Daily Mail, March 31 2003.

The air is loud with the sound of people moaning that the game is up, Baghdad didn’t fall in a week as promised, the Iraqis are not strewing flowers beneath allied boots and – the supreme outrage -- this war is taking casualties. If these people and the broadcasters feeding this neurotic negativity had been around at the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, the allies would never have defeated the Nazis.

These are the same people who said there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in terrorism. They were proved wrong in the most gruesome way at the weekend when four US soldiers were killed by a human ‘suicide’ bomb.

The Iraqis now say 4,000 Arabs (including hundreds of Palestinians) have come to Iraq to form human bombs, ‘the first on the glorious path of jihad (holy war) against the invaders’. So much for the claim by the anti-war lobby that the secular Ba’athists have nothing to do with the Islamic jihad against the west. Now these Iraqi godfathers of Arab terrorism are threatening to unleash their human bombs on Britain, too. The war against Iraq is turning very graphically into a war against terror.

Those who refuse to acknowledge these links are the same people who have denied all the evidence that Saddam has chemical or biological weapons. Yet 3000 chemical protection suits were found abandoned after a rout of Iraqi soldiers; and now military intelligence is warning that chemical warheads have been tried out near Basra, and that there are fears that chemicals may even be added to the raging oil fires. The Iraqis would be fools to use chemical weapons unless they are finally cornered; but only a fool would deny they have them.

The nay-sayers also seem to think that if a war hits unexpected setbacks, it should be abandoned. Ten days in, and Robin Cook is already running up the white flag. ‘I have had my fill of this bloody and unnecessary war’, said this haggis-eating surrender monkey. ‘I want our troops home before more of them are killed’.

Within hours – even more preposterously – he was trying to deny he wanted to abandon the battlefield. The fact remains that he is filling the role of Saddam Hussein’s cheerleader-in-chief, undermining soldiers who are laying down their lives for their country.

True, the war is certainly not going to plan, and that’s because the Americans got it badly wrong. They assumed Saddam would be defeated quickly because the Iraqis would rise up in gratitude and relief against him.

It hasn’t happened. The Iraqis bear too many scars of their past abandonment by the Americans to trust them now. Moreover, the Ba’athist tyranny is still all too obviously in place, and people will not rise up until they are certain it is in its death throes.

The result of the Americans’ strategic mistake is a shortage of both troops and supplies for a war which will last far longer than they thought.

But the fact that they got this wrong should not mean we all now give up. It means instead that we must rethink and adapt to the realities of a war on three fronts: a conventional military campaign, humanitarian assistance and counter-terrorism.

The conventional war is going very well. There have been rapid advances, thousands of Iraqis captured and killed, civilian casualties kept to a minimum, and very small allied losses.

If the British can get the humanitarian aid flowing and the Iraqis start feeling its benefits, then in time they may realise the intention is to help them and their suspicion and hostility may dissipate.

It is the third front that is rightly causing acute alarm: the fact that the Iraqis are using terrorism in addition to conventional military force. The result is the desperate fight for the cities, with most concern that in Baghdad the Iraqis will dig in and entice the allies into fighting street by street with enormous losses.

These terrorists are using civilians as human shields, abusing white flags and ambulances, murdering deserters, and now creating human bombs.

This is asymmetric warfare, of a kind demonstrated every day by Iraq’s Palestinian allies in the war against Israel – whose own conventional military superiority is similarly undermined by the country’s respect for human life; it creates a fatal imbalance against an enemy whose fanatical contempt for life fashions human beings themselves into bombs.

For all we know, the relentless bombardment of Baghdad has so weakened the Iraqi command structure that the city is more vulnerable than we think. But assuming the worst -- that the Iraqis are well dug in -- the allies face their gravest danger, and we all need to think clearly and stiffen our sinews.

For Saddam’s most potent weapon – and the reason he is using terrorists to tear up the rules of war – is the west’s paralysis caused by its extreme abhorrence of causing civilian casualties. That is why terrorism, which uses innocents as hostages, tips the balance of military power the other way.

This poses a truly hideous dilemma for the west. We have an ethical duty to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible. But that doesn’t mean we must place our own soldiers at risk and endanger the victory of a just cause through a self-defeating concern to avoid any casualties of war.

Every military strategist knows that war cannot be won by half measures. British commanders in the field have already said their troops are being put in danger because they are forbidden to fire if there is a danger of hitting civilians.

A prolonged siege of Baghdad or Basra would be even worse, exposing all citizens to the hideous fate of slow starvation. It is surely better and more humane to act decisively and quickly – not by saturation bombing, but by destroying specific targets and infrastructure, even if there are dangers of unintended civilian casualties.

This war is being fought to remove a threat to the world arising from the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The consequence of victory will be the liberation of the Iraqi people. But this is not a popularity contest. The Ba’athist regime has to be conquered before the people can be liberated. And conquest cannot be achieved without loss of innocent life.

It is absolutely essential to destroy the Iraqis’ assumption that the west has no stomach for taking casualties. It is vital not just to win this campaign, but to face down all the other Arab godfathers of terror who have been using this same assumption to blackmail the west for decades. It’s possibly the single most powerful factor behind the growth of global terrorism.

The Americans’ strategy may have been lamentably wrong, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this war is just and necessary. It simply cannot be lost. The stakes for the security of the free world are too high. However long it takes, it must be won.

Those who have told themselves this can be achieved without setbacks, deaths or consequences which give us sleepless nights should either grow up or shut up. In this war against terror, we all pull together – or fall apart.

Daily Mail, March 24 2003

The unspeakable nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime has been brought home by the parading of terrified American prisoners of war on Iraqi television, and by the disgusting footage of the bodies of other captives, at least two of whom had been shot between the eyes.

All in flagrant contravention of the Geneva convention, of course; and all in direct contrast to the way Iraqi POWs are being treated by allied forces.

Terrorised Iraqis understand this distinction only too well. Hundreds of young men stood applauding as allied convoys rolled into Basra. In Safwan, there were scenes of heartbreaking relief at the arrival of the allied liberators. ‘You’re late’, said one weeping Iraqi man. ‘What kept you so long?’

Yet in Britain, thousands of people took to the streets once again to protest against the war; truanting children marched beneath placards branding Tony Blair and George W Bush as murderers; and the churches resolutely refused to differentiate between good and evil.

The persecuted Iraqis understand that the war is not directed against them or their Moslem faith, but at the tyranny which has enslaved them. But people in the west, under whose banner Iraq is to be liberated, deny that this is truly a just war – and fantastically, believe instead that the most dangerous person in the world is not Saddam Hussein but President Bush.

It is clear the Americans have made every attempt to avoid needless loss of Iraqi life. The surgical strike at the beginning was aimed at killing Saddam and his top brass in order to end the war before it started. And when the smoke cleared from the ‘shock and awe’ operation’s unparalleled destructive force last week, it was found that only three Iraqis had died with a further 200 injured.

