Airstrip One

Gilligan's Island

Boris Johnson writes in defence of Andrew Gilligan. Many good points here, as well as the surprising fact (to those who've never met Gilligan) that Gilligan was moderately pro war - as if a loyal New Labourite could be anything but.

The first point was that the right wing press have been giving the left wing government a free ride. While this should not be surprising in the pages of the Labour supporting and sister company of Sky News, The Times, the Telegraph should know better. Alas, it hasn't really known better for about ten years but that's another story.

The main point, however is that Gilligan called it right. The dossiers were a pile of tosh, and the fact that they were tosh was not because our intelligence services were hopeless but because our government lied to us, and our government lied to us not out of habit but out of a conscious desire to have an excuse to follow on the slipstream of a superpower. (Of course Campbell is not to blame for the dossier, he followed orders as well.)