Diary – 7 June 2003

Long before there was any public outcry that Tony Blair had ‘lied’ about weapons of mass destruction, intelligence sources were worried and some, privately, said so. Perhaps these are the people that John Reid calls ‘rogue elements’, but their complaints were very sober and unrogueish. They were worried about both the dossiers on WMD, but for different reasons. The first dossier, drafted by John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was, in their view, respectable, but Mr Blair was unwise to have tried to publish such a thing and the Foreign Office should have stopped him. Publication inevitably politicised the intelligence and bowdlerised it in order to avoid compromising sources, and so made it seem weak. Mr Blair, longing to make everything seem strong, oversold what he had, in his foreword and elsewhere. The second dossier, in these people’s view, was much worse. It was not reputable or properly sourced. It was cobbled together at No. 10 and was, effectively, misleading. Whitehall seems united in blaming Alastair Campbell for this. None of this shows that there are no WMD or that Mr Blair lied. But it does show New Labour as manipulative, short-termist and now, with Dr Reid, paranoid. Is there any material difference between Tony Blair and Harold Wilson?

Here is a way of avoiding the sort of situation in which Tony Martin found himself. I have come across it in the memoirs of Nimrod (C.J. Apperley), the 19th-century hunting journalist. He writes of a country neighbour of his known as ‘bloody Brown’:

His garden had been frequently robbed of much of its choicest fruit, and he, being an old soldier, having served at the siege of Havanna …was one not to be trifled with on such occasions…. He applied to a dissecting room in London and obtained the leg of a human being, fresh cut from the body, on which he put a stocking and a shoe, and then suspended it in a man-trap over his garden-wall.