Amid growing indications that Labour can make a fight of the general election, two major shadows are cast over Gordon Brown’s chances of avoiding the kind of humiliation that so many in the party believed was inevitable so short a time ago. One is the ghost of Tony Blair, conjured up by his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry last week, rekindling all that led to the dismemberment of “new” Labour and the British body politic even before the expenses scandal came along to bury it. The other is Mr Brown’s own forthcoming appearance before the inquiry, a gamble, like the inquiry itself, of his own making. It’s a gamble with consequences that may outweigh, or at least fatally reverse, Labour’s closing position on the Tories even as the election campaign proper is getting under way.
Tribune did not comment on Mr Blair’s appearance beforehand. We have made our position clear on his mendacious handling of Iraq in the past. Amid all that has been said and analysed, one single political factor
stands side-by-side with the criminality of the deaths caused by the Iraq war; Mr Blair
duped the House of Commons into backing military action with a false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction with a capability of attacking British interests within 45 minutes. The latter he now regards as a mistake, everything else he claims he believed to be true at the time. Tribune has published evidence which disputes the justification for this belief – see this article from our archive.
As The Observer, a newspaper which now concedes it was wrong in backing the war, put it: “Mr Blair treated law and constitutional propriety as barriers to the expedient pursuit of his goal. He overcame them by force of will. It was effective, but it was not democracy.”
Journalists at the time were briefed that then Chancellor Brown was set against the war to the extent that he and the Prime Minister were barely on speaking terms. If that were truly the case, Mr Brown needs to deliver some convincing reasons to explain how his opposition was overcome and he publicly backed and funded the war he could have stopped by resigning.
In her candid evidence to the inquiry, former International Development Secretary Clare Short – who did resign, but not until it was too late – described a regime in which senior ministers were excluded or, in the case of the Attorney General persistently leant on, and kept in the dark. But Mr Brown cannot expect, at either the Chilcot inquiry or the potentially critical television debates which will play into this election, to rely on his old excuse of never having been at the scene of the crime.
The closing of the gap between Tories and Labour in the opinion polls reflects voters’ growing recognition of the flaccidity of David Cameron and his policies. Iraq tore a hole in the public trust in politics, but the public’s need for political action tethered to their greater good remains and Labour is still the party best suited to the task. Mr Brown must successfully address the former if he wants a chance at the latter.
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