Ken Livingstone, the elected mayor of London, who was forced to leave the Labour Party in order to stand (run) for election, subsequently beating the official Labour candidate into third place behind the Tory, has made it clear that he will stand for re-election at the end of his current mayoral term and that he would like to be re-admitted to the party so that he can stand, next time, as the official Labour candidate. He proclaims his willingness to submit himself to the party’s candidate selection process provided that this is not artificially stacked against him, as it was on the last occasion. Now Clive Soley, MP, who chaired the disastrous party selection committee meetings last time which rejected Livingstone as the party’s candidate, writes to the Guardian to assert that the problem over Ken’s selection last time had been his refusal to promise to be bound by the Labour Party’s official manifesto for the mayoral election. Soley demands to know whether Ken would make that promise next time. This is crudely disingenuous stuff. The party manifesto had not yet been written at the time when Livingstone was being pressed to promise to be bound by it as a condition of his selection as the Labour candidate: but he knew perfectly well that the manifesto would include a commitment to the government’s Public-Private Partnership (PPP) plan for the London Underground, generally equated in the public’s mind with partial privatisation. Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that a huge majority of Londoners, including Labour Party supporters, are strongly opposed to any privatisation of the Tube, especially after the disastrous experience of the privatisation of the railways. Livingstone has consistently opposed the PPP and privatisation of the Tube, advocating an alternative which is popular and apparently well founded on the successful experience of New York some years ago. To require him to sign a blank cheque, which would obviously then be made out to PPP privatisation, was a blatant piece of political trickery, from which Livingstone was able to escape only by resigning from the party and running as an independent. The humiliation by the London voters, including many who normally vote Labour and even card-carrying Labour Party members, of the official Labour candidate and Livingstone’s election as independent Mayor manifestly reflected London’s rejection of privatisation and support for the Livingstone alternative. None of which stops Soley trying to bait the same old trap for Livingstone with the same old rotten meat: nor does it stop the government ploughing on with its discredited plans for privatising the Tube. Responding to the obvious wishes of the London electorate and the policies of the elected Mayor obviously takes second place to ministers’ visceral dislike of Livingstone and their unwillingness to lose face by letting him win a famous victory.
The row over the Transport Secretary Steve Byers’s attempt to get rid of Jo Moore and Martin Sixsmith (politically appointed Special Adviser and professional civil servant respectively) seems a long time ago already, but it still has some resonance. One feature has received less attention than it should: the fact that neither Moore nor Sixsmith had actually done anything wrong or improper at the time when they received their instructions to resign: nor has anyone suggested that they had. More than six months ago Moore certainly behaved indiscreetly (by writing in an e-mail a suggestion that betrayed a degree of cynicism shared by legions of public relations officers, heads of information, bureaucrats and indeed politicians, which didn’t stop them throwing up their hands in fake horror in order to placate the tabloids): and at about the same time she behaved improperly (by ordering a neutral civil servant—not Sixsmith—to run a politically partisan smear campaign against the American head of Mayor Livingstone’s London transport organisation, and having the civil servant moved to a lesser position when he refused): but ministers from the prime minister downwards, and the permanent head of Byers’s department, concluded that neither of these offences merited dismissal, and Moore got off with a reprimand. There’s no suggestion that she has subsequently repeated her objectionable behaviour in any way. As for Sixsmith, there seems to be no charge against him of any kind, apart from his action in taking his case to the Sunday Times after his civil service boss had given the Financial Times a full briefing on the whole resignation saga—but that was after he had been told to resign, not a prior ground for requiring resignation. The sole reasons for the decision to get rid of the two officials seem to have been that Moore and Sixsmith didn’t get on, Moore was under continued criticism from the media for her actions of six months beforehand, and Byers, their minister, was also under strong media and parliamentary attack on a host of fronts, including his apparent determination to hang onto Moore. The intention was clearly to relieve the pressure on Byers by making him sacrifice Moore: and he wasn’t willing to sacrifice Moore unless her enemy, Sixsmith, went too.
