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John Williams, the then press secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote the "first draft" of the so-called "dodgy dossier" on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Now, after concerted campaigning, the Government has finally released this "first draft" - only for David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to say that it's nothing of the sort.
Williams's draft doesn't have the key stuff about Saddam Hussein being able to target Britain in 45 minutes, or the long-since discredited cobblers about uranium being sourced from West Africa, but it does paint up a picture of an aggressive state with a capability for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Is Miliband's bizarre statement that this was not the basis for the later dossier meant to suggest that more information will somehow come to light showing there was sound intelligence for these claims? It hardly seems likely.
Williams says he was approached to write it in August 2002. But he was hardly working from scratch: a dossier compiled to put the case for going to war with Iraq was reported to be going the rounds as early as March of that year. It was being booted back and forth from the Cabinet Office, to the Joint Intelligence Committee to the Foreign Office, and no one was very happy with it. But even those of us who only watched TV footage of Hans Blix's UN Weapons Inspectorate blundering about in the Iraqi desert could see there was unlikely to be any stockpile of inter-continental ballistic missiles.
Still, who cares about the Williamses - and for that matter, the Campbells - of this world? They were just the little people who greased the wheels of the juggernaut that has crushed hundreds of thousands of people to death.
No, the more grotesque spectacle is that now afforded by the current Foreign Secretary, who goes on robustly defending a policy that isn't working, hasn't worked and never could have. In his sleek suits and smooth dark plumage, Miliband looks like a vulture feeding on the neo-cons' bloated corpse. Where others see Afghanistan as a failed state, the Panglossian Foreign Secretary sees a burgeoning democracy. In a speech last week to honour Aung San Suu Kyi, there was Miliband, searching for a way to distance-himself from realpolitik, while still robustly countenancing military support for what he describes - in a chilling echo of the current US policy in Iraq - as the "civilian surge".
This refusal to face up to the human cost of the Iraq war, and to the lies and evasions that justified the invasion, represents the moral rot at the core of Gordon Brown's government. Brown, notoriously, cannot bear to do anything unless he knows what the consequences will be - and so he directs his foreign policy puppet to carry on mugging, as this end-of-the-pier show staggers towards its bitter end.
