Gordon Brown should apologise

At last: an admission from a senior member of the government that it lied through its teeth and misled the public in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, back in the early spring of 2003. Or at least that’s how I read Gordon Brown’s comments about the way in which New Labour used intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s military threat to the West. Perhaps I am misinterpreting our next Prime Minister, or simply overstating the case, as usual. I’ve rung Gordon to clarify but neither he nor any of his monkeys have got back to me yet.

Brown is widely reported to have said the following: ‘I would like to see all security and intelligence analysis independent of the political process and I have asked the Cabinet Secretary to do that.’ This was interpreted as a swift poke to the eye of the current Prime Minister and, as the Daily Telegraph put it, ‘an attempt [on the part of Brown] to distance himself from Mr Blair’s disastrous Iraq legacy’.

But it is a little more even than that, surely. The fact that Gordon Brown has asked a civil servant to ensure that in future intelligence reports remain independent from the political process implies that they are not independent now. In other words, they are and have been open to manipulation, exaggeration, overstatement and distortion by the government. Further, Brown’s aspiration that such security analysis should be independent in future and that ‘mistakes were made’ in this context by the government suggests that this — or something like it — is precisely what he accepts happened in the lead-up to the war against Iraq.   

In which case a bouquet of flowers should be on its way now from No.