Barely a week into the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq, two ex-mandarins’ evidence has pretty definitively acquitted Tony Blair of one of the gravest charges against him, and convicted him of another. In the testimony...
With the aim of assisting the Chilcot Inquiry with its preparations for questioning Tony Blair about how he led us into war with Iraq, I have put some key texts on my website —...
The EU’s appointments of the Belgian prime minister Herman van Rompuy (what comical names these foreigners do have![1]) as permanent Chairman (“President”) of the European Council, and (subject to the approval of the European...
In an eloquent article on Our Kingdom, David Marquand, the academic, former Labour MP and later chief adviser (1977-78) to Roy Jenkins as President of the European Commission, laments that the Britain he’s proud...
Last month I submitted a letter to the Guardian pointing out that the same day’s issue had wrongly described Tony Blair’s job in the middle east as that of ‘peace envoy’. What happened next...
It’s worth trying to identify some of the confusions that have arisen in the controversy over the action of the normally mild-mannered Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, in dismissing Professor David Nutt from his post...
The sudden burst of media interest in the fading possibility of Tony Blair being chosen to be something erroneously described as “President of Europe” has given rise to an extraordinary number of misconceptions and...
There’s been no shortage of strongly argued reactions to the BBC programme Question Time, starring the malodorous British National Party’s leader Nick Griffin. (You can still watch the whole thing online here.) We’re forcefully...
Last August I posted a piece here about the scandalous injustice of “indeterminate sentences for public protection” (IPPs): it’s at https://barder.com/696. It prompted 37 comments, several of which starkly illustrate the human cost of...
As every UK newspaper-reader and television-watcher ought to, but probably doesn’t, know, since the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876, the judicial work of the House of Lords has been done only by the 12 most...