Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, passed the tenth anniversary of his election as leader of the Labour party. During a Commons debate on the Butler report, he defended his decision to go to war against Iraq. He then turned his mind to a reshuffle. Mr Blair had said earlier that it was time to
As the 1960s drew to a close, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the Moon, pop’s dopeheads were experimenting with ten-minute-long guitar solos, and a mop-haired Tony Blair was in the sixth form at Fettes where, in between canings for insolence, he was railing against fagging. Now, we are led to believe, the
Lord Butler of Brockwell published his report into the intelligence failures that led to the government claiming, in a dossier published in 2002, that Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and could deploy them within 45 minutes. Lord Butler described the dossier as ‘seriously flawed’ and criticised some of the language
The most blissfully satirical moment during Lord Butler’s press conference was his remark that Iraq contained ‘a lot of sand’. His point was that the fabled weapons of mass destruction might yet turn up, buried in the dunes. The former Cabinet secretary is known as a man of boundless optimism. It may be that all
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, asked by the Commons liaison committee if he would apologise for going to war with Iraq for the wrong reasons, said: ‘It has got rid of Saddam Hussein and he was a tyrant. I do not believe there was not a threat in relation to weapons of mass destruction.
Too much theory and not enough practice. Those were the words used this week by a lifelong shire Tory to describe what has become of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She meant that the two societies have become unhealthily
A fine old row broke out over an unpublished book, Off Whitehall, by Mr Derek Scott, a former economics adviser to Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. It detailed arguments between Mr Blair and Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. A spokesman for the Chancellor called it ‘deliberate peddling of lies’ and did
There was one thing surprisingly absent from last Monday’s handover of Iraq’s sovereignty by Paul Bremer, leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to Iyad Allawi, Iraq’s new Prime Minister. It wasn’t an extravagant ceremony involving a star-spangled banner lowered to the accompaniment of a military band and a tearful speech by Paul Bremer. It was
David Westwood, the chief constable of Humberside, was suspended by the Home Secretary David Blunkett after an inquiry by Sir Michael Bichard found ‘fundamental and systematic’ flaws in Humberside Constabulary’s handling of intelligence; the force had deleted details of several accusations of earlier sexual offences by Ian Huntley, who killed the Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells
It is a seldom acknowledged benefit of rail privatisation that for ten years we have not had a national rail strike. This happy situation will come to an end at 6.30 p.m. next Tuesday when, in the middle of the rush hour, 15,000 members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) walk out on
In local elections Labour did very badly, taking 26 per cent of the vote, compared with 29 per cent for the Liberal Democrats and 38 per cent for the Conservatives. ‘I am not saying we haven’t had a kicking,’ remarked Mr John Prescott, the deputy Prime Minister. In the European elections the UK Independence party
From Marks & Spencer to Network Rail, from Shell to Enron, this truth becomes daily more self-evident: it is not the poor bloody workers who cause the trouble, but the rich bloody management. The latest ‘senior management team’ to prove the point is a GCSE and A-level examination board. Last week the Assessment and Qualifications
Britain went to the polls to elect members for the European Parliament, an exercise which the Liberal Democrats had portrayed as a ‘referendum on Iraq’. Thousands of postal ballot papers went undelivered in Bolton, and two men were arrested in Oldham after claims of fraud. London re-elected a mayor. ‘I am back playing the guitar
On the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States in 1981, superstitious observers believed his fate was determined. Since 1840, they pointed out, every president who had been first elected in a year ending with a zero had died while in office, from William Harrison, who caught a
Minister Mr Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist who has lived in exile in Britain for decades; he was not the man America had chosen. Under the terms of a new draft resolution put to the United Nations, American and British forces would leave Iraq by early 2006, with the election of a new parliament. American
If you vote for the United Kingdom Independence Party you will cheer up Tony Blair. So said Michael Howard on Tuesday, and he is clearly right. The Conservatives are the only party (apart from Labour) that can remove Mr Blair from government; they have made impressive progress under Mr Howard’s leadership, and their momentum will
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said that political control of military action would pass to the Iraqi government after 30 June. Speaking at his regular monthly press conference, he said, ‘Let me make it a hundred per cent clear: after June 30 there will be the full transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi government.
Among the many organisations which donors to Comic Relief have generously helped to support is Tar Isteach, a Dublin-based group of former IRA terrorists led by Tommy Quigley, who was jailed in 1985 for three murders. The group recently received £80,000 for its programme of events supposedly aimed at rehabilitating prisoners released under the Good
‘The task of leadership when things are difficult is precisely not to cut and run,’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said at a press conference during a visit to Turkey. ‘We have the will, we have the leadership to do it, we will get the job done,’ he said, with reference to Iraq, but
A fence against terror Following Emma Williams’s article on the Israeli ‘wall’ (‘Trapped behind the wall’, 15 May), it’s time to talk facts, not fiction. The security fence is a temporary measure. It did not exist before the onslaught of terror attacks against Israel in September 2000 and it will be removed with the end