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.