Buller For All Of Us

Three cheers for Baroness Manningham-Buller. There was no Iraqi threat. There was no link between Iraq and 9/11. There was no "al-Qaeda" in Iraq until we removed the bulwark against it. By doing so, we also created a homegrown Islamist terrorist threat which had not previously existed, exactly as the 7/7 bombers made clear in their videos. Precisely so.

A pity that she still feels the need to defend the silly scare tactics of yesteryear, such as the deployment of troops at Heathrow, at which we all laughed so long and so loud. But never mind.

There are many reasons not to vote for David Miliband. He invented "free" schools, the flogging off of our GP services to the American healthcare companies, and the whole Big Society gibberish. He is undoubtedly in favour of "merging" the Armed Forces under American command. Blair wanted these things, but he could not get them past Brown, the last man who could have saved the only Britain that anyone born after the War can possibly remember. So David Miliband could not possibly Lead the Opposition to them.

Instead he could only Lead the Opposition to the good things about this Government: withdrawal from Afghanistan, pursuit of bilateral relations with a range of states, restoration of the link between pensions and earnings, abandonment of identity cards, the prospect of electoral reform, an inquiry into the last lot's complicity in torture (that means you, David Miliband), dismantlement of the surveillance state, a renewed emphasis on a manufacturing-based economy diffused throughout the country, one coalition partner that really did oppose the Iraq War, and another that at least has the decency to pretend that it did so.