Altogether an unappetising brew. But it set ringing equally sordid echoes of another forced resignation: that of Peter Mandelson, a then Cabinet minister and close friend and adviser to Blair, accused by the media of using his ministerial position to try to get a favourable decision on the passport applications of a pair of Asian brothers who were offering a financial contribution towards the Millennium Dome (for which, among other things, Mandelson had had ministerial responsibility). It rapidly became clear that there had been nothing remotely improper about the enquiry Mandelson had made, or caused to be made, about progress in processing the passport applications, and indeed even the Home Office junior minister to whose office the enquiry had been addressed, one O’Brien, confirmed that there had been nothing improper about it. The ensuing argument then revolved around the wholly insignificant question whether Mandelson had made a telephone call directly to O’Brien (as O’Brien claimed to remember him doing, although no record of such a call has ever been found) or whether it had been made on Mandelson’s instructions by his officials (as Mandelson believed, and as the few available documents seemed to confirm). The media became violently excited over this issue; the prime minister’s rapid response was to call in Mandelson and require his resignation, while publicly acknowledging that he had behaved with total propriety at all times. Another sacrifice to the ravening wolves of the British tabloids and their more staid but equally malicious broadsheet brothers! For unexplained reasons, Mandelson’s behaviour, although not the object of any accusations, was then subjected to an official enquiry by a not particularly eminent barrister who concluded that Mandelson had done nothing improper but had probably made the disputed telephone call to O’Brien even though he had clearly ‘forgotten’ having done so. Weirdly, this exoneration of Mandelson did him no good, since he had been made to resign before the enquiry rather than after, or in the light of, its outcome, an odd reversal of the usual procedure by which verdict generally precedes sentence, rather than the other way about. And there has been a curious postscript to this sorry chronicle. Mandelson recently found some official papers in a briefcase which he felt confirmed his recollection that he had not made the disputed telephone call to O’Brien. The not particularly eminent barrister was reinstalled to hold a further enquiry, but after scrutinising the new evidence concluded that he had no reason to change his mind about the probability, on balance, that Mandelson had made the telephone call, although he repeated that there had been nothing improper about it. Thus Mandelson, acquitted by the first enquiry but already sacked and not later reinstated, appealed against his own acquittal only to have it reaffirmed. But he still hasn’t been restored to government office: not, obviously, because had done anything wrong, but because he had made powerful enemies in the Cabinet, the Labour Party, Number 10 and the media, and Mr Blair has not been willing to face them down or to stand by his old friend and mentor. It will be interesting to see who is the next minister or official required to terminate his or her career for having done nothing wrong.
I can’t help feeling guilty about not joining in the high-minded clamour of protest over Mr Blair’s apparent determination to support an American attack on Iraq (once Mr Bush, Mr Cheney and the roaming general have sorted out the Israelis and Palestinians). My problem is that as between on the one hand doing nothing now, thus allowing Saddam Hussein a few more years to build up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and, probably, to develop some kind of nuclear weapon: and, on the other hand, mounting a military operation soon to destroy his WMD and their raw materials, and ideally to rid the region of his régime, the latter course—acting now—seems to me plainly the less dangerous. I don’t think one can seriously doubt that Saddam poses a uniquely serious threat. He has been developing WMD (nuclear, biological and chemical) for more than a decade; and he has shown himself to be a quite extraordinarily unscrupulous dictator: occupying Kuwait, using chemical weapons against his own Kurds, ruling with Hitlerian-scale ferocity and repression, turning international sanctions to his own advantage at the expense of the lives of his own citizens, defying international opinion by resisting all efforts to get him to agree to an adequate weapons inspection régime. Can anyone truthfully say that there is no appreciable risk of such a man being prepared to allow a terrorist group (al-Qaeda or some other) to have access to a biological or chemical weapon for use against a target in the US or Europe? Or of Saddam using his possession of these weapons, including medium-range missiles and possibly primitive nuclear weapons, in order to threaten and blackmail other countries in the region or indeed elsewhere?
Of course there’s a genuine dilemma here, as with all arguments for and against pre-emptive strikes: the risks of early action before the threat has become a reality are definable and inescapable, whereas delay leaves options open, and there’s always the hope that the threat won’t after all materialise. In this case, though, giving Saddam more time before intervening is so overwhelmingly likely to intensify the threat, and to aggravate the damage he’s eventually likely to do, that the case for acting now fairly clearly outweighs the case for delay. At which point the argument becomes a semi-technical one: is a military operation to destroy the WMD and the Saddam régime feasible? could such an operation have a good chance of success without causing disproportionate loss of innocent lives?, questions on which we can’t usefully form a firm view without a knowledge of the military and intelligence factors which few of us possess. Getting authority for an attack in a Security Council resolution wouldn’t be easy unless the Chinese and Russians (and French?) had somehow been persuaded, or squared. An invasion from Kuwait might be possible, but the preparatory build-up would take months, and heaven knows what Saddam would do while that was going on. Current signs seem to be that he may play for time and muddy waters by inviting the UN inspectors back, but on terms that will require months, even years, of negotiation to agree on. Awkward to attack Iraq while that was going on, and impossible once the inspectors were actually back on the ground. But the Americans would no doubt veto any return of inspectors on terms other than full unfettered access to everything, everywhere, any time. And they would be right to do so.
Maybe the practical difficulties of a successful military campaign to destroy the WMD and their raw materials and to overthrow Saddam will prove to be insuperable (although it would be a brave General who was willing to say that to Bush and Rumsfeld!), in which case there’s no more to be said. But that’s different from saying that an operation against Saddam with those objectives would be inherently wrong, even if it could be pulled off. I see no grounds here for parading through the streets with banners, or bombarding my unfortunate MP with e-mails.
