The Spectator’s Notes | 7 May 2005

Another week of this, and I think I would have ended up voting Labour. Ann Toward, the widow of Guardsman Anthony Wakefield, who was killed near Amarah, southern Iraq, on Monday, said that Tony Blair was to blame for her husband’s death. Although it is obviously true that if there had been no war in Iraq, Guardsman Wakefield would not have died there, it is unfair to blame a British prime minister for the death of a volunteer professional soldier. Ms Toward herself has said that her husband wanted to go to Iraq, against her pleading: ‘He said it was his job to go to Iraq.’ There is no suggestion that political imperatives have forced British soldiers to do things which, in military terms, are unreasonable to ask. Sorry to state the obvious, but Guardsman Wakefield was killed by terrorist bombers, not by Tony Blair. One cannot blame a distraught widow for making accusations, but one can blame a media culture which encourages such vulnerable people into the political arena. It is part of the terrible self-righteousness of the anti-war media and politicians that they do not see this as a problem. Do they think that all those widows who do not agree with Ms Toward, and have not come forward to blame the Prime Minister for their husband’s deaths, are morally defective? There were and are good arguments against the war, but when its opponents have marked out Mr Blair as a killer of our troops, I have found myself half wanting another four years of the wretched man. I almost asked Alastair Campbell to send me one of his store of postal votes for a Lib Dem/Labour marginal.

Scotland is experiencing net emigration, we are told by opponents of Tory immigration policy. Mightn’t it be something to do with its governmentalised monoculture and consequent lack of opportunity for anyone who doesn’t want to be a bureaucrat? No doubt the rest of us in the United Kingdom benefit from the skills of Scottish émigrés, but I think that English voters are gradually beginning to question why we should be governed by Scottish politicians, sitting for Scottish seats.