To a dinner party, then

With Charles Nevin, Liv O’Hanlon, and Richard Dowden, and Penny Mansfield, old Indie friends and their spouses: in fact Richard and Penny more or less have to stay married, since she runs One to One, which used to be known as the Marriage Research Centre: it’s a think-tank set up by the Catholic psychologist Jack Dominian. Liv, frustrated in her efforts to adopt a child when she married Charles, founded a charity to make adoption easier. She’s reasonable on both sides of the family, you see: Irish and Norwegian. Dowden is one of the best journalists I have ever shared a paper with. He had two perfect anecdotes.


The first involved Charles Meatbeater and Bobby Block, now the Wall Street Journal’s Africa expert. If I say that Bobby has the soul of a photographer, writing journalists will understand: for others, the essential photographer nature is conveyed by another anecdote: he came back from a Balkan war with a new Serb girlfriend and took some friends out to dinner to meet her. He was clearly besotted with her, and talked so much about this, and about his other adventures, that it wasn’t until the coffee stage that anyone noticed the poor girl spoke no English at all. Of course Bobby hadn’t mentioned this. It would have interrupted the dramatic flow.
Leadbeater was then the Assistant Editor of the Independent, fresh from Demos. He dressed at the cutting edge of fashion, even if his mind couldn’t always keep up, and so he was the first man in Canary Wharf to wear combat type trousers, with zips all over the place where there used to be only seams. Seeing him approaching the foreign desk. Block leaned across to Dowden and delivered judgement in a conversational bellow: “You can never trust a man who wears zips with no prick behind them.”
Then there was a story about the croquet match in Addis Ababa, during the last or the last but one coup. With two other journalists, he took refuge in the British Embassy: “We had to step over two corpses to get it, but once we were there, everything was fine. We played croquet on the lawn. It sounds ghastly, but there was nothing else to do.” It was the punch line that made it a great journalist’s anecdote. “What was really terrible was that fucking Kiley won the game.”
Richard actually took four miserable Iraqi conscripts prisoner in the first Gulf War, and became a little famous for this. But he is full of despair about this one.
He pointed out Matthew Parris’ completely wonderful article in the Times: not the one which asks is Blair mad? but this, more reflective if not more serious piece:

The Governments of America, Britain, Germany, Russia and France would not have got themselves into the various positions they find themselves in today if they had known the likely outcome of their actions. For within the space of but a few months Nato is perhaps fatally wounded; the EU is bleeding internally; the British Government’s hopes of a referendum on a single currency have been pole-axed; bilateral relations between Britain and France, and between France and the United States, have been badly damaged; Germany’s transatlantic relationships have been knocked off balance; a trade war threatens; the chances of a world economic recession have increased; the UN Security Council has been horribly weakened; the commitment of the United States to the very idea of the United Nations has been called into question; Islamists and Islamophobes have both been inflamed; relations between the Arab world and the West have been torn; and decades of patient confidence building of many kinds have been pulled apart.

Forget even the question of whether a war was wise: it is surely clear that for Washington to have embarked on it unilaterally would have been preferable to the failed attempt at co-ordination. Among the questions which therefore arise — none of them with the slightest bearing on the moral estimability of any living politician — are these:

Is it true that the US Administration had settled on an invasion of Iraq long
before Resolution 1441? If true, did the American political machine generate the grave internal debate warranted by such an idea? If not, why not?

Did the governments of the European allies know of any such debate, or any such long-standing US intention? If they did not, how did their intelligence networks fail to pick it up? If they did suspect it, why did they not co-ordinate a response and give Washington fair (and private) warning of what that response was likely to be?

Why had the British Government such seemingly scant intelligence of German, Russian and French thinking when our Prime Minister made it his mission to arrange the UN resolution which came to be known as 1441? Or, if it did have such intelligence, why did he lead the US Administration into a belief that differences within Europe and on the Security Council could be reconciled?

Once 1441 had been agreed, why did our Government not deduce from the difficulty of agreeing it that it would be unwise to encourage talk of a ?second? resolution? Having encouraged such talk, why did the Prime Minister continue to sound so confident that such a resolution could eventually be agreed? What private assurance did he have from the French that they were bluffing about a veto, or, if he had none, who advised him that they were probably bluffing? Had Paris no means of privately warning our Prime Minister of French intentions? Was a warning given, and if not, why not?

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