BBC leads Blair hate fest

I wondered how the Daily Mail would manage to report Tony Blair’s donation of the £4m advance for his book, A Journey, to the British Legion in a way that sought to diminish him. As usual, I under-estimated the sheer ingenuity, professionalism and malice brought to the challenge.

Getting the word “guilty” onto the front page (right) was a particularly fine achievement, even if most of the rest of the hate-fest was well trailed by the BBC yesterday and easily copied by other newspapers, including sadly The Independent, today.

I did not write about the donation yesterday, as there did not seem much useful that I could add to coverage of the story. A generous donation to a charity that helps injured soldiers to go back to service or to civilian life speaks for itself. If comment is required, it should only be that this is a fitting way to pay our respects to the professionalism of the vast majority of our service personnel, who are prepared to risk their lives for the sake of our national security, as judged by the democratic institutions of our government.

Instead we got bile, insinuation and a tedious rehearsal of the arguments from seven years ago. The theme, quickly set by the BBC quoting Peter Brierley, whose son Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley was killed not in Iraq, as it reported, but in a road accident in Kuwait in 2003, was that the donation was an a penance for what, it is implied, was obviously an error or worse.

Two minor and related points about the coverage. (Marbury says all that is really needed here.) One is that the BBC set the tone, and the newspapers followed, by quoting the Stop the War Coalition and interviewing its spokespeople as if it were representative of the range of respectable opinion in this country, which, wrongly in my view, regards the Iraq invasion as a mistake.

The coalition is a front for the Socialist Workers Party, in alliance with some Iraqis who are sorry to see the end of Saddam Hussein’s government. Neither part of the coalition believes in democracy; and neither part of it is “anti-war” in the sense that normal people understand the term. They just wanted Saddam to win it.

Some of the relations of soldiers killed in Iraq who have been quoted yesterday and today saying rash and offensive things about a Prime Minister who took a decision with which they disagreed, at least after the event, are associated with the coalition. One of the most active anti-war voices is Brierley, about whom Oliver Kamm and I have written in the past.

I am sure that some of the military families who continue to oppose the use of military force in 2003 have nothing to do with the Trotskyists and Saddamites who exploit their unhappiness, and utterly reject their views. But I believe that they are nevertheless in a small minority among service families, most of whom understand the concept of a professional Army, accept the decisions of the House of Commons even if they disagree with them, and abide by the sensible convention that the armed forces should stay out of politics.

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