Bright's Blog: The Iraq Dossier Saga

Of all the stories told on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, there is one important episode that took place during the build-up to the conflict that has gone largely unreported. It concerns a young woman who was a witness to something so outrageous, something so contrary to the principles of diplomacy and international law, that in revealing it she believed war could be averted. That woman was Katharine ... read more

Now we have the missing draft of the government's notorious weapons of mass destruction dossier in our hands, it is horribly plain why officials and ministers went to such lengths to stop us seeing it. The so-called "Williams draft" - named after John Williams, the former Sunday Mirror journalist who became director of communications at the Foreign Office - demonstrates beyond doubt that the government's spin machine was at the ... read more

As a journalist, Alastair Campbell never knowingly broke a news story. As he would freely admit, even when working for the Daily Mirror, he acted as a propagandist, not a reporter. As such, it should come as little surprise that nearly 800 pages of his diaries have produced little new other than the odd piece of tittle-tattle - Tony Blair saving Gordon Brown from a locked toilet, Bill Clinton and ... read more