Aaronovitch works out his notice with the Jonathan Aitken defence Part IV
Today's column returns to the theme of that one a month ago, that Blair was not a liar, in which he was forced to apologise for completely misrepresenting David Kelly's position (as read in the Hutton Report).Today's might require further ones. His main mistake is to start talking about the Scott Inquiry, which of course was the one held in the early 1990s into the Thatcher government's sales of arms to Iraq (finding -- they were all sold through Jordan), rather than the Hutton Inquiry (or Butler Report).
I made the case that the report of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as the Scott inquiry concluded, was consistent with the picture of Iraqi intentions and capabilities that Blair presented to parliament and the nation
Most of it is on a similar theme to the wrong column, except it begins even more bizarrely. Aaranovitch tells a story about Jonathan Aitken, where someone said he was a liar, and George Carman said:
'We are all liars,' Carman, who had acted for the newspaper, reproved them gently. 'His mistake was to do it in court.'
And you can guess the rest, if we shouldn't call Aitken a liar, we should be careful calling Blair a liar too.
Aaranovitch complains that the media now calls Blair a liar at the drop of the hat, but this certainly isn't true of the TV channels, and indeed on Ch.4 News last night the general implication was that it was going too far for politicans to say that. The only people calling Blair a liar in the media last week were Conservative politicans and Conservative newspapers. Aaranovitch has had nothing to say about either all election campaign.
This is all symptomatic of the panic the "decent left" have got themselves into this election campaign. They have flit between saying that Labour are going to lose their majority because selfish middle-class people are unimpressed with the war, and if such people were as decent as themselves they would forget their reservations and vote Labour (not this doesn't apply to anyone who is going to vote Conservative because they don't like immigrants, or public spending; no, they must be courted), and looking at the opinion polls, which show Labour on course for a large majority, and thus arguing that the war was not having much effect.
posted by Matthew @ 5/01/2005 08:54:00 AM
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