THE GATHERING STORM?

Maybe I shouldn`t have been surprised to learn that Tony Blair has not only been awarded $100,000 (about £67,000) for `bringing liberty to the world` as the recipient of the annual Liberty Award in the United States but that he has also had the cheek to accept it. Well, I guess he would, wouldn`t he. After all, he has previous.

But I also noticed yesterday a couple of items that might prove significant as the wheels of justice might again have been gently kick started on their long and winding road. The first was the release of documents which pretty much proved that Blair took us to war in Iraq against the legal advice of the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith. Reading between the lines, it seems that Goldsmith was himself convinced that joining Bush in going to war in Iraq was illegal without a further UN resolution but that Goldsmith was bullied into some form of words that Blair thought were good enough to enable him to go ahead.

The second was, once again, the representations continually made by a group of leading doctors questioning the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly, the weapons inspector, who was found dead in a wood near his Oxfordshire home shortly after being `exposed` as the source of the controversial BBC news report which itself had questioned the grounds for going to war in Iraq. Blair`s poodle Inquiry, led by Lord Hutton, concluded that Dr. Kelly had taken his own life, but the evidence has never been shown to be conclusive, otherwise the medical evidence put forward at the Inquiry would not have been subject to a 70 year ban before publication. Furthermore, there never was a coroners inquest into his death and the death certificate was not completed by a medical practitioner.

The ongoing Chilcot Inquiry might help to clarify the legality of events concerning the Iraq invasion and it might just be encouraging that the new coalition Government are thinking about reopening the case of Dr. Kelly, irrspective of (or even because of) the conclusions reached at the Hutton Inquiry. I just sense that storm clouds might be gathering around our former Prime Minister and his cronies. These distant rumbles will not go away and it might be that the Liberty Award and the medal handed out by America, with its $100,000 price tag, turns out to have as much value as my own Tufty Club Certificate.