Of course, those and subsequent casualties are all to be regretted. And much worse may unfold in Baghdad, where Saddam’s forces are reputedly planning to make a last stand using civilians as human shields. This despicable tactic, though, should only heighten the contrast between the two approaches.

The allies have been fighting in accordance with the proportionality demanded by a just war. It is the strategy of people who have respect for human life, and who are fighting a regime which, by contrast, views human beings as utterly dispensable. Yet amazingly – even though support for the war is growing -- thousands of people in Britain and other western countries refuse to accept this moral difference.

Indeed, from the ugly opinions voiced in the street demonstrations and on TV and radio panel discussions, what’s all too obvious to the suffering Iraqis is flatly denied by Stop the War protesters and much of the British establishment.

The street demonstrations are being organised by the cynical and manipulative hard left – an unsavoury crew of communists, Trotskyites and Moslem activists using the tactics and some of the agenda of the anti-globalisation protests to suck in the faint-hearted and credulous.

What is particularly worrying is the hold such groups are exercising over impressionable schoolchildren. Several thousand pupils bunked off school once again last week, and in a grotesque parody of adult political hooliganism mounted several charges against the police in Parliament Square.

But the hard left has stumbled upon a cause that chimes with liberals and even conservatives, not just in Britain but throughout the west. So what on earth is going on here?

This is a phenomenon as complex as it is alarming, arising from factors including consumerist complacency and fear of terrorism; anti-Americanism and anti-Bushism; and utter ignorance and a complete misreading of the Middle East conflict.

But the most fundamental reason is surely the general moral confusion that is now entrenched in Britain and the west, where people are increasingly unable or unwilling to distinguish good from evil. In all walks of life, there is now a widespread assumption that these terms are merely a matter of opinion.

This doctrine of moral equivalence means that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter – regardless of the fact that he may be fighting against a free democracy. The result is that aggression is no longer recognised as such and may be brushed aside or even supported.

In Britain, the churches’ visceral opposition to this war has given way to pious prayers for the troops. But the bishops’ moral equivalence is nauseating. They say it would be ‘arrogant’ to suggest that God is on the side of the west, since all people are his creatures.

This is an astonishing position for religious leaders to take, since it means they make no distinction between good and evil. Of course, one would expect them to be concerned for everyone’s soul. But this refusal to take sides is morally contemptible; worse, it actually leads them to excuse evil when other factors – such as poverty – enter the equation.

The Archbishop of Canterbury himself has expressed just such moral equivalence. In his booklet Writing in the Dust, written straight after 9/11, Rowan Williams wrote of the west: ‘We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving them no other option’.

Just think about that last phrase for a moment. ‘No other option’? This is close to a justification for terror. And despite such apparent respect for those who do not enjoy western freedom, this attitude consigns them in fact to death and despair.

According to Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor whose trip to Iraq as a human shield ‘shocked me back to reality’, the Iraqis convinced him that Saddam was ‘a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head’.

This is the evil that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican bishops refuse to fight. This is the evil that they refuse even to say is morally worse than the cause that has taken up arms to end it.

The churches, along with the others who are against this war, have lost their moral way. Whatever weaselly formulations they construct, by their opposition they have effectively lent their weight to a continuation of Saddam’s appalling regime.

And now that allied troops are laying down their lives for their countries, those who continue their protests are committing nothing less than an act of treachery.

There is now not only war in the gulf. The west is at war with itself.

The battle is between those who want to build a better world and destroy the promoters of tyranny, terrorism and mass murder, and those who wish instead to appease them -- composed of a startling global coalition of the far right, communists, pacifists, terrorists, anarchists, defeatists, antisemites and useful idiots.

These dividing lines are critical to the terrible battles ahead, and will be remembered for ever.

Spectator, March 22 2003.

Want to make yourself really, really unpopular if you’re a Jew? Try saying that the world is witnessing a terrifying firestorm of hatred directed at Israel and the Jewish people, in which the British and Europeans are deeply implicated.

Since it is now a given in many circles that Israel is a threat to the world equal to North Korea and that Ariel Sharon is a cross between Martin Bormann and Hendrik Verwoerd, you will find yourself accused of using the Holocaust to avoid any criticism of Israel’s behaviour. Because, well, you know, you Jews always stick together and are mighty quick to deal that persecution card.

Anyone who holds that view may as well skip what follows. More objective and fair-minded souls, however, might be deeply alarmed to learn of the evidence provided at a recent conference on antisemitism and the media at the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Antisemitism in Jerusalem.

This was scarcely a gathering of the Ariel Sharon fan-club. Among academics and journalists from Israel, Europe, Britain and America were several left-wingers and liberals who were deeply hostile to Israel’s Likud government, believed the settlements should be dismantled and were troubled by the behaviour of some of Israel’s military. ‘There’s no doubt that Israel is committing human rights violations on the West Bank’, said Professor Yehuda Bauer, the distinguished Holocaust expert.

But there was equally no doubt, from what he and others said, that anti-Zionism is now being used to cloak a terrifying nexus between genocidal Arab and Islamist hatred of the Jews and deep-seated European prejudices.

Antisemitism is protean, mutating over the centuries into new forms. Now it has changed again, into a shape which requires a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary. The new antisemitism does not discriminate against Jews as individuals on account of their race. Instead, it is centred around Israel, and the denial to the Jewish people alone of the right of self-determination.

This is nothing to do with the settlements or the West Bank. Indeed, the language being used exposes as a cruel delusion the common belief that the Middle East crisis would be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state.

The key motif is a kind of Holocaust inversion, with the Israelis being demonised as Nazis and the Palestinians being regarded as the new Jews. Israel and the Jews are being systematically delegitimised and dehumanised – a necessary prelude to their destruction -- with both Islamists and the western media using anti-Zionism as a fig-leaf for prejudices rooted in both medieval Christian and Nazi demonology.

This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel in the media but to mainstream articles discussing the malign power of the Jews over American and world policy.

The Jerusalem conference heard chilling presentations about a phenomenon barely discussed in Britain: the virulent Arab and Muslim hatred of the Jews. This goes far beyond even the desire to finish off Israel as a Jewish state. Anti-Jewish hatred plays a crucial role in the fanatical jihadism that now threatens all of us in the west, pouring out in TV programmes, newspapers and religious sermons throughout the Arab and Muslim world and amounting to a new warrant for genocide.

The dominant message is that Jewish power amounts to a conspiracy to destroy Islam and take over the whole world. Truly mad theories circulate on Islamist internet sites which have now convinced untold numbers of Arabs and Muslims that the Jews were behind both 9/11 and the Columbia space shuttle disaster. Egyptian television transmitted a 41-part series which presented the notorious Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – which purported to be a Jewish plot to control the world – as the truth. (This has prompted some Arab intellectuals to condemn such propaganda as both untrue and a tactical error, but these dissidents remain a small minority). Meanwhile, Saudi media and religious sermons incite the murder of Jews.

