Smile Don't Frown

The Guardian is a funny paper. Last Monday it reported that Carne Ross, a British diplomat who used to work at the UN, said that the threat allegedly posed by Iraq was “intentionally and substantially exaggerated in public government documents… This process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies.” [1]

Was there a front page with the headline ‘LIES! Two million people were right and over one million are dead’? No.

In yesterday’s paper Marina Hyde was allowed to say of the man who collated the lies: ‘…Alastair Campbell! The man a high court judge notoriously dismissed as an unreliable witness, whose famously fastidious attention to detail was such that when it came to making the case for the most serious foreign policy decision since Suez, he was perfectly content to sling out some 12-year-old guff he’d lifted straight off the internet.’ [2]  In the ‘Review’ section Caroline Lucas MP gets away with quoting a cheeky line from a book (A View from the Foothills by Chris Mullin): “…the spooks are livid about the sixth-form essay on Saddam’s chemical arsenal cooked up by No 10”. [3]  But…Alastair Campbell – yes, the man whose lies led to the deaths of over a million people – is allowed space in The Guardian to talk about books he likes too! Joseph O’Connor recommends The Alastair Campbell Diaries, and his comment that it is an ‘acclaimed masterwork’ by a ‘leading English storyteller’ is amusing, but like Marina Hyde’s piece, frustratingly toothless. Yes, yes, I know it’s just a book recommendation, and I know Hyde’s is a jaunty opinion piece, but wouldn’t it be refreshing if people in the media were as honest and direct as Carne Ross? Alastair Campbell is a liar responsible for mass murder. Send him to The Hague. And Blair and Brown and Straw and…breathe…All this anger can make one ill.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/12/carne-ross-chilcot-inquiry

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/16/peter-mandelson-memoirs-new-labour

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/17/summer-reading-coalition-books

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