviser at the heart of the Iraqi weapons row found his body in the woods a few miles from his home. David Kelly, a former Iraq arms inspector, went for a walk from his house near Faringdon in Oxfordshire, on Thursday afternoon, and never came back.
Only two days previously Kelly gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons on the evidence Blair’s government used as justification for for the Iraq war. Furthermore, it now transpires that Kelly had been named by the Defence Ministry as a likely source of a BBC report broadcast last May that alleged that Downing Street had greatly exaggerated the threat of Saddam’s WMDs in order to push Britain into the war. It was made clear to him that he had broken civil service rules by having unauthorised contact with a journalist.
The sequence of events to follow can be predicted with some certainty. There will be a full independent judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading to Kelly’s death, and it will inevitably turn into an inquiry into Blair’s claims on Iraq’s WMDs. Until now Blair had refused to authorize any such inquiry into the government’s handling of the weapons case, but events will now proceed outside his control. Short of a miraculous weapons find, the inquiry’s findings will be damning. Even before they are made public Blair’s closest aide and spin-master extraordinaire—his Communications and Strategy Director Alastair Campbell, the man who inserted the infamous “45-minute threat” in the British government’s dossier on Saddam’s arms—will have to go. Once the findings of the inquiry are made public Tony Blair will probably have to resign.
This assessment is different from the one we made a month ago (“Tony Blair in a Bit of Trouble”) because the political landscape in London has changed rapidly and profoundly. The writing for Blair is now on many walls. The Tories smell blood, and feel energized after a long spell of depressed inactivity. Richard Ottaway, a Conservative MP and member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that interviewed Dr Kelly over the dossier row, opened the salvo by saying that a “tragedy of ghastly proportions” resulted from “political machinations” by “this whole regime of spin and manipulation ... by the government and its advisers.” Other Tory members of parliament have said Kelly was the “fall guy” in an episode that was embarrassing for the government. One of them, Richard Ottaway, called for an inquiry “at the highest level” into the government’s treatment of Kelly.
More significantly, within Blair’s own Labour Party many influential figures have come to regard him as an electoral millstone and an embarrassement. The demand for a high-level inquiry was echoed by several Labour MPs, such as Peter Kilfoyle. Some supporters of his arch-rival, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, went so far as to portray Blair as “psychotic” and a “psychopath” in the pages of New Statesman magazine. The former cabinet minister Clare Short, a close ally of Mr. Brown, described Blair as a “media star” who “thinks in soundbites” and “uses his charm to get what he wants.” She warned of “a big nasty split” that would damage the party, making it unattractive to the electorate if Blair stayed in power, and reiterated her call for “an elegant handover” of office. Another former cabinet minister, Robin Cook, who resigned over the war, said the government had sent troops into battle “on the basis of a mistake” and that it had committed a “monumental blunder.” Actress Glenda Jackson, also a Labour MP, has said the Prime Minister led Britain to war under false pretences and should step down before the end of the year.
Both British parties are unforgiving of failure and have no qualms about replacing a leader who has become a liability. Eden had to go after Suez, Macmillan after Profumo, and even as strong a figure as Margaret Thatcher was discarded in 1990. Blair will resist but he is running out of tricks. By this time it is likely that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will lead Britain. After over seven years of Blair’s irritating posturing almost any change is bound to be for the better. Britain needs real alternatives to Blair—on Europe, on immigration, on globalization, on the relationship with the United States—and Brown will not offer them, but at least he is an honest man, and an end to the present regime of therapeutic deceit is sorely needed if that once great country is to start recovering its soul.
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Copyright 2003, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
] His wife reported that he felt betrayed by the MoD about the release of his name. Fair enough. But weren't the MoD betrayed by him giving information to a journalist, which was against the Official Secrets Act he signed? 
games though.