According to the Arabic scholar Professor Menachem Milsom, this Arab and Islamist propaganda persistently dehumanised Jews by representing them as apes and pigs. A preacher at the totemic Haram mosque in Mecca said the Jews were ‘evil offspring’, the ‘destroyers of God’s word’, ‘priest murderers’ and the ‘scum of the human race’. The medieval Christian blood libel—the claim that the Jews kill children and drink their blood -- has surfaced time and again in prestigious Arab newspapers.

And Zionism was equated with Nazism; just at the Nazis believed in the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race, so Zionists (sic) believed they were the chosen people, which justified their own military expansion. This equation was not confined to a marginal few. Abu Mazen, said Milsom, the Palestinian Authority intellectual who is being talked about as Yasser Arafat’s prime minister in a ‘reformed’ administration, wrote as much in his doctoral thesis -- in which he also said that the Zionists gave the Nazis permission to treat the Jews as they wished so long as this guaranteed their immigration to Palestine.

These sick outpourings are not so much religious or even fundamentalist doctrines as rooted in a fanatical totalitarian ideology. As Yehuda Bauer observed, the driving aim is the Islamic dictatorship of the world. Realisation of this utopia necessitates the destruction of the foundation creeds of western culture, Judaism and Christianity -- and especially Israel, the supposed personification of western global power-lust, which was planted as an incubus on Arab soil as a result of the Holocaust.

Holocaust denial is therefore central to Arab antisemitism, the prejudice which such historical falsehood has helped to forge a strategic alliance with Europe. For it absolves Europe of its guilt towards the Jews, and replaces it by European guilt towards Arabs displaced as a result of the Holocaust.

Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, Europeans have eagerly embraced the Nazification of the Jews, a process which really got under way with Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This marked the beginning of the media’s systematic inversion of Israeli self-defence as aggression, along with double standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to do with delegitimising the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its dismantling.

So the conference heard about German accusations that Israel was using Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of the Nazification of Israel in Sweden, where there were charges that the Israelis were exterminating the Palestinians, that the media was controlled by Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel and that influential Jewish lobby groups were ‘spraying journalists with poison’.

It heard that in France, Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate if they challenge the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) – which has been playing to packed houses in Paris -- about the obsessive malevolence towards Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British media described Israel’s ‘death squads’, ‘killing fields’ and ‘executioners’ while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as ‘gentle’, ‘religious’ and ‘kind’. It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who was saying: ‘Surely they are not going to kill me again’.

And of course there was Jenin, the so-called ‘massacre’ or ‘genocide’ reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians died of whom more than half were terrorists while Israel sustained (for it) the huge loss of 23 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught Palestinian public was – on this and other occasions -- whipped up by biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact, contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.

The Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly genocidal programme. But an even more striking feature is that, while the old antisemitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new antisemitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political left. So as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more counter-intuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the left also subscribe to this analysis -- and even the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid – handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new antisemitism as Jewish paranoia or islamophobia.

So what is the explanation for the left’s position? Partly, it’s the old anti-imperialist and anti-west prejudice. Partly, it’s the view that only the powerless can be victims; so third world people can never be murderers, and any self-defence by western societies such as Israel must instead be aggression. Partly, it’s the post-modern destruction of objectivity and truth, which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the left takes an axe to morality and self-restraint, it’s a golden opportunity to pulverise the very people who invented the damn rules in the first place.

A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the real point. The left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the left as a protective against the implosion of its whole ideological position.

So the evidence is being denied, and truth is being stood on its head. The result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction, and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face.

Daily Mail, March 17 2003

As we prepare to go over the top in Iraq, the drums of revolt within Tony Blair’s domestic encampment are being beaten ever more histrionically.

Last night, while the Prime Minister met President Bush and the Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar for their council of war in the Azores, rebellion was said to be growing. Clare Short and possibly Robin Cook are expected to resign from the Cabinet. Other Cabinet ministers have revealed their concerns, up to 30 junior ministers are apparently poised to resign and a further 16 MPs are said to be planning to join the rebels. So Mr Blair’s position becomes ever more fragile.

Well, maybe. We have yet to see whether more than a handful really will be prepared to split their party. If dozens of the payroll vote were to resign, Mr Blair’s control would indeed be fractured. And if the war went badly or British forces became bogged down in a messy aftermath, then he would be left swinging in the wind.

But if the war does go well, then we will also enter uncharted political waters. It would be a defining moment, the reshaping of the international order and the British and European political landscape in which Mr Blair himself may emerge personally vindicated -- while the party he leads may become damaged goods and radically unstable.

Indeed, Mr Blair already appears to have weathered the immediate threat. There are signs that, even though some Labour MPs may fall on their swords, his rebels have overplayed their hand. Forced to look over the edge of the cliff last week into a future devoid of its principal vote-winner, the party rounded on the leaders of the revolt. And tellingly, the hitherto silent Gordon Brown has now declared unequivocal support for the Prime Minister’s strategy.

If Saddam is removed in reasonably short order, Mr Blair will not only be hailed as a leader of huge courage and statesmanship. His whole approach to his party will have been changed by these traumatic experiences. He will have been through the fire; and the Prime Minister that emerges will be forged in a mould of iron.

Already, he has trimmed the political cronies from his immediate entourage, and is relying far more on high-powered senior civil servants. And after this crisis has passed, he is likely to reshape his Cabinet still more ruthlessly around his own image.

He will thus become even more detached from his party. But he may be presiding over a movement that has degenerated into factional camps and ideological disarray.

This is not just because members will have opposed the removal of a tyrant, thus setting themselves against the rejoicing Iraqis. Nor will it be merely that their credibility is destroyed if the full extent of Saddam’s apparatus of terror at home and abroad is finally revealed.

More profoundly, if Saddam is beaten and the world clearly benefits then the whole world view of the left will have taken a series of enormous knocks. That view is based on the left’s deep belief that the international order is preferable to its own national interest. But the twin vessels of this internationalism, the UN and the EU, will have been holed below the waterline.

The UN will be shown to have failed to implement its own authority, with the US having to do its job for it. And Europe will have been split open by the French miscalculation, which has caused a breach with those present and future members who recognise that their interests lie above all with America – which will now turn its back on both ‘old’ Europe and the UN.

The defining issue now is how individual countries relate to the US in its new world role as pro-active defender of the west against its enemies. ‘New’ Europe has shown itself to be far more pro-America than the old. So it is entirely possible that – thanks to President Chirac – the federal European project is now dead in the water, and will be replaced by an alternative Europe of pro-US states in a looser coalition. And the leader of that coalition could well be Tony Blair.

This division would cause untold grief to the euro-fanatic left, for whom the federal EU is the new socialism – a mechanism for controlling people and trying to reshape society and human nature itself through bureaucratic directives and European law.

