Alistair Campbell isn't getting his picture here - instead this is the result of the dossier he denies influencing

There are lots of reasons to have a problem with Alistair Campbell. My main beef with him is that by becoming the most notorious of “spin doctors” his bullying, goading and arrogant manner has tarnished the entire PR profession with his chippy, chalky brush. Whenever I tell people that I’m in Public Relations, they think of Alistair Campbell and assume I spend all day yelling obscenities down the phone to journalists and anyone else who cares to displease me.

As much fun as that sounds, it’s not the case. The second problem I have with him was perfectly illustrated by his appearance today in front of the Iraq Inquiry - that like his political master Tony Blair, he is incapable of admitting that he may have made mistakes while in his government position. We may have all swallowed the 45 minutes sophistry back in 2002 but it should be perfectly clear in 2010 that the dossiers of both September of that year and February 2003 were packed full of information that was at best selectively presented and leadingly phrased and at worst blatantly untrue.

Today, Campbell refused to accept any criticism of his role, he denied having over-ridden intelligence information with his own advice on “presentation” and said he totally stood by every word in the 2002 dossier. “You seem to be wanting me to say that Tony Blair signed up to saying, regardless of the facts and WMD, we are going to get rid of this guy,” he said. “It was not like this.” Well then, Alistair, exactly how was it?

Did Tony Blair not discuss regime change back in 2001 with President Bush? Was the emphasis of the dossier not changed from “may” have WMDs capable of a 45-minute launch to “has“? Lewes MP Norman Baker might be a little deluded about the death of Dr David Kelly (he thinks the government did it) but his interview on Sky News earlier (sadly not available on their website) showed just how discredited the Campbell sticking-to-the-guns stance is.

And while Campbell was confident and easily dealt with the tame questioning today from a panel whose body language reeked of mistrust for him, his “Je ne regrette rien” attitude doesn’t paint him in a sympathetic light. We can, no doubt, expect more of the same from Tony Blair when he appears in front of the inquiry too. He will say that he believed that the dossier was true, that the fact it has subsequently been shown to be a pile of fibs was not forseeable at the time and that he would probably have gone ahead in Iraq regardless of WMDs because he believe removing Saddam was the right thing to do.

Possibly it was, although it would be interesting to note the Iraqi people’s view on that subject, which has little to do on the whole with democracy and human rights and far more to do with tribal and religious considerations. But if getting rid of Saddam merited invasion, why are we not invading Zimbabwe, Iran, North Korea, Burma and, for that matter, China? Why don’t we intervene in Tibet or the drug wars of Mexico?

It is a shame that both Blair and Campbell are too battoned-down to understand that moral judgements are rarely applicable on a case-by-case basis; you either believe in a principle of removing dictators or you don’t – and if you do, you have to remove them everywhere. Unless there’s some other reason of course that we are not being told about. Surely not.

John Hutton

Up until yesterday, I didn’t care much for John Hutton – a particularly strident Blairite who failed to make any impact at all in work and pensions, business and regulatory reform and defence. Quite a list of cabinet jobs to be rubbish at.

However, the revelation that he was able, along with the rest of us, in 2006 to see that Gordon Brown would be a disaster (he used a rather more colourful adjective to proceed the word “disaster“) as PM leaves at least a vestige of his reputation intact. Eddie Mair extracted this information from him yesterday in a fantastic interview that suggested Hutton has rather given up on Parliament – he was certainly not combative in his attempts to deflect the question.

It all asks the obvious poser of why, when big beasts such as Hutton, John Reid, Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers were all pretty much implacably opposed to Gordon becoming PM, they didn’t put up more of a fight to stop it. I suspect that although Hutton may have only recently given up on Parliament, they all gave up a while ago.

How strange too that Hutton couldn’t show the same perceptiveness about the war in Afghanistan that he reserved for the leadership of his own party.

British soldiers in southern Afghanistan

I see that the BBC is placing a visit by the PM to troops in Afghanistan high up on the news agenda. That would be fine, were it not for the PM’s sake and a timely reminder of our troops’ ongoing stalemate in the country. The corporation is making a virtue of the fact that Gordon saw fit to “bunk down” in one-star accommodation while staying the night in the country.

You’ve got to be having a laugh – aside from the fact that there aren’t many five-star establishments in Helmand, I should jolly well hope so. The guys on duty in the province spend six months or more – night and day – in the country. Frankly, after what this government have done to our ability to properly carry out military operations, a Christmas visit and an overnight stay are just about the very least the PM can do for our soldiers. He certainly doesn’t deserve BBC plaudits.

