As every day passes, Lord Hutton's judgment that Tony Blair and his leading officials were men of integrity looks more and more flawed. Five years on, his verdict has fallen to pieces. Britain now urgently needs a full-scale inquiry into the causes and prosecution of the Iraq War.Unsurprisingly, Oborne says that:
The first step should be the publication - strenuously resisted by the Government - of minutes from two key Cabinet meetings in the build-up to war.
What are the essential qualities the British are entitled to expect in our national counter-terrorism chief?
Here, surely, are a few: sound judgment, coolness under pressure, good intuition, total discretion, the ability to sift through evidence without leaping to conclusions and mental alertness.
There is no evidence that Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, who is in charge of keeping Britain's streets safe from the Al Qaeda menace, possesses a single one of these vital characteristics.
The "war on terror" continues to have an intensely damaging effect on the mainstream British media – and in turn on British politics.The conference links the reporting of western-led wars with the media's treatment of muslims in Britain. I'm not sure I buy the connection but that old lefty Peter Oborne will talk about the latter point and what he has to say is very important and very welcome.
I have increasingly come to believe that the likes of Peter Oborne and Fraser Nelson did not condemn “spin” and “cronyism” because they genuinely find them distasteful. They seem to have no problem with them in Tories. No: these concepts apparently were, for great chunks of the British press, just a partisan stick with which to disingenuously beat a Labour government.