The biggest blow to the left, however, will be delivered if America succeeds in its governing ambition to restructure the Middle East. It hopes that the removal of Saddam will pave the way for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians by removing one Arab sponsor of Palestinian terror and thus serving notice on all the others that their game is now up.

Now this is a mighty big gamble. For it to work, America will have to do rather better than hailing as a moderate the new Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen – a man who is Yasser Arafat’s puppet, and whose own doctoral thesis claimed that the Zionists colluded with the Nazi persecution of the Jews to produce mass emigration to Palestine.

But if the removal of Saddam does break the logjam and bring about peace in the Middle East, the left will be destroyed. If President Bush were to engineer a pragmatic compromise between the Palestinians and Ariel Sharon, its intellectual and moral bankruptcy would be starkly revealed.

And if that happened, the tectonic plates of British politics would shift far beyond the Palace of Westminster. For America’s success would destroy the view of our intellectuals and our governing class that there are no values worth fighting for.

It would challenge the widespread reluctance to make any sacrifices that might disturb the comfortable status quo, an attitude which has subverted everything from the defence of the realm to family, authority and the notion of self-restraint and replaced them by an illiberal political correctness enforced by law.

If the intellectual terror of the left were to be removed, people would once again start drawing lines in the sand to protect and defend what is valuable.

But even if Mr Blair is vindicated by the success of the war, British voters are unlikely to forgive him. When the dust settles, they will still judge him principally on his failure to deliver on the public services and on his own role in undermining the identity and values of the country.

For Mr Blair is also a universalist. His pursuit of a second UN resolution has been dangerous folly. As the Attorney-General is apparently confirming, it was not legally necessary. It has produced a delay highly dangerous to our troops. And it created a politically lethal misapprehension that without it, war was neither legal nor justified.

Mr Blair’s eyes may now have been opened to the reality of Europe, the fantasies of international brotherhood and the real choices that need to be made. In short, this could be where the world turns for the better. This is not to diminish the extreme dangers that lie ahead. All it needs is courage, fortitude, wisdom -- and luck.

Daily Mail, March 13 2003

According to the medical establishment, the whole idea is a nonsense. The suggestion that a new autistic bowel disease is now affecting large numbers of children who were previously normal until they were vaccinated with MMR is simply not borne out by the evidence.

There is, say these experts, nothing new going on. All that's happened is that a few parents are desperate to invent a reason for the appalling disorder of autism that has afflicted their children.

Autism often isn't noticed until the second year of life, which happens to be the time children are vaccinated with MMR. These few parents have simply put two and two together and made five.

So it came as a bit of a shock to attend the annual Autism Society of America meeting in Indianapolis last June.

There I discovered upwards of 1,000 parents, most of whom told the same story: that their children were developing totally normally until they had MMR, following which their skills and personalities disintegrated and they developed appalling gut problems and food intolerances.

Take Jeff Sell, a Texas lawyer with eight year-old twins, Ben and Joe. Ben was born with an autistic disorder but Joe passed all the normal milestones until he had MMR.

'Joe had an immediate reaction with epileptic seizures, very high fever, rash and vomiting the next day.' said Sell. 'We took him to the doctor and were given the standard party line. In few months after that the language he developed had all gone, and chronic diarrhoea set in.'

Or take Liz Birt from Chicago. Her eight year-old son Matthew passed all his developmental milestones until he had MMR and Hib (haemophilus influenza type B) vaccinations at 15 months.

'That night he had a high temperature. Seven days later he started to have severe diarrhoea and stopped sleeping at night. He would wake at 1am and be up for the rest of the night. And he started screaming.

'I was very concerned because he wasn't growing and putting on weight. A few months later he started staring at lights, not making eye contact.

'Previously, he could count to ten, say mama and dada and ball but all these words went away. Then it seemed he wasn't hearing what we were saying at all.'

Despite the fact that Matthew had chronic diarrhoea, doctors dismissed his mother's concerns. But then she took him to be examined by Andrew Wakefield's team at the Royal Free Hospital, London.

Wakefield is the British doctor who first raised the alarm about MMR, linking it to autism and bowel problems.

His team discovered that Matthew was in constant pain from a grossly impacted and diseased bowel -- something he believes is directly linked to autism following MMR jabs.

Other parents tell similar stories. Tanya Reubarger from Indianapolis said of her five year-old son Nathan: 'He was a perfectly normal baby until he had his injection.

'Then he started regressing, throwing violent tantrums, beating his head on the walls, beating his hands until they bled, frantic, always crying. He was eating normally but he had constant diarrhoea. Yet no-one will believe you.'

In Britain, the National Autistic Society says it has not noticed more reports of regressive autism and bowel disease following MMR.

But other groups say this is because parents with such experiences don't join the deeply conservative NAS because it gives them no support.

Such parents say that through their children's disorder, they have met countless other couples whose autistic children similarly developed normally until MMR provoked a catastrophic regression.

And they say the claim by autism experts that they simply failed to spot autistic symptoms before the vaccination is demonstrably untrue, since so many of them have video recordings of their babies before vaccination showing them to have been perfectly normal.

Tracey Steell (correct) from Glasgow has triplet boys, now aged eight. They had finished a course of antibiotics shortly before their MMR vaccination. Until then, they had been perfectly normal babies.

Within a few days of the jab, one by one all three developed high fever, started to scream uncontrollably and then stopped developing.

'They didn't play, they just lay there, all three of them,' she said. 'They stopped playing with the dog and the cat, they didn't play with their toys, they didn't cry; if you picked them up they would just stare at you.'

Because they were triplets, she said, the babies were continuously monitored by the hospital for the whole of their first year of life – and the hospital found nothing abnormal about them, giving the lie to the claim that such parents fail to recognise autistic symptoms present before vaccination.

Jonathan Harris of Birmingham has six children. The two eldest, Ashley, 16 and Laura, 14, were too old to have MMR, and are normal children. The next two, Thomas, 12 and Oliver, eight, did have MMR.

Within a week of the jab Oliver started to scream and his behaviour regressed: he wouldn't make eye contact, wouldn't play and started throwing things around. Thomas developed bowel problems and lost his language skills.

Harris is now looking for single vaccines for his two youngest, who are four and almost three. 'Most parents of autistic children that I have met have had similar experiences to us,' he said. 'I know dozens of such families.'

What no-one disputes is that in both Britain and America there has been a huge rise in the numbers diagnosed with either autism or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which covers other developmental abnormalities.

And what is striking is that this rise coincided with MMR vaccination being made a legal requirement in

the US in 1979 and being introduced into the UK in 1989 (although some experts claim -- with figures that have been contested -- that autism started to rise in the UK two years before MMR was introduced).

The main US figures are collated in California, the state with the most advanced services and reporting system for developmental disorders.

