Interesting article from Yesterday's Spectator calling for Blair to leave office. The article was written before Campbell's resignation and it does particularly single out Campbell but nonetheless it is still highly relevant.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-08-30&id=3448
Tony Blair should relinquish his premiership. It is not simply that he has lost the trust of the voters, his own party activists and increasingly large sections of the parliamentary Labour party, and is regarded with luminous contempt by such dispossessed ministers as Robin Cook, Clare Short, Peter Kilfoyle and Glenda Jackson. It is that he can no longer do his job properly, and that the protective cabal around him has shrunk with such rapidity that he has nowhere to turn for succour and support.
And the things which have brought about this situation — culminating the Hutton inquiry — were not rare examples of a lapse in judgment, which we might be inclined to forgive, if not forget, but are instead emblematic of the long-term traits of this regime: lying, dissembling, and the orchestrated smearing and vilifying of people who have objected to the lying and dissembling.
And that ludicrous 45-minute claim: it was plucked from the main body of the dossier (where it shouldn’t have been, anyway) and included in Tony Blair’s frontispiece. Its position there must have been a deliberate attempt to mislead. The decision to defame Dr Kelly after his death came from No. 10. Do you believe for a second that the duty press spokesman, Tom Kelly, made up, himself, the suggestion that Dr Kelly was a Walter Mitty figure? Portraying the scientist thus was part of a quite deliberate strategy to place in the public mind the idea that Dr Kelly was a borderline nutter who had misled Gilligan and everybody else. Where do you suppose that came from? And do you think for a moment that the Prime Minister — who, as the Hutton inquiry has learnt, took an intense, consuming interest in the row — didn’t know that such a strategy had been adopted?
Mr Blair memorably announced, on the eve of the Good Friday Agreement, that he could feel the hand of history upon his shoulder. Yeah, well, the hand’s come back again, Tone. And this time it’s pointing out of the door.