well, since it’s Boris, more scampering away than scuttling. Still, it is interesting to read that he should have known, within ten days of the invasion, that we were doomed. It’s not quite how he saw it at the time: “I don’t know how [Blair] will get out of the current impasse. But as I squint ahead, I dimly see, amid much tribulation, a victory, the end of Saddam, great Iraqi rejoicing and vindication. And will the Labour Party love him again, for having proved them silly and wrong?”
Or, six months into the occupation, when he wrote: “plenty of BBC producers probably opposed the war. If it had been up to them, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. The Iraqi people would not now be celebrating with exuberant and unmistakable joy the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. Those two thugs would still be stubbing out their Cohibas on the skins of their victims, and still causing the population to cringe past their villas in fear of being shot.” A sentence best savoured in the knowledge that in Baghdad today you must cringe past your own house in fear of being shot, as well as past everybody else’s.
On second grubbings through the archives, I may have done Boris a slight injustice. He at least was prepared to score partisan points off Blair very early: from the Telegraph of April 8 2003 in parliament:
Boris Johnson, Conservative MP for Henley, asked Mr Hoon whether the conflict would be deemed illegal if the weapons of mass destruction were not discovered. Mr Hoon replied: “We will find them.”
Allied forces now had access to all parts of Basra and UK troops had been “warmly received by crowds of local people, demonstrating that the coalition is winning the confidence and support of the Iraqi population”, he added.
Earlier, at a briefing for journalists, Mr Hoon said that the British troops established in Basra would not be leaving. “They are now in Basra to stay,” he said.
He said that coalition forces would still have a job to flush out “irregulars, thugs and fanatics” who had attached themselves to the regime.
In fact, Johnson has been pretty thoroughly against the way since Abu Ghraib, when he started one article thus:
“Just remind me, I said, turning to a colleague and friend, what is the case for this war in Iraq? You voted for it. I voted for it. We both spoke in favour of it. We both saw the merits of sticking with the Americans. We both believed that it was a good idea to get rid of Saddam.
But is there not a time when we have to admit, in all intellectual honesty, that our positions have been overwhelmed by countervailing data? How on Earth can we now defend what seems – admittedly at some distance – to be a total bloody shambles?