Six weeks or so ago I was bemused to receive a furious letter from John Lloyd, contributing editor to Prospect. It accused me of various crimes and misdemeanours, and demanded reparation. I was pondering how to respond when, shortly after lunch, the phone rang. It was Lloyd again, still in a state of outrage.
He was aggrieved by an article I had written for the Mail on Sunday in the aftermath of the Iraq war. This article argued that Downing Street was using military victory over Saddam to repackage the prime minister as a wizened, grey-haired war hero who had been to hell and back. I felt that, at the end of a war in which 31 British soldiers (at that time) and thousands of others had died, this was indecent and improper.
There was plenty of evidence to back the thesis. Within days of the end of the war Tony Blair gave a vainglorious interview with the Sun, in which he made the questionable claim that he had been ready to quit had he lost the pre-conflict Commons vote.
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