Rick Rollens is a former secretary of the California state senate whose own son developed regressive autism after his booster MMR shot. 'Something happened in 1979/80,' he says. 'The pattern changed.'

And the rise seems to be accelerating. Between 1987 and 1998, the proportion of autistic people using California's services almost doubled.

Between 1987 and 1998, there was a rise of 273% in the number of autistic cases in the state. According to Rollens, California is now adding on average seven new autistic cases per day to its register.

The figures are borne out by studies of other parts of the US. And they correspond to UK figures too.

Until recently, the rate of ASD in Britain was estimated at between 5 and 20 per 10,000. The Medical Research Council now puts it at one in 166, or about 70 per 10,000.

The National Autistic Society thinks that is an underestimate. In a study, it found the rate running at one in 86 in primary schools, a staggeringly high figure.

Teachers are increasingly reporting that they are finding it difficult to cope with the new phenomenon of autistic children in their classes.

Nevertheless, the medical establishment has long maintained that the numbers aren't really increasing.

Dr Eric Fombonne, the child psychiatrist and renowned autism expert who is advising the drug companies that make MMR, has pooh-poohed the California figures and said the high rates merely reflect wider and better diagnosis and recognition.

He has been backed up by Dr Patrick Bolton, a child psychiatrist and co-director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, who says the explanation for the rise is unclear.

'It's most likely to be at least in part due to the fact that we've changed our way of defining and diagnosing autism and we are better at spotting it. We've broadened the concept.'

However, last autumn a study by the University of California concluded that the huge rise in autism was real and could not be explained away by changes in diagnostic practice or classification.

And even Dr Fombonne now appears to be conceding that a significant change is taking place. In a recent article, he wrote that rates for the range of autism disorders were now three to four times higher than they were 30 years ago.

The parents respond with fury and incredulity to the idea that such behaviour could simply have been overlooked in the past or mistaken for something else.

In the US, Jeff Sell's wife was a special needs teacher in Spring, Houston. 'In 1994, she knew there were three children with autism in our district,' he said. 'Now there are 83.

'Are we being told that there were previously 83 children, all screaming and rocking and head-banging, and nobody noticed them? You don't miss autism. There are more of them.'

'We have heard from parents that huge numbers of autistic children are being identified,' said Judith Barnard of the NAS, 'and it wasn't like that when they were kids.

'So we asked schools whether they felt there were more autistic children now than five years ago and two thirds of them said yes. There is a sense that something perceptibly different is happening.'

Yet the establishment points to an apparent paradox which they say undermines the claim of a link with MMR. How can this be cause and effect, they say, when the rate of autism is still rising even though MMR uptake has stayed steady (or even gone down)?

The response from the Wakefield camp is that MMR is not the only cause of autism. Many other factors may be involved, such as, for example, the dramatically rising rate of food and other allergies, or the increasing burden of other vaccines administered to infants.

In the US, many parents believe that the mercury found in some vaccines other than MMR, such as the diphtheria/polio/tetanus jab, may weaken a child's immune system so that MMR becomes the final knockout blow.

Dr Jeff Bradstreet runs a clinic for autistic children in Florida. He firmly believes that MMR is a devastating factor in a wider process that impairs children's immune systems.

His own son Matthew was a normal baby until his MMR jab. 'Within two weeks of receiving MMR, Hib and chickenpox, Matthew was lost,' he said. 'He had chronic diarrhoea and regressed into a world of his own. After his booster MMR jab he had seizures.'

Tests revealed he had a very high level of measles virus in his spinal fluid. 'A Congressional researcher and I called paediatricians all over the country and presented the lab data and the history and asked them for their diagnosis and they all said measles and encephalopathy (brain disease).

'We said he had autistic features and they said the encephalopathy was causing the autistic features.

'There are many toxins in the environment. Ultimately, I think you have a series of wounding events and then in a weak state the child is exposed to MMR.'

The theory that too many vaccines at once overload the immature immune system is -- like everything else in this story -- controversial.

The eminent immunologist Sir Peter Lachmann says: 'There's no limit to what the immune system can take; that's what it is for. There is no evidence that three living viruses administered at the same time overloads it. I think this idea is entirely drawn out of the air.'

But Professor James Oleske, a paediatric immunologist in New Jersey, says: 'It's not the number of antigens in a vaccine that's the problem -- it's the fact that in preparing them for the vaccine, other things are added to make them more effective.'

Wakefield believes it is particular folly to mix viruses in a vaccine since this makes them unpredictable in their effects -- a view Lachmann dismisses.

'Compound viruses do not interfere with each other's responses,' Lachmann insists. Others say Lachmann is profoundly wrong.

Autism expert Dr Ken Aitken says studies have shown that combining viruses does indeed alter their effects and increases the risk of adverse reactions.

The Department of Health argues that the triple MMR vaccine is safer for children than single jabs, which would expose them and others to a far greater risk of measles, mumps and rubella through slow or non-existent take-up.

Because of the controversy, however, MMR take-up is down by about ten per cent to 84%, and demand for single jabs has soared. Drug manufacturers are now limiting the availability of single vaccines, with claims by campaigners that the health department is leaning on the companies not to supply them.

The perils of making it difficult for GPs to give single jabs on the NHS were underscored last month when two private clinics were shut down after it was found that their single vaccines were either ineffective of contaminated.

Dr Richard Halvorsen is a London GP and one of the few who gives single vaccine jabs on the NHS. 'The arguments against providing single vaccines are irrelevant if parents won't give their children the MMR.' he said.

'It seemed an overwhelming clinical argument to offer the single vaccine. By not offering it, we were contributing to the potential epidemic of measles that the department is purportedly trying to prevent.'

To which the Health Department replies: look at Japan. In 1993, Japan abandoned MMR completely after it suffered an outbreak of aseptic meningitis triggered by the Urabe strain of mumps vaccine within the triple jab.

Urabe-strain MMR had been withdrawn in Britain the previous year for the same reasons (shamefully, the Health Department had known of the dangers when it was introduced) and replaced with an updated version.

Japan, by contrast, switched entirely to single jabs. This has resulted, says the Health Department, in a measles epidemic in Japan and 79 deaths from the disease between 1992 and 1997.

On the face of it, then, this seems a strong argument for sticking with MMR. But Dr Hiroki Nakatani, director of the Infectious Disease Division at Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare, has a very different story to tell.

He says that in 1989, when Japan first introduced MMR, there were 34 deaths from measles; in 1990, there were 53 deaths; in 1991, 39; and in 1992, 14.

Then, in 1993, the Japanese government moved from recommending MMR to single vaccines instead. The number of deaths from measles per year has since remained at between 14 and 25.

So in fact, in the years Japan was using MMR there were on average rather more deaths from measles -- quite apart from the deaths and serious damage done by the vaccine -- than since single jabs were introduced.

