Wednesday 27 April
Glorious day - but that's all I can remember of it; the rest has been wiped from my mind by subsequent events ie the leak of more of the Attorney General's advice. The evening is spent tracking down Reg for comment, answering phone to journos, keeping in touch with the reaction of the Military Families Against the War who are seeking legal advice themselves, and putting out a press release. Oh and drafting letters to Howard and Kennedy asking them to give us their parties' votes.
It now seems that the gap between the advice of 7 March and the summary of 17 March is politically unbridgeable - whatever the PM says, however the 'facts' changed in that time, he took the country to war (or rather invasion) without the Cabinet and Parliament having seen the equivocal advice.
There comes a point when argument and counter-argument, or, in this case, excuses such as 'I had to take a hard decision and I took it' or 'isn't the world a better place without Saddam?', just don't work any more. There comes a point when you wake up one morning and your credibility has evaporated - there is just no more credit left in the account.
We now have the unprecedented situation where this has happened to the PM in the middle of an election campaign, and in his own constituency he is being challenged by a man who is there to bring him to account on the very same issue. Sedgefield has suddenly become the place where half the people in the country want to live, or at least vote.
- ©Reg Keys, 2005 -
