It must be hard, if you live outside Britain, to realize quite how unremitting a campaign has been waged against Tony Blair and his government since the end of the Iraq war. Day after day their record on Iraq has come under attack--from the media, from disaffected members of the Labour party, from critics of the war in general. Some rough blows have been struck.

A new pitch of animosity was reached around the middle of July, when the left-wing weekly the New Statesman published what was effectively an anti-Blair issue, in the course of which it described him as a psychopath. The New Statesman is only a shadow of its former self, but in the quarters where it still commands respect there was a certain amount of consternation. “Psychopath” was surely going a bit far, even by current standards. Wasn’t it time to adopt a more measured tone? But then later the same week came news of the suicide of David Kelly, the government scie ...

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