This may well have been because take-up of vaccines during the MMR years never reached more than 68 per cent. By contrast, said Dr Nakatani, take-up of the single measles vaccine has now reached 95%, utterly disproving the

UK government warnings that the single jab would cause a steep decline in use.

In other words, it may be possible to increase take-up of single jabs above the rate of MMR simply through a sustained campaign of public education and encouragement.

So how is this great controversy to be resolved? Next year, about 1,000 families will be pressing claims for compensation against the drug companies in the High Court.

Whatever the result, this is not likely to end the argument. The answers to this riddle will have to come from scientific evidence, and are most likely to be uncovered in the US where much research is going on.

What, though, should a baffled public and -- in particular -- anxious parents make of the evidence so far? Which of these warring sides is right?

Both sides are fundamentally motivated by the highest concerns. Unfortunately, these concerns collide. The Department of Health and the medical establishment want to protect children and the wider community from

diseases that can kill or cause serious handicap.

The Wakefield camp and the parents are not against vaccination -- indeed, most of them agree on its importance -- but say the evidence is stacking up that the MMR carries too great a risk of injury.

The Wakefield camp has not yet proved its case. Its studies need to be replicated.

On the other side, Wakefield's opponents have not proved their case either. The epidemiology is flawed, and the claims made for it by government have often been bogus and misleading.

Moreover, the Department of Health is ill-placed to alllay anxiety when -- as I revealed in the first part of this series -- it was responsible for introducing a strain of MMR whose safety it knew had been seriously questioned, only withdrawing it after three years of flawed surveillance and resulting damage to a number of children.

As we have seen today, fears over this same Urabe strain prompted Japan to ditch MMR completely. The Health Department chose to stay on the triple-jab route, but its handling of the debacle was deeply unimpressive.

Given this dubious record, and the testimony of so many parents, it would seem only prudent both to permit single jabs and to encourage as a matter of the utmost urgency properly independent research to prove one way or another whether Andrew Wakefield is right.

Although his case is still inconclusive, there is surely enough evidence to prompt serious concern -- and a precautionary approach. The vast majority of children are clearly unaffected by the MMR jab; but if a small proportion is indeed affected, that still amounts to a lot of children.

The Government is frightened to do anything that may prompt a widespread collapse of confidence in vaccination.

But if it persists in dismissing the accumulating evidence from both clinicians and parents, it may find that it causes the very collapse in confidence -- with disastrous results -- that it is so desperate to prevent.

Daily Mail, March 12 2003

Little William Kessick was a bubbly and jolly baby. Bright as a button, he was born without problems 14 years ago, and passed all the normal milestones of child development with flying colours.

Then, at 15 months, he had his MMR jab -- a triple vaccination for mumps, measles and rubella. Within a few weeks, his mother Rosemary says she watched her child start to disintegrate.

'He had started to use a few words, like ball and book. Suddenly I realised he wasn't saying these words properly any more. Then his language just faded away.

'The last word he had was juice; and then that went too. He started banging his head against the walls and the furniture. He stopped responding to the spoken word.'

Mrs Kessick noticed that although William was eating normally, he was terribly thin, with his ribs poking through. He had appalling diarrhoea all the time, and was screaming all day and all night.

'The doctors just dismissed it. I put it together with the MMR which seemed to be the only thing that had happened, but they wouldn't listen. I was told I was being a bit neurotic about his behaviour.'

As William got worse and worse, Mrs Kessick found one small ray of hope. Changes to her son's diet seemed to make a difference to his behaviour.

By trial and error, she discovered what other researchers have subsequently confirmed -- that if such children avoid foods containing gluten and casein (derived from wheat and milk) not only their gut problems but also their behavioural difficulties dramatically improve.

The two sets of symptoms seemed inextricably linked. And Mrs Kessick was sure that MMR had somehow triggered them both.

She went from doctor to doctor but no-one would listen. In desperation, she contacted a vaccination pressure group called Jabs, founded by Cheshire mother Jackie Fletcher after her own son, Robert, developed epilepsy and brain damage following MMR.

Robert, now 11, has the development of a 14-month-old baby. Doctors told his mother that that the MMR jab had 'revealed' Robert's epilepsy, not caused it.

Jackie Fletcher told Mrs Kessick that she had heard of only one doctor who would be sure to take her fears seriously. His name was Andrew Wakefield, he worked at the Royal Free hospital in London, and he was one of the first doctors to sound the alarm over MMR.

Meeting him was to transform the lives of Mrs Kessick and her son. She would find herself at the centre of one of the greatest medical controversies of our age, with Wakefield and his supporters fighting a bitter battle to persuade the medical authorities that the MMR jab can trigger bowel disorders and autism in a minority of children.

But was Mrs Kessick right to blame the vaccination for her son's

catastrophic decline? And how could gut trouble be linked to problems with behaviour and the brain?

Are Wakefield and his fellow researchers scaremongers, or pioneers ranged against a hidebound establishment? Have they made an important discovery? Or are they wrenching the facts to fit a theory that doesn't hold water?

This is a debate of vital importance to every parent of young children in the land. Yet all too often, the public has been fobbed off by soundbites and bland assurances.

To get to the truth, as this special Mail series is trying to do, we must look more closely at the medical arguments. As we are about to see, it is a story of warnings that have gone ignored and experts who have been savaged for failing to support the official line.

Yet however often the evidence against MMR has been dismissed by the medical establishment, the dissident researchers have come back with new and troubling questions.

Andrew Wakefield made his name researching inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

He had a theory that measles virus -- which tends to home in on gut tissue -- might damage blood vessels, causing the wall of the bowel to break down and infection to set in.

His early work was aimed at proving a causal link between measles and Crohn's disease, a chronic bowel disorder. He failed to do so.

His critics cite this as evidence that his whole case is flawed, but other researchers have subsequently confirmed a high incidence of measles in the gut of children with Crohn's.

In any event, Wakefield still had measles in his sights. He had noticed a huge increase in IBD among children. Since the gut was important to the body's immune responses, there was probably something to which these children's immune system was reacting.

Might it be measles virus, or even the attenuated form of the virus in measles vaccine? Wakefield's concern deepened when he found that exposure to both measles and mumps in the same year appeared significantly to increase the risk of IBD.

The MMR vaccine, introduced in 1989, was for measles, mumps and rubella. In other words, it gave children simultaneous exposure to the two key viruses.

Wakefield became so anxious that he wrote to Dr David Salisbury, the government's principal medical officer for communicable diseases and immunisation, drawing attention to numerous studies indicating an association between bowel disease in children and measles. He received no reply.

A year later, when he heard of the proposed re-vaccination in 1994 of more than seven million children to counter a suggested measles epidemic, he wrote again urging that the campaign be aborted while more research was

carried out.

He was ignored again and the campaign went ahead. Meanwhile, more and more parents were becoming convinced that the MMR jab had produced a catastrophic reaction in their children.

Rosemary Kessick was one of them -- and her relief when she contacted Wakefield was immense.

