Some thoughts about March
This is another collection of thoughts about a few of the events and controversies of the last few weeks, seen from the perspective of a committed supporter of the Labour Party who is also...
Category: International Affairs
Gordon Brown at the Iraq Inquiry: the unanswered killer question at last
The prime minister’s brave decision to give evidence at the Iraq Inquiry on 5 March provided the opportunity for the central question about the Iraq war to be put bluntly and persistently to the...
Famine relief aid to Ethiopia diverted? A misleading BBC allegation
A BBC programme broadcast today, and the advance publicity for it, give the impression that a huge proportion of the famine relief aid given by the international community to Ethiopia in the 1980s was...
The Blair defence: never take a risk
Tony Blair’s six hours at the witness table of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry yesterday gave us a bravura performance, allowing him to display all the old familiar dramatic and forensic skills that got him...
Iraq: the 45-minute warning and the dossier in three inquiries
The academic and historian Professor Geoffrey Warner has kindly authorised me to publish on this website a short but meticulously researched paper comparing the evidence given to three official inquiries — Butler, Hutton and...
Was the Iraq war legal? No, but the attorney-general didn’t change his mind
This week the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry starts to hear evidence on, among other things, the legality or illegality of the Iraq war. Among the key witnesses will be Sir Michael Wood, at the time...
Iraq: a plan is not a decision, Mr Murdoch
In its report of the secret letter of 25 March 2002 (a year before the US-UK attack on Iraq) from Jack Straw, then Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary, to Tony Blair, warning the prime minister...
We still need to know why Blair went to war when he did
When I commented in question-time after a recent London club discussion dinner about Tony Blair’s pre-Iraq prevarications[1] over the conditions in which he would commit Britain to war, the distinguished speaker (I later learned)...
Alastair Campbell at the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry: the gaping hole
It’s disappointing that the Chilcot Inquiry didn’t focus relentlessly on the gaping hole in Alastair Campbell’s defence of his and Blair’s record in Iraq, summed up here: “When it came to it, when the...
Ephems is AFK and wishes all its readers a — you know…
Ephems will shortly be intermittently AFK* for a variety of reasons so please don’t expect any blog posts or responses to comments for a while. Meanwhile we sit and shiver in sub-zero London and...