The blame game

The Butler report clearly confronts Blair and his Government with some uncomfortable truths about their conduct and the quality of intelligence in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, but incredibly no-one will be losing their job. Apparently, everyone involved in the fiasco shares "collective responsibility", the blame for systematic mistakes apportioned equally rather than resting upon any one individual. Ahhh, isn't that nice? It means we can't be beastly to anyone and demand their resignation.

But then, if errors of this magnitude were made in a business context, and even if no single person was solely responsible, I'm sure that whoever was nominally in charge would find themselves in trouble as the person on whose "watch" (to borrow the American term) it all took place. What exactly is the difference here? It doesn't matter if you think John Scarlett is a brilliant intelligence analyst, or whether you think Tony Blair is a brilliant Prime Minister, for that matter - they simply have to go. Blair really must be starting to believe all that Teflon Tony stuff.

To put it in context, Greg Dyke, Andrew Gilligan and Piers Morgan have all lost their jobs over Iraq, for mistakes which were not necessarily made by them personally but which occurred on their "watch". Indeed, whether they were even mistakes in the first place is now highly questionable at very least. Gilligan claimed the September 2002 Iraq dossier was "sexed-up". In his report, Lord Butler described the infamous 45-minute claim as suspiciously "eye-catching", while former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has said: "They put exclamation marks where there had been question marks and I think that is hyping". Little wonder, then, that Dyke is arguing that the BBC were right all along.

The situation is becoming increasingly farcical. If heads don't roll - and by that I mean heads at the very top, not civil servant scapegoats - then the fissure between the political class and the people will widen further and become a chasm. Blair and Bush seem to wax lyrical about democracy whilst conveniently forgetting that one of the most important components of democracy is the accountability of the elected leaders.