The BBC was doing its job – bring back Gilligan
So there he goes again. The cordite is carried off by the breeze. The dust settles and out of the crater creeps the Prime Minister, beaming his chipmunk grin. He acknowledges the cheers of his back benches, flicks an invisible speck from his irreproachable Paul Smith sleeve and saunters off back to Downing Street.
It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.
For weeks we have been told that his extermination at the hands of Hutton has been as predetermined as the convergence of the Titanic and the iceberg. And now what? The judge has decided that the Prime Minister behaved with complete honour and candour throughout.
Blair, Hoon, Scarlett, the whole lot of them, have been sprayed with more whitewash than a Costa Brava timeshare. Hutton has succumbed to blindness of Nelsonian proportions. As snow-jobs go, this beats the Himalayas.
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Question: Weapons of Mass Destruction, Iraq and the legality of the war (to Geoff Hoon, Secretary of State for Defence)
Mr. Boris Johnson (Henley) (Con): Given that a vital part of the reconstruction of Iraq is presumably the discovery and removal of weapons of mass destruction, may I remind the Secretary of State of an answer that he gave to me more than six months ago, when I asked him whether the failure to find weapons of mass destruction undermined the legality of the case for war? He gave a four-word answer, which was, “They will be found.” Does the right hon. Gentleman still believe that? If not, does he not think that it is about time that the public saw all the legal opinion upon which the Government based the case for war?
The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr. Geoffrey Hoon): I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his ingenuity, but he needs to check more carefully the precise circumstances in which military action was taken. It was taken on the basis of resolution 1441. We know that Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction previously; 1441 was given by the United Nations to Saddam Hussein as a last opportunity to co-operate with the international community. The coalition forces judged that he had failed to take that last opportunity. I am sure that a fair-minded observer of these affairs, as the hon. Gentleman is, would reach that conclusion.
Question: Commons Townlands hospital in Henley (to Dr Stephen Ladyman, Junior Minister, Department of Health)
Mr. Boris Johnson (Henley) (Con): Speech therapy is among the many services provided by the head injuries unit at the Townlands hospital, in Henley. How is it possible, at a time when this Government are allegedly pumping umpteen billions into the NHS, that it should be seriously contemplated that that hospital close? Will the Minister do everything in his power to live up to his Government’s promises and stop the closure of this valued and much-loved local hospital?
Dr. Ladyman: The reconfiguration of hospital services, as the hon. Gentleman perfectly well knows, is a matter for local decision. We have devolved these matters to local areas so that local people can be involved in local decisions. If I were in a position to ask the hon. Gentleman the sort of question that he has just asked me, I would ask him how many speech and language therapists there would be if we carried out his plans to cut spending by 20 per cent.
The hole in the heart of the euro
In the course of the long afternoons of my youth, when I was meant to be reporting on EU agricultural meetings, I brooded on this gnomic Letzeburgish. After deep thought I decided that Sid Gudder Ding Mid Bofferding means, roughly speaking, that you are on to a good thing with Bofferding.
And if ever there was a group of people conspicuously on to a good thing, it is the hordes of lawyers, from all over Europe, who will be descending on Luxembourg to drink the place dry, Bofferding included.
For the next six months the taxpayer will be coughing up the per diems of even more of m’learned friends than will be engaged in the Shipman inquiry and these lawyers will be disputing a case that is simultaneously ludicrous and potentially epoch-making.
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The totality is – the Prime Minister lied
Right. OK then! Now I get it (slap forehead). How could I have been so slow on the uptake? I understood until yesterday that the Prime Minister had been caught out in a great big fat steaming smoking-pants lie. I thought it was clear to the meanest intelligence that Tony Blair had authorised the naming of poor Dr David Kelly to the media, and then pretended otherwise.
But it turns out that we haven’t been paying enough attention to the “totality” of what he said. No, no, he kept saying yesterday, as he wriggled before Michael Howard like a kebabbed witchetty grub. Only the “totality” is operative, said Blair, irresistibly recalling the performance of Nixon’s spokesman during Watergate. Well, let us indeed examine the totality of the Prime Minister’s words and deeds, and discover how we came by this misunderstanding. They total up to quite a lot.
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