Having read Sir Ken Macdonald's preposterous piece in today's Times, I am relieved that he is now the former Director of Public Prosecutions.
He writes:
Tony Blair
engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on
to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made
perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard
to believe even he found truly credible.
(He also writes a lot of other things, such as calling Mr Blair "a narcissist", thinking that his bar qualification also gives him the ability to make psychological diagnoses, and to do so based on media reports of an intensely political subject.)
I have not the least interest in Sir Ken's views on this - or indeed any other - subject beyond the criminal law. His view of what lay behind the decision to go to war is as informed as his view of what is going to win the Grand National in three years' time: not at all.
But his piece is important, nonetheless, because it shows that a man whose former job was about almost nothing other than ability to assess evidence was entirely unable to perform that basic function. His argument, such as it is, is based on ad hominem insults and conclusions which have no more logical basis than the assumption that 2+2=5. There is not one - not one - piece of evidence to suggest that Tony Blair used "subterfuge". Not one piece of evidence.
What he means is that he disagreed with the former PM, and thinks he made a huge mistake in taking us to war. From this Sir Ken concludes that Mr Blair deliberately lied in order to indulge his narcissistic relationship and his "sycophancy
towards power".
That this man was able to take decisions based on his ability to draw conclusions from evidence is shocking.
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