The abuse of power

The impeachment of Tony Blair would form a fitting end to a prime ministership which opened with the promise to be ‘purer than pure’, but ended in the arrogant deception of the British people. This ancient form of trial, which has lain disused but not defunct in the armoury with which we defend our liberties, is the means by which Parliament can humble a chief minister who has arrogated grotesque quantities of power and has treated with contempt the constitutional forms which ought to have restrained him.

Eminent among those forms or conventions or traditions is the dictum that ministers must not lie to or mislead the House of Commons. This is what Mr Blair did repeatedly and flagrantly as he sought over a period of many months to persuade the nation of the case for invading Iraq. Nor has he ever apologised for the sustained duplicity with which he advanced his bogus arguments for the impending war. He treats Parliament as a nullity, rather as he treats his own Cabinet and his own party.

We recognise that Mr Blair has a number of lines of defence open to him. He may claim that he erred only in matters of detail, and protest that nobody can want to plunge yet again into any question including the words ‘weapons of mass destruction’. He may rely, in other words, on the belief that most of us are heartily sick of the subject, and are disposed to let it drop.

But when one reads the evidence presented by Adam Price, the Welsh Nationalist MP who has assembled the case for impeaching Mr Blair, this defence no longer seems tenable. For here we find the whole inglorious catalogue of the Prime Minister’s bogus assertions laid bare, and are bound to feel that such prolonged and deliberate deception deserves to be punished.