Besides being prepared to consider a connection between the measles vaccine and her son William's bowel symptoms, he was also prepared to listen when she suggested that it was linked with William's behavioural problems.

'I phoned him and said, I think the gut has affected the brain -- and bless him, he didn't put the phone down on me,' recalls Mrs Kessick.

William was examined by the Royal Free team including the renowned paediatric gastroenterologist, Professor John Walker-Smith.

They found an impacted bowel, diarrhoea and inflammation. After the examination, said Mrs Kessick, Walker-Smith came into the room and said: 'You are right; we think this is a new disease state.'

Once they started treating William's bowel symptoms, there was a dramatic transformation in his behaviour. He began to laugh again and use words for the first time in years. To Mrs Kessick, it was now undeniable that the two sets of symptoms were linked.

Mrs Kessick then consulted Norfolk solicitor Richard Barr, who was preparing law suits on behalf of hundreds of other parents who claimed their children had been damaged by MMR.

In 1996, Barr was sufficiently concerned by the cases he was seeing to write to the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, expressing anxiety about the safety of the vaccine.

He was also worried that the 'Yellow Card' system for doctors to report adverse reactions to vaccines was grossly inadequate. The previous year, Dr Elizabeth Miller of the Public Health Laboratory Service had found five times more adverse reactions than doctors had reported.

In 1997, Wakefield finally won a meeting with the Health Department. He and John Walker-Smith, Jackie Fletcher of Jabs and the solicitor Richard Barr met the new health minister Tessa Jowell.

David Salisbury, the immunisation chief who had ignored Wakefield's warnings, was also present, as was the government's Chief Medical Officer, Sir Kenneth Calman.

The parents' side set out their evidence. They explained that there were hundreds of cases where children had been developing normally until MMR, whereupon they had lost all their social skills, including speech, and started suffering severe bowel problems and other physical symptoms.

Calman was sufficiently impressed to order an inquiry by the Medical Research Council. But according to Wakefield, David Salisbury was dismissive, telling Mrs Fletcher that it was all coincidence and her son had probably never been right from the beginning.

It was a response the medical establishment was to repeat ad infinitum, along with the dismissive observation that autistic children are bound to have gut problems because they tend to be 'faddy eaters'. In fact, Wakefield says he has found a specific intestinal disease in these children which 'faddy eating' cannot explain.

The whole controversy finally exploded into public consciousness in 1998, when Wakefield, Walker-Smith and their colleagues published a paper in the Lancet.

They reported how 12 children of previously normal development had suddenly lost their language and social skills, and had developed -- along with these autistic symptoms -- a new type of bowel disease.

The researchers conceded that this combination could have occurred by chance; but they believed they had identified a unique disease, which they called autistic enterocolitis.

What made the paper so incendiary was that it reported that a majority of the children's parents believed the trigger for this disease had been MMR. At a press conference, Wakefield recommended single vaccines should be used instead.

The Lancet was engulfed by a storm of criticism. Doctors said Wakefield's theory made no sense and was based on self-selected samples and bad science.

And indeed, the theory was confusing. Was the MMR jab supposed to cause autism or bowel disease or both? If only one of them, did autism then cause bowel disease or vice versa?

There was particular fury that Wakefield's paper presented no evidence for the MMR link except the experience of the parents. Wakefield remains unrepentant about this.

He told me: 'It wasn't my hypothesis; it was what the parents said. We acknowledged this did not prove a causal association.

'It's not my job to censor the parents' story. If we censored that history, how would we enable people to test it?

'The parents said to us: my child has bowel disease. Unequivocally they had bowel disease which the medical profession had played no part in diagnosing.

'It had ignored the suffering of these children. As a profession, we had been 100 per cent wrong and negligent in our duty to these children.

'So when the parents say they believe this happened after vaccination, we are not in any position to say, you are wrong. We must say instead we will investigate your history to the best of our ability.'

In fact, warnings over a possible link between MMR and autism had been issued before.

In 1996, an American immunologist and professor of medicine, Sudhir Gupta, told the National Autism Association of Chicago that there was a striking association between MMR and the onset of behavioural problems in all children he investigated for regressive autism (where the child suddenly loses skills after previously normal development).

And in 1998, American researcher Dr H. Hugh Fudenberg noted that 15 autistic children had developed their symptoms within a week of MMR immunisation.

Although he said he could not prove an association with MMR, he nevertheless recommended that immunisation with live viruses should be delayed until at least three years of age -- because the children's immune systems were still not fully developed at 15 months, the usual time of MMR jabs.

But what about the other side of the coin -- bowel problems? If anyone had been alert, there had been warnings signs about these, too, in the MMR safety trials years before.

One of these studies by Dr Joseph Stokes, published in 1971, looked at the effect of the vaccine on children in Philadelphia, Costa Rica and San Salvador.

It concluded the vaccine was safe, with the most important clinical reaction being 'mild fever in a portion of the children'.

However, buried in the report was a table which showed that the Philadelphia children who were vaccinated were more than four times as likely to develop gastroenteritis as those who were not.

Could this be proof that the jab was linked to gut problems? The confusing thing was that there was no such correlation among the children from Costa Rica and San Salvador.

In a paper they published in 2000, called Through a Glass Darkly, Wakefield and his colleague Dr Scott Montgomery suggested an answer.

They speculated that the absence of any rise in gastroenteritis in the Latin American children might be due to the fact that gut problems were much more prevalent in developing countries, swamping any possible effect from MMR.

In Philadelphia, however, where gastroenteritis was not so common, the increased incidence after MMR was highly significant -- and extremely ominous.

Through a Glass Darkly mounted a long and detailed onslaught on the original MMR safety trials, which it claimed had been wholly inadequate. It was accompanied by four reviews of its findings by other experts; none disagreed with the findings.

One assessor, Dr Peter Fletcher, concluded that even on an 'extremely generous' assessment, the evidence for MMR's safety had always been 'very thin'.

'Being realistic,' he said, 'there were too few patients followed up for insufficient time. Caution should have ruled the day. The granting of a product licence was premature.'

The paper caused a storm, and the establishment counter-attacked with great force.

The Medicines Control Agency, the body responsible for vaccine safety, published a savage critique which claimed that Wakefield and Montgomery had been selective in their evidence, misrepresented certain studies and got others wrong.

Nevertheless, the researchers were backed up by one of the world's foremost epidemiologists, the American professor Walter Spitzer, who said that he couldn't find any reliable MMR safety data in any published report.

Regardless of the growing furore, Wakefield and the Royal Free team pressed on with their work.

By now, they had shown that the affected children's guts contained measles virus protein, indicating that the virus was still active, and a raised level of measles antibodies, suggesting an abnormal immunological response. The next step was to discover whether this virus came from the MMR vaccine, or whether it was ‘wild’ or natural measles.

