Guardian: Blair's trial by ordeal hasn't slaked his appetite for power

[muriel_volestrangler]

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1141316,00.html

Post-Hutton, the prime minister's moral authority is in tatters

Two things were obvious from yesterday's Commons debate on the Hutton report. The first was Tony Blair's unshakeable self-belief that he was right over Iraq and his critics were 100% wrong. Some polls - like that on Channel 4 News last week - may find that 90% of people thought Hutton was unfair. But the prime minister is having none of it. The second was the palpable anger and dismay among Labour MPs - including regular government critics from Martin Salter to Dennis Skinner - about the reaction to the Hutton report. With the government on the back foot, party loyalty has kicked in.
...
The row over the war in Iraq, and the Hutton inquiry that followed it, is not a storm in a teacup. It is a climate-change inundation, flooding familiar features and tearing up trees. After it, the landscape looks different. What all the thinking ministers are trying to do is work out how to survive there.

For it feels as if Labour in general, and the prime minister in particular, has suffered a radical loss of authority. One minister asks: if Blair has been cleared of everything by Hutton and is still portrayed as a liar and a fraud, what does he do next? The prime minister has tried everything the establishment rulebook suggests to help recover his moral authority - a law lord, a cabinet secretary, a sackload of privy councillors, cross-examination by MPs. He's thrown himself at lobby journalists in press conferences, submitted to Paxman and radio phone-ins, revealed more evidence about the workings of No 10 than any predecessor. In the Middle Ages they called it trial by ordeal. And none of it has worked.

[ex_jew]

1. It hasn't worked because he was WRONG !

There's no procedure for burying the truth about such a catastrophe. Why can't Tony realize that it's time for him to go. After he resigns he can write a nice book and wrap himself in the Hutton exoneration, but for now he is just a bone stuck in the throat of England which must be expelled.