Brown will find that there’s more to foreign policy than disowning Blair

From the moment that the snatched camera-phone footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution emerged, it was hideously clear that the sentence had been carried out in a deplorable manner. The Americans immediately briefed that their calls for a delay had been ignored by the Iraqis. On 4 January George W. Bush felt obliged to admit that he wished that the proceedings had been ‘more dignified’. Yet it took until 9 January for Tony Blair, normally a far more astute politician than the President, to speak publicly about how the manner in which the sentence was carried out was ‘completely wrong’. Even then Blair was visibly irritated, giving the impression of having been forced to the lectern only by Gordon Brown’s  condemnation of the execution.

The delayed response was another example of one of the great puzzles of the Blair years: why has a Prime Minister who is generally so politically pitch-perfect refused to heed the Clintonian mantra of ‘concede and move on’, even when he is clearly in an impossible position? Take the absence of WMD in Iraq, the issue that did by far the most to diminish public trust in him.