So, after all the deceit and obfuscation we get this:-

Secret documents revealed yesterday show that, almost a year before the Iraq invasion, Tony Blair was privately preparing to commit Britain to war and topple Saddam, despite warnings from his closest advisers that it was unjustified.

They also show how Mr Blair was planning to justify regime change as an objective, despite warnings from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, that the “desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action”.

In his legal advice on March 7 2003, released by the government last week, the attorney repeated his view that “regime change cannot be the objective of military action”.

The officials said “certain conditions” should be met and that efforts should be made to “shape public opinion” …

I suppose concepts such as honesty and service to the people are out of the question with Blair.  Any government that believes as this one does in social engineering and multiculturalism, and so consistently practises the, in every sense, black arts of political correctness doesn’t respect the will of the people it governs.  Full stop.

But then, we’ve always known that behind the carefully-worked artifice of the Nice Guy in Jeans stands a craven power politician.  He is both the product and beneficiary of an entirely clique-based approach to party politics.  His only real loyalty is to himself and, maybe, to the New Labour clique of Mandelson, Brown, Campbell and one or two minor underlings.

So why, really, did this creature commit us to war in Iraq … and the inevitable cost in dead and wounded British soldiers (of which Anthony John Wakefield, 24, of the Coldstream Guards became the latest today)?  Was it to secure regime-change, which they are now spinning us as a post facto justification?  Really?  No, I don’t believe Blair was altruistically motivated.  He is not altruistic.  He is not interested in the fate of the Iraqi Shias and Druze.

It’s simply that our Prime Minister shares unreservedly, wholeheartedly and right up to the proverbial brass neck in George Bush’s neocon vision of American power in the world of the 21st Century.  Did he, then, merely yearn to tag along best-little-buddy style with the power people?  I don’t doubt it.  It is all just cravenness.  That was what he was (and is still) wanting to hide from us.  He knew from the start that we would never share his intense love of and for power, his moral defect.  We would never consider it worth a single British life since no British interest attached to it.  That, finally, is the reason why your and my opinion had to be “shaped” - only another term for deception, after all?

What a damned pity - and an insult to the bereaved - that our war leader won’t be justly and properly punished on Thursday.