A Japanese researcher had found vaccine strain measles virus in the liver of hepatitis patients. He was sent samples from three autistic children, and found the same result in their blood.

At around this time, Wakefield sent other samples to Professor John O'Leary, a pathologist at Trinity college, Dublin, who specialises in detailed gene analysis.

O'Leary's tests confirmed the presence of measles virus in the gut of 75 of 91 autistic children with bowel problems, but in only 5 of 70 normal children.

Then, in June last year, O'Leary announced that he had identified the measles virus in the children's guts as the same strain used in MMR vaccine. It was a highly significant moment.

Certainly, such findings did not prove that MMR had caused the children's problems. The measles virus could conceivably have been an innocent bystander; or it could be that the children's bowel disease was responsible for the persistence of the virus, not the other way round.

All the same, O'Leary's findings suggested serious cause for concern that the measles vaccine might have something to do with these children's disorders. This was worrying, and cried out for further research.

What happened next was an object lesson in how this whole controversy can spiral out of control, and how the medical establishment can savage anyone who seems to support the Wakefield line.

The trouble started when over-hasty Press headlines suggested that O'Leary's findings did prove MMR caused autism.

Under huge pressure, O'Leary felt obliged to issue a statement saying this was not so. He had always advocated MMR vaccination, he said, and it was wrong not to immunise children.

Despite this statement, he has since found himself under intense attack from the highest level. Senior medical figures have queued up to denigrate him.

The Government's Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Pat Troop, is openly scornful of O'Leary's work and told me: 'High quality reviewers have expressed concern over his methodology and cannot accept the conclusions he has drawn.'

An especially damaging broadside was unleashed by Dr David Brown, of the Public Health Laboratory Service. Last June, he told the US Congress that O'Leary's data were not scientifically valid, and that they were undermined by a simple blunder.

O'Leary had identified the virus as the MMR strain by the presence of a particular amino acid. But according to Brown, this amino acid was also present in a number of wild measles viruses.

It was a point that seemed to torpedo O'Leary's whole argument. O'Leary has not answered it in public; nor will he speak to the media.

However, his medical supporters say he has a cast-iron defence -- since the wild measles viruses in which the amino acid is present are found only in Africa, never in Britain.

The only measles virus in Britain that corresponds to the characteristics O'Leary has identified is the MMR vaccine strain.

Far from being demolished, in other words, his research remains entirely valid.

The ferocious reaction to work raising questions about MMR has not scared the researchers into silence. But it did claim Andrew Wakefield's professional scalp.

As I described in the first part of this series, he came under such

sustained attack that he felt the only way to continue his work was to leave the country.

After making a deal by which he would have access to his old patients' notes and records, he left the Royal Free hospital in 2001 to work in America. He has since decided to stay in the UK to work for his charity Visceral, that raises funds for autism and bowel research.

By the time he left the Royal Free, the government was mounting a co-ordinated defence of MMR, with a blanket refusal to entertain any suggestion that it might not be safe. It also made much of the fact that the Royal Free findings were not being replicated elsewhere.

But then they did start to be replicated, apparently confirming the crucial link between autism and bowel problems.

Dr Arthur Krigsman, a gastroenterologist from New York, revealed that he had evaluated 43 autistic children after a colleague observed a large proportion of autistic patients suffering from chronic, unexplained gut

symptoms.

These children had developed normally for 12-18 months, with a vocabulary of some 15-25 words. They made normal eye contact; they were playful and interactive and not overly irritable.

At some point they had suffered a precipitous or gradual decline in all their developmental markers, and 90 per cent were suffering from the same bowel disease as identified at the Royal Free.

Dr Karoly Horvath at the University of Maryland in the US investigated 36 autistic children and concluded that 'unrecognised gastrointestinal disorders' might be contributing to their behavioural problems.

And the day after Wakefield departed the Royal Free, Dr Timothy Buie, a paediatric gastroenterologist at Harvard, announced that he had found similar bowel disease in 16 out of 89 autistic children.

Wakefield's group had speculated that the route from bowel disease to brain disorder might be through toxins leaking through the gut.

But now a flurry of researchers started to indicate another route, a possible connection between measles virus and auto-immunity.

Their evidence suggested that the measles virus in MMR could leave a child so weakened that the body effectively turns on itself, mistaking friendly cells for enemies and attacking them by producing too many antibodies.

Back in 1989, some Russian researchers had found high levels of measles antibodies in patients with auto-immune disorders. Others suggested a connection between auto-immunity problems and autism.

Potentially the most significant work was done by Dr Vijendra Singh at the University of Utah. He found not only measles vaccine virus antibodies in autistic children, but brain antibodies too.

In other words, MMR was causing the immune system of these children to attack their brains, a phenomenon that was not occurring in normal children.

Singh accepted that his work still needed to be reproduced by other scientists (the litmus test in medical research) but he did not pull his punches about the implications.

If no attention were paid to this danger, he warned, an 'epidemic of autism' was a real possibility.

Certainly, with so many tantalising but disparate fragments of research accumulating, Singh's theory -- if true -- might provide a crucial missing piece of the jigsaw. But is it true?

Several doctors have voiced deep scepticism about his methods. Sir Peter Lachmann, an eminent immunologist and president of the Academy of Medical Sciences, told me: 'Singh's work in these papers is not particularly reproducible or good.

'There are many diseases which show raised antibodies to measles, for example, chronic active hepatitis or multiple sclerosis, yet there is nothing to associate these with MMR. There is no persuasive evidence that autism is caused by autoimmunity.'

But others disagree. At New Jersey medical school, paediatric immunologist Professor James Oleske has also found raised levels of measles antibodies in a preliminary study of autistic children.

He is now following this up with a further study which he hopes will provide more definitive results.

Oleske has reservations about Singh's data but supports his line of reasoning, saying: 'I do think there's some link between patients with autism and the immune system which we do not yet understand.'

Andrew Wakefield certainly agrees. He does not claim to have the answers, but he has now examined hundreds of children from around the world and says he keeps hearing the same story from their parents.

No-one has ever claimed that MMR is the sole cause of autism, or that it affects all children in the same way. The vast majority of children who are vaccinated with MMR have no adverse effects at all.

What Wakefield is saying is that there may be a small sub-set of children who are particularly vulnerable to MMR, for a number of possible reasons.

He has noted certain factors that frequently crop up: a current or recent infection, being on antibiotics at the time of the vaccination, a history of allergies, a strong family history of autoimmune disease or a maternal history of MMR or rubella vaccination just before pregnancy.

His critics accuse him of constantly moving the goalposts by drawing in these other factors. He replies that the research is constantly evolving. Certainly, the association between autistic symptoms and bowel disease, which was scorned when he first raised it, is now much more commonly accepted among gastroenterologists.

And theories about how MMR might trigger this association are developing all the time. Progress is slowly being made in unravelling the mystery.

Above all, Wakefield stresses, it