Portrait of the week | 6 March 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the bombings in Iraq that there was ‘a struggle between good and evil’ going on there. Before the bombings, Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said it was withdrawing support from the Butler inquiry into intelligence on purported weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because the inquiry was to be conducted in an ‘unacceptably restrictive fashion’; Mr Michael Mates, the Conservative MP on the Butler committee, said it was his duty to continue. Miss Clare Short was asked on Today on Radio 4 about spying on the United Nations and said: ‘These things are done. … In fact, I have had conversations with Kofi [Annan] in the run-up to war thinking “Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I have been saying.”’ This followed the dropping of an Official Secrets Act prosecution against Katharine Gun, an employee at GCHQ who had leaked an email request from America before the Iraq war for Britain to spy on six countries that would decide a vote in the United Nations Security Council.