Balls On Iraq

Neither Ed Balls nor Ed Miliband was an MP in 2003. But it is hardly as if either of them was without media access. We all know about David Miliband, not merely an MP but a Minister at the time of the invasion of Iraq, and who until less than a fortnight ago was presiding over this country's practice of torture. As for Andy Burnham, who cares? Is there really any such person? But neither Balls nor the other Miliband is any better.

The fact that John McDonnell had voted against the Iraq War sent the Whips into a frenzy in order to keep him off the ballot against Gordon Brown. Not only for that reason, but for that one more than any other, McDonnell would have won the constituency section of the Electoral College, with Brown elected Leader by means of a stitch-up between the PLP grandees and the super-union grandees.

Diane Abbott also voted against the war. But her intervention threatens to keep McDonnell off the ballot a second time, backed up by very New Labour charges of racism and sexism against him and his supporters, she herself being that most New Labour of things, the politician as media star and vice versa. Who ever could be behind that intervention?

Jon Cruddas, however, was an MP who had voted in favour of the war but seen the error of it. So he really, really could not have been permitted as a Leadership candidate. Lo and behold, he isn't one after all.

Meanwhile, on the war that we are actually still fighting rather than the one from which we withdrew after possibly the most spectacular defeat in British military history, Liam Fox has not only decried the preposterous notion that we are expending our blood and treasure so that Afghan girls can go to school, but has called for "a new approach to Afghanistan". I propose just such an approach. Pull out. And never again involve ourselves in anything remotely like this.