Conservative leader says voters should punish Blair for lying over Iraq

CARDIFF, Wales: Conserv-ative Party leader Michael Howard, fighting against the odds to become Britain’s prime minister, on Friday branded Tony Blair a liar — about the quality of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war and about the weakness of the legal case for the invasion. “I’m not criticising him (Blair) for going to war. I’m criticising him for not telling the truth and for not having a plan” for securing the peace afterwards, Howard said in an interview with The Associated Press. “He has a track record of not telling the truth. That’s why character and trust are an issue in this election.” Howard, the Tories’ third leader since Blair took office in a landslide victory in 1997, has attacked the government on several fronts — immigration, crime, health and the decision to go to war — but without yet denting the government’s lead in opinion polls.

Howard’s focus on Iraq is compromised by his own support for the war, and his stance that he’d have supported the Bush administration even if he’d known Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. But Howard clearly sees political capital in questioning whether voters can trust Blair. And signs are that the tactic could pay off, either by rallying his party or making disenchanted Labour supporters stay home on election day. In a poll published Friday in The Guardian newspaper, 44 percent of the sample agreed that the prime minister was a liar, compared to 29 percent who felt the same about Howard. The war became a major campaign issue this week as Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s advice on the legality of the conflict was leaked in part, then released in full by the prime minister’s office.

The memo, which Blair had steadfastly refused to disclose for two years, revealed Goldsmith’s doubts about the legality of going to war without a second UN Security Council resolution. That contrasted with his publicly disclosed summary days later which said a second resolution was not necessary. Until Blair released the text, Howard told AP, “we didn’t know that the advice was full of caveats and warnings, we didn’t know that it changed so much.” Former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock says he fears the dispute over Iraq this week has badly knocked the party’s campaign off course with just days to go before the May 5 vote.

“It is a massive diversion of the campaign for reasons which are understandable — it’s a question of war and peace and the conduct of government so there is a legitimate matter in any general election in a democracy,” Kinnock said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend. Nevertheless, Blair’s personal rating has risen: 44 percent of all voters said in The Guardian that he would make the best prime minister, up seven points in a week, while Howard’s rating dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent.  The survey of 1,547 adults by ICM had a margin of error of three percentage points. Interviews were conducted April 24 — 26 — before Goldsmith’s memo was published on Thursday. Blair, 51, and Howard, 63, were both heckled by a television audience Thursday night as they defended their positions on the war, and both sought to change the subject on Friday.

Blair would have lost the crucial vote in the House of Commons on going to war without the help of most of the Conservative members. Though Howard wasn’t the Tory leader then, he hasn’t disavowed the war but has hit on issues such as Blair’s use of what proved to be flawed intelligence. And that’s why he calls Blair a liar. “We know that the intelligence said on its face that it was limited, sporadic and patchy,” Howard said. “He (Blair) said the intelligence was extensive, detailed and authoritative. There’s no way you can match up those two sets of words.”

Howard said he still could have made a strong case for war, even knowing that Saddam didn’t possess the weapons of mass destruction he was thought to have. “The argument would have been Saddam Hussein has possessed weapons of mass destruction in the past, had used them, would have tried to get them in the future ... was therefore a threat to the peace of the region and a threat to the peace of the wider world, and was in breach of many vital security council resolutions,” Howard said. “You take all those things together, and I believe there was a legal case for going to war.”