Faux sincerity. Weasel words. The Spin King strikes again

One of the most insidious aspects of Tony Blair’s governments was their cynical reliance on ‘spin’. This was personnified by his mendacious and Machiavellian Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell, who, though unelected, was more powerful than most Cabinet ministers.

Spin served Blair particularly well in foreign policy as he took Britain to war five times in six years – more occasions than any other post-war prime minister.

Most shamefully, having already struck a secret deal with President George Bush, he embarked on a disgraceful year-long campaign of spin and lies to try to win parliamentary approval for the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003.

This followed interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and an earlier involvement in Iraq – many of which plunged the world into chaos from which it still suffers.

Sadly, it seems that Blair’s addiction to spin remains undimmed as the permatanned multi-millionaire ex-Prime Minister travels the world in a private jet, advising squalid tyrants and looking for his next money-making venture.

How this sits happily on the conscience of a man who told us that he prayed when deciding whether or not to send British troops to Iraq, heaven only knows.

But we witnessed at the weekend another exercise in news-manipulation of which his old mucker Alastair Campbell would be very proud.

Blair has been aware for a long time of the broad thrust of any criticisms of him likely to be made in the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war – currently six years late and £10 million in the making.

For the ex-Labour PM and other figures expected to be criticised for their role have had plenty of opportunities for them and their lawyers to challenge and deflect imputations of culpability.

As the King of Spin, Blair grabbed the chance to try to exonerate himself – full in the knowledge that his reputation and political legacy risks forever being blighted by the widespread belief that he took Britain into an illegal war which resulted in the deaths of 179 British troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

His latest performance – dressed up as a confessional – was in an interview with an ideologically-sympathetic American TV presenter who himself said, in 2003, that ‘any stirring of the [Iraqi] pot is good’.

WeLL the pot was more than ‘stirred’. The Iraqi kitchen and house burned down and the fire spread to neighbouring Syria and Turkey. As a consequence, the power of the Iranian ayatollahs is at its zenith and Russia is exploiting the mess by sending its warplanes to the region. A vicious sectarian war threatens to engulf the entire Middle east, part of which is controlled by the IS death cult, the world’s first terror state.

Of course, not even an ‘ apology’ is straightforward in the case of trained barrister Tony Blair, who once, without irony, described himself as ‘straight talking kinda guy’.

There was no reference in his Cnn interview about the recent revelation that he had committed Britain to war in Iraq at least a month before he met Bush at his ranch in Texas in April 2002, where they are believed to have committed themselves to military action, though there were no witnesses.

Only last week, we learnt from a newly-unearthed memo from the then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, written a month earlier to Bush, that ‘on Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary…’

This means that Blair was privately committed to war, which belied his public position that he was going down the diplomatic route to try to avoid it, with the efforts of Un inspectors under Hans Blix to neutralise the supposed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ threat from Saddam.

The fact is – as we have subsequently learnt – that those ‘ weapons of mass destruction did not exist.

Blair’s ingrained ability for media manipulation was also praised in the Powell memo. The Secretary of State told Bush that the British Prime Minister would ‘ present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause’.

Close examination of Blair’s supposed mea culpa to Cnn shows that, essentially, he is only ‘apologising’ for the mistakes of others.

For example: ‘I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong’. This adroitly shifts the blame squarely onto MI6 and GCHQ which gathered the intelligence on Saddam. Thus, scant blame is laid at the door of politicians such as himself who analysed it and then served up that notorious ‘dodgy dossier’ version to the public which he had demanded, replete with ‘proof’ that Saddam had ‘ weapons of mass destruction’ capable of destroying British bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes of an order from the Iraqi leader.

The twisting of military of intelligence in this way is one of the worst things any democratic government can do. But it was just another day’s work for Blair and Campbell – adjusting any facts that ‘conflicted’ with their wishes.

It is not just in his analysis of the run-up to the war that Blair is now using such sleight of hand.

His historical revisionism – if that’s not too fair a phrase for such an archmanipulator of the truth – is on display again when dealing with the catastrophic failure to manage the aftermath of the Iraq invasion.

Again, he shifts the blame from himself to the senior military figures responsible for planning the invasion and occupation, where for sure, there were errors aplenty.

How typical of Blair – who comes from the liberal Islington lawyer class which thinks it has a monopoly of life’s good intentions – to apologise for ‘our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime.’ note that he uses the word ‘our’ twice, rather than ‘my’. And, of course, he adds firmly: ‘But I find it hard to apologise for removing Saddam.’

So, one moment we are offered an apparent mea culpa; but then it’s instantly followed up with a non-apology.

What’s more, by refusing to apologise for the removal of Saddam (which swiftly resulted in Iraq sliding into anarchy and Saddam’s Baathist henchmen joining the Al Qaeda terror organisation which launched attacks on Britain), he is in denial that it was Saddam’s ‘removal’ that was mainly responsible for the ensuing chaos.

On another front, Blair uses the Cnn interview with Fareed Zakaria to try to neutralise the charge expected from Chilcot that he and George Bush bear responsibility for the rise of IS.

He SAyS: ‘ I think there are elements of truth in that. Of course you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.’

This ranks as one of the understatements of the year.

Without doubt, IS is a direct result of an Iraqi political system that left many minority Sunnis feeling aggrieved after the majority Shia took over the country.

Forget Blair’s weaselly phrase ‘elements of truth’, it was the whole truth that the actions of Blair and Bush led to the establishment of IS.

This latest brazen exercise in spin from such a master of the dark arts as Tony Blair – using typical faux sincerity – is a chilling reminder of the deceit that lies behind much of modern politics.

But more specifically, it will never absolve Tony Blair for responsibility for the biggest foreign policy disaster of our times.