Phone in

I caught a bit of the national phone-in today to the party leaders. To be honest it seemed like a bit of a waste of time. Generally callers confronted them with personal anecdotes which (and for once I agreed with Blair) could not be usefully generalised. In addition, lacking the briefing and research that political interviewers normally have, they could be fobbed off with any old rubbish by the politicians.

I was particularly disappointed with the lucky punter who got to confront Blair about Iraq. 'There's lots of questions unanswered.', he asserted. Well ask me one, retorted Blair. The best he could manage was 'Where were the WMDs', an underarm ball that Blair battered effortlessly into the long grass. 'Four inquiries into the misuse of intelligence.', 'Can't apologise for removing Saddam', '8 million Iraqis voted' etc. etc. I think he even slipped in a 'let the Tories in by the back door'.

I'm unlikely to ever get to put my questions but if I did, they would be:

• Why didn't you read the Foreign Office legal advice?
  
• Why wasn't the full Attorney General's advice circulated to the cabinet as required by parliamentary protocol?
  
• Why do you use the removal of Saddam to justify the war, when you said yourself that regime change alone could not be justification, and the Attorney General warned you that it could not be?
  
• Why did you allow the Attorney General's opinion of 17 March 2003 to be represented as a summary of the advice of 7 March 2003, when it bore little relation in content or conclusion?
  
• What exactly was the 'material breach' of UN resolutions that Iraq was committing on 17 March 2003, and what evidence did you have to conclude this?
  
• How could Jack Straw be justified in saying there was 'no question about the legality' when the Foreign Office had concluded that a UN Security Council decision was a necessity, and almost everyone except the Attorney General and the US agreed with them?
  
• When the Intelligence told you that Iraq may have a few weapons, why did you tell the country that they definitely had major stockpiles?
  
• If rebuilding Iraq is such a success, why has the number of children under 5 that are suffering from malnutrition doubled since occupation?
  
• You said that if you became an electoral liability to the Labour party you would resign, why are you still here?
  

That should be enough to be getting along with. Why do they matter?

As Rory Bremner said "If these things really don't matter to us, we have no right to live in a democracy."