More to the point, DC beat the PM there by a week. The corporation’s response was decidedly less sycophantic. The problem they have is that Cameron is a leader and knows where to be and when. Gordon is a follower who does whatever Mandelson/Campbell/insert advisor here tells him to. It would be interesting to hear the views of the troops serving in Afghanistan which man they would rather have making decisions for them. Until then, I guess we’ll just have to stick with the BBC’s opinion.

Sir John Chilcot

It’s not unusual for the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre to be full but perhaps rarely are events held there that cause a queue to overflow outside. This morning, the Chilcot Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the Iraq War began with Tony Blair expected to be among those giving evidence.

Now that he can no longer expect diplomatic immunity from prosecution after his EU presidential bid failed, this must be a nervous time for Mr Blair. Several newspapers have run stories suggesting that the facts of the matter are at significant variance to the official account of events, including that Blair denied military options were being considered when in fact they were.

What I hope will happen as a result of this inquiry is that we will know:

a) Whether or not Blair and others deliberately manipulated evidence, parliament and public opinion to go to war

b) Whether or not his central claim of “45 minutes from destruction” was true and how it originated

c) Why there was a woeful lack of planning for what happened after the Allies controlled Baghdad – the clock to insurgency then started ticking

d) How much US policy dictated British strategy in Iraq

We all suspect we know the answers, or at least many of them, to these questions. The picture emerging six years after invasion was that politicians exaggerated and spun their way to public approval for a war that the Americans wanted and that there was a price for not following them into.

But let’s not forget that the cost of war in Afghanistan and Iraq has stretched to billions and billions of pounds that have be scraped away from areas such a local authority highways, Revenue Support Grant, policing and even the Armed Forces themselves. The person who approved every penny for this shallow, shambolic military intervention is now sat in No 10 Downing Street, all of 500m from the conference centre.

We should not forget his role in this. Yes, Blair wanted war. But he also wanted welfare reform, Euro membership and to follow Tory spending plans. Gordon didn’t seem to have a problem blocking these things – so why wasn’t he more vocal in his opposition of the war? His role in signing the cheques seems to have been swept under the carpet.

It is interesting to note, of course, that Woking MP Humfrey Malins voted against the Iraq War and resigned from his position on the shadow front bench in protest. How right he has been proven to have been.

There have been so many eloquent thoughts expressed about Remembrance that it is difficult to add anything further.

But this year is the first ever year of Remembrance without a living First World War veteran in the UK. It is an almost impossible thought – so many soldiers of that generation died in 1915 and 1916 and are nearly 100 years gone. Others such as Harry Patch and Henry Allingham are still fresh in our minds, having lived a brace of years for which they knew they owed immeasurably to their long-gone friends.

Inevitably the focus now shifts to the Second World War and preserving the thoughts of those that fought in a conflict that was in some ways very similar and in others totally different to the Great War.

Thanks to them, two successive generations have been spared the ordeal that a war for survival brings to a nation. Those on the home front in the Second World War and fighting abroad lived in an environment where life became a great deal cheaper yet more valuable, where everyone lived for each moment, minute and day and where the prospect of death was never far away. People did things that they would never normally do, made sacrifices of staggering bravery and selflessness and the prosperity of the 1920s might as well have been the 1720s.

It’s a difficult situation to imagine and my generation is lucky to not have experienced it. We owe a debt of opportunity to past generations that we have been able to live our lives in a way that war meant none of them ever could. And to our forces who currently serve in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we owe a similar debt as they fight while our lives with the opportunity given to us by our grandparents proceed without the ordeal of war.

Two minutes is the very least each of us can spare.

Staff Sgt Schmid - "better than the best of the best"

I was listening to the radio today while discussion centred on the latest soldier to die in Afghanistan, Staff Sgt Olaf Schmid, who was killed defusing his 65th roadside bomb earlier this week. It is difficult to imagine more handsome tributes being paid to any individual. His commanding officer called him 

“simply the bravest and most courageous man I have ever met. No matter how difficult or lethal the task which lay in front of us, he was the man who only saw solutions.”

He continued by called him “better than the best of the best” and another colleague said he was a “once-in-a-generation” man. But the most moving tribute came from his widow Christina, who wrote that she had lost her “soulmate” and “best friend“.

“Oz was a phenomenal husband and loving father who was cruelly murdered on his last day of a relentless five-month tour. The pain of losing him is overwhelming. I take comfort knowing he saved countless lives with his hard work.”

Reading out her statement on 5Live, Peter Allen sounded as if he was struggling. It’s easy to appreciate why. Olaf Schmid faced danger and death every single day in his line of work, tackling explosive devices so that others didn’t have to. I’m in awe of anyone with such courage and selfless duty – I don’t know whether I would be able to muster the same in similar circumstances and am proud to live in a nation where others can.

To single out Staff Sgt Schmid – brilliant though he clearly was – is perhaps a touch incongruous because each of the 224 British personnel killed in Afghanistan have made exactly the same sacrifice. But his death co-incided with the absolute farce of the Aghan elections - or at least they were supposed to be plural before one of the candidates threw his toys out of the pram and withdrew in a move designed to embarrass the Allied Forces and Afghan government.

We are left with a president Hamid Karzai who is discredited because he never won the election outright, is seen as close to the Allies and has presided over corruption everywhere. We have an opposition that he been motivated by a sense of injustice and could create instability within the country. We have a resurgant Taliban using the elections as an excuse, as if they need one, for violence and US and UK forces trying to hold the whole thing together for reasons known only to their political masters.

I supported the original invasion of Afghanistan, mostly because Tony Blair told me that we would find Osama Bin Laden there and bring him to justice as well as cut off his major allies, the Taliban. It transpires that Osama is probably holed up in our “ally” Pakistan and the Taliban don’t particularly like him that much – most of his support comes from another one of our “allies”, Saudi Arabia.

So it’s on days like this I have to ask what on earth we are doing sending our brilliant young men and women with families and dreams to die in some scorched and featureless part of the world that we have failed to subdue before? It may not be on the scale of the Somme but Helmand seems similarly detached from meaningful objectives.

The British Grand Fleet, 1916 by Fritz Wagner

I would imagine that things are pretty grim in the MoD this week. Not only has this country suffered further losses in Afghanistan but we learned yesterday that the RAF appears to assert little discipline over some of its staff and today that the fault for the fact that a Nimrod surveilliance plane blew up in mid-flight lay squarely at the door of defence officials.

“A systematic breach of the military covenant” was how Charles Haddon-Cave described the circumstances surrounding the Nimrod tragedy three years ago. But his words could have applied to any number of personnel losses since we entered Afghanistan and Iraq with no strategy except to follow the Americans. Our biggest mistake, obviously, was to assume that they had any more clue than we did.

One looks at the lack of footwear, appropriate body armour, military vehicles and even radios (in Kosovo)  that we supply to infantry. Then cast our eye over the fact that the Nimrod MR2 in question was nearly 40 years old. Very, very few civilian aircraft exist in service at that age – why should it be okay for soldiers to travel in ageing and poorly-maintained aircraft any more than civilians?

Our fleet, which even 25 years ago was sufficient to retake the Falklands, is diminishing with each spending review and looks set to be reduced further due to the recessive legacy of this government. Our air defence is manned by shaky, ageing aircraft from the Cold War era and cuts are being made to the Eurofighter aquisition programme. At the moment, we are committed to 16 planes to defend Britain. That’s one plane to defend every four million citizens.

Given all this, I’m not sure where we can still find the money for Trident II. We already have nuclear weapons – although there is a very good case for scaling back the number that we maintain. The future defence of the realm will not be against other nation states with designated armies – it will be the terrifying fight to stop radical terror groups with all sorts of agendas penetrating our homeland security and threatening us with chemcial, biological and nuclear weapons.

Therefore it makes sense to view our Armed Forces as something else. They simply don’t need to fight off an invading army any more. Instead the Armed Forces should be a source of education, inspiration and pride for young men and women alike from communities where other options are limited – it should be an enabling organisation to turn wayward 16 and 17-year olds into rounded and mature 25 year-olds with eight or nine-year service commissions.

It should be a peacekeeping force to help other parts of the world that cannot help themselves. For this, it needs to be versatile, mobile, organised and well-equipped. But it shouldn’t need to be over-administered, excessively large or armed with the latest nuclear weapons. Nor should peacekeeping stretch to regime change – ever again.

Moreoever, we need fewer gunnery officers and more intelligence officers. Resources need to flow from urban warfare into electronic warfare, intelligence gathering and to ensuring that terrorist cells do not have the chance to threaten our security. All the infantry in the world will be no good to us if their barracks become targets for terrorist attack.

At the moment, Labour is hanging on to a mess. They don’t want to properly reform the purpose of our Armed Forces and admit that we have to give up our pretensions of world power. The Armed Forces themselves are reluctant to admit that they are no longer the commanding presence they once were. But we have an army of just 95,000, only two capital ships (with a handful of Harriers now reaching 30 years old) and small number of airworthy RAF fighters that would be totally inadequate to defend this country against another world power.

We need to let go our ideas of military might, take brave decisions about what we need to defend ourselves rather than what we want. It would wonderful to have a Grand Fleet once again and to be able to send up 1,000 bombers each night to menace our enemies. But even if we could afford this splendour, our modern-day enemies would be nowhere to be seen.