Clare Short

An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq, and the Misuse of Power
(2004, The Free Press, ISBN 0743263928)

When giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 17 June 2003, a month after her resignation from the Cabinet over Tony Blair’s policy on Iraq, Clare Short was asked is she felt she had been deliberately deceived by the Prime Minister in the run-up to war. In reply, she said she believed that Blair saw it as ‘an honourable deception’.

Nearly eighteen months later, with US and UK forces still mired in difficulty in Iraq, and with reconstruction based on a legitimate democratic government looking increasingly difficult, how much honour remains in that deceit? For deceit is what it was, as the former Secretary of State for International Development makes clear in this devastating book.

Neither self-serving memoir nor dry historical overview, An Honourable Deception? is Clare Short’s riveting personal account of both the events leading to Tony Blair’s decision to ally himself so unquestioningly with George W. Bush’s neoconservative agenda, and her subsequent decision to resign from the government – including the real reasons for her delayed departure. Writing ‘more in sorrow than anger’, Clare Short also presents an insider’s view of Iraq as just one, albeit spectacular, example of a much wider malaise: the absence of proper debate and democratic process in Blair’s government, and the emasculation of Cabinet as a decision-making body. Two massive majorities, she argues, have made Number 10 simultaneously arrogant and ineffectual, and Blair’s leadership style has contributed to a failure to grasp the real and urgent problems that Britain, and the world, must address.

Passionate, accessible, and written with the honesty and directness for which she is so widely admired, An Honourable Deception? is not just a searing indictment of wasted power, it is an inspiring clarion call for change – in the way our politicians behave, in the way politics is conducted, and in the way we regard Britain’s role in the world.

The Right Honourable Clare Short MP entered Parliament in 1983 as the member for Birmingham Ladywood. She served as Secretary of State for International Development from 1997 until her resignation from the Cabinet over the war in Iraq in 2003. She lives in Birmingham and London.

November 2004

In February 2005, An Honourable Deception? was awarded the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year Award for 2004. Click here to listen to Clare Short’s acceptance speech

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Reviews

• Review by John Kampfner, 31 October 2004
• Review by Michael Portillo, 31 October 2004
• Review by Philippe Sands, 15 November 2004