INTERNATIONAL BLAIRISM WILL SIMPLY FADE AWAY
by John O'Sullivan
Gulf News
May 1, 2005

He usually ends up shouting it at them. It has also been the unspoken motto of Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain's election campaign which climaxes on Thursday.

Unspoken until the last few days, that is. Since then Blair has been shouting it at the voters.

The war in question is not Fawlty's Second World War but the Iraq intervention which still rumbles on. Blair had good reasons for not mentioning the war: the general public now thinks it was a mistake and Blair's own Labour party is badly split on the issue.

The issue, moreover, is personal.

The prime minister is accused of having misled parliament and people over a number of issues, in particular of having ignored legal advice from the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, that intervening in Iraq would be contrary to international law.

That particular charge has now exploded in the middle of the campaign. Last weekend the Mail on Sunday published leaks from the attorney-general's original legal advice to the Blair Government.

It consisted of 13 pages. It had been delivered to Blair on March 7, 2003 and it laid out six reasons why an invasion of Iraq could be illegal.

Among them: that the UN (not the United States or the United Kingdom) was the appropriate body to decide whether Saddam Hussain was in breach of UN resolutions on weapons of mass destruction; that the UN had not authorised military action against Saddam; and that a second UN resolution would therefore be necessary to legalise hostilities.

These are substantial arguments (at least from the standpoint of international lawyers). They plainly argue against joining the US intervention. And nothing happened in the days immediately following to cast doubt on them.

Ten days later, on March 17, however, Lord Goldsmith said in a written parliamentary answer that war against Iraq was legal after all. Next day the Foreign Office legal adviser resigned in protest at this.

What had happened between March 7 and March 17 to change Goldsmith's mind? No one really knows. The rumour mill has it that Goldsmith was "leaned on" by Blair's close political ally, Lord Falconer, on May 13 to change his advice.

Legal advice

Denying this, however, Goldsmith asserts that he arrived independently at his final legal advice and that he has not changed his mind since then.

And there the controversy would gradually evaporate if it were not for one other fact: Blair and the government have repeatedly said that the attorney-general had "always" regarded the Iraq war as legal and that the attorney-general's advice "was clear throughout and we acted upon it".

Those assurances now look distinctly dubious. What political impact will they have, however? As so often in life the likely fallout does not correspond with just deserts.

Only one party is likely to benefit directly from this mini-scandal: namely, the third-party Liberal Democrats who were against the war from the start and remain so today.

According to the pollsters, they may gain a small number of younger middle-class voters who might otherwise have stuck with Blair. But most voters have already factored Iraq into their voting intentions both for and against Blair.

The Lib-Dems will gain two or three points at most. Labour will suffer from the revival of the "untrustworthiness" factor, but not by very much. That has been factored in too.

Iraq also belongs to the past. Elections centre much more around the question "what have you done for me lately?"

The main Labour appeal is that they are delivering a strong economic future. Blair personally may lose, however. He was already a personal phenomenon with a short remaining shelf-life. And the leak of the attorney-general's advice shortens it still further.

Many Labour voters who opposed the Iraq war will return to the fold because Blair is likely to be replaced by a new leader, namely Gordon Brown, who is more reflective of his party.

Labour MPs in the next parliament will sense that he is now a handicap rather than an asset. He is unlikely to serve as prime minister for the full term he promises.

His legacy within the Labour Party will be a determination not to join in US military adventures without UN approval ever again.

International Blairism will simply fade away. Paradoxically, however, it is the Tories who are in the most painful fix. They supported the Iraq war and they still maintain stoutly that it was correct.

But no opposition could resist such a powerful temptation to attack the prime minister for misleading the country. (Here is the relevant passage in their manifesto: "Mr Blair misrepresented intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq … It is nevertheless the case that a democratic Iraq would be a powerful beacon of hope in a troubled part of the world. So we believe Britain must remain committed to rebuilding Iraq and allowing democracy to take hold.")

But this mixed message is a complicated and difficult sell. However unfairly, it makes the Tories look shifty.

And it tempts them to use arguments for instance, that Blair was wrong to override the attorney-general's advice that have distinctly anti-conservative implications in foreign policy.

Instead of concentrating on the prime minister's "untrustworthiness", Tory leader Michael Howard would do better to argue that it was Blair's (and his party's) left-wing deference to international law and the UN that got him into trouble.

Dubious

He should point out that it was because Labour MPs insisted on UN approval for the Iraq intervention that Blair and the attorney-general had to manufacture a dubious international legal brief and to exaggerate the urgency of the WMD threat.

And he should insist that a future Tory government would cut the pretensions of international lawyers and the UN down to size and base its foreign policy firmly on the national interests of the UK and its allies.

That would be a high-risk stance. But it is a defensible one. And it reflects what Tories actually think. Attacking Blair's "lies" on Iraq, by contrast, suggests that the Tories were themselves deceived by Blair into a war about which they now have mixed feelings.

It thus casts doubt on their judgment and offers a reason for some middle-class voters to switch from them to the Lib-Dems. And if that happens, the Tories could end up more damaged than Blair by the Iraq war.

As Lord Bowen presciently wrote over 100 years ago: The rain it raineth on the just/And also on the unjust fella/But more upon the just because/The unjust has the just's umbrella."

John O'Sullivan, former adviser to Lady Thatcher and former editorial page editor of the Post, is editor-at-large of the National Review and a member of Benador Associates.