Difference between Blair and Johnson

ALL that John Hodgkins (Letters, Saturday) says about Tony Blair and Iraq may be true.

No doubt Blair was predilected to going to war to get rid of Saddam Hussein but he swears to this day that he believed the evidence given to him by the United States about weapons of mass destruction was genuine and that was the reason for his final decision.

It turned out that this evidence, that he may well have been grateful for, was false and he was misled by it, he believes he was telling the truth, unlike Johnson who knew he was lying about ‘partygate’.

That the decision to go to war was wrong and things were handled badly and he was manipulative to get his way is not in dispute by me, I am simply giving Blair’s view. I apologise if I didn’t make that clear in my previous letter, I should have said ‘how Blair said he was misled’.

I still believe, as I previously stated, that any Conservative Prime Minister presented with this evidence by a Republican President of the US would have acted in the same way, especially if it had been Boris Johnson who at the time was still a citizen of the United States.

None of this alters the fact that Johnson broke his own law and lied to Parliament about ‘partygate’ which is what this correspondence with reader C Jackson was initially about and we should not be deflected from that. By the way, a part of me, sadly, hopes that Keir Starmer has broken the law over ‘beergate’ and receives a fine. He would have no choice but to resign and Boris Johnson would be honour-bound to follow suit. It might be a price worth paying.

AW, Gosforth