When Tony Blair was asked for his comments on Greg Dyke's resignation as director general of the BBC in the wake of the Hutton Report, he replied: "I hope this now enables us to draw a line under this affair and move on." The Government had extracted its pound of flesh, the heads that Alastair Campbell decreed must roll had been duly delivered on a platter, and it was now time to put it all behind us and get back to the domestic agenda. But not so fast. As I wrote in this column last Saturday, the public is the final court of appeal in British politics - and the public's reaction to Lord Hutton's one-sided report was predictably and rightly sceptical. And as the controversy over what really happened in the run-up to the Iraq war continues to rage, the Prime Minister's hopes of "drawing a line" and moving on now look more forlorn than ever. Lord Hutton having failed to put the issue to bed, Mr Blair tried again this week by announcing the Butler Inquiry into whether the intelligence received about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was accurate. But it swiftly emerged that that inquiry, too, was likely to be a whitewash, with the actions of politicians in the weeks and months before the war specifically excluded from its ambit. Then a well-aimed Commons question by an obscure Tory MP extracted the admission from Mr Blair that he had not known that the infamous "45-minute claim" referred only to short-range weapons. Cleared by Lord Hutton of the charge of lying, he now faced the scarcely less damaging charge for a Prime Minister of having been simply incompetent. Does any of it matter? Isn't the bottom line that Iraq is a better place, and the world a safer place, without Saddam Hussein? Well, up to a point. But the reason it matters is because the deeper issue at sake here is not that of the war at all, but the issue that has dogged Mr Blair throughout his premiership: trust. The question of whether or not the Prime Minister and his officials "sexed up" the September 2002 dossier or exaggerated the case for war masks a more fundamental lack of honesty. That is, that the reason he gave us for going to war was not the real reason - and it is that which the public is now finding so hard to forgive. There were in essence two reasons why Britain went to war with Iraq - the humanitarian reason, and the political reason. The humanitarian reason - so movingly articulated by Ann Clwyd in the Commons debate last March - was that Saddam was a bad man who was terrorising his own people and that his country would be much better off without him. The political reason was that, for Mr Blair, the importance of maintaining the Atlantic alliance over-rode the need to build a broader international consensus for military action through the UN. Both of these are perfectly respectable positions, but Mr Blair made little or no attempt to sell either of them to the British public. In fact what he said, when presenting the September 2002 dossier to Parliament, was: "Our purpose is disarmament. The whole purpose is disarmament." But it was not. It was regime change, and the desire to stand four-square with an American President who had decided long before to go to war. The subsequent failure to find any of the fabled weapons of mass destruction has not altered the way that many people felt about the war, but it has altered what they feel about Mr Blair. And as the public's reaction to Hutton has shown, the level of disillusionment has now reached such a point it will be hard for him to regain the political initiative. The tragedy for Mr Blair - and perhaps for the country too - is that he should have squandered so much political capital and public goodwill over this one issue. It is easy to forget now that Tony Blair was once so popular that, armed with that 179-seat majority, he could have done literally anything he chose. He could, for instance, have secured this century for Britain's natural centre-left majority by bringing in proportional representation and healing Labour's historic rift with the Liberals. Instead, he risks being followed by a much more right-wing Conservative Government than the one he replaced in 1997. Similarly he could, having painstakingly established a consensus that public services were more important than tax cuts, have used it to build a fairer, more equal society. Instead, he will almost certainly leave office having seen the gap between rich and poor, and North and South, get wider. Above all, Mr Blair could have restored the bond of trust between the electorate and politicians which had been so badly damaged by the years of Tory sleaze. Instead, he risks leaving office with that bond more deeply fractured than ever, and the public more disillusioned with politicians than perhaps at any time in our history. For as one Labour MP privately confided to me this week, there is now only one course of action that will enable the Government to "draw a line" under the Iraq affair and move on. It is the resignation of Tony Blair as Prime Minister. His successor, almost certainly Gordon Brown, would then get the opportunity to do what Mr Blair cannot now do, to renew Labour in government and imbue it with a new sense of purpose. And unless the Labour Party can face up to the logic of this, the electorate may very well end up making the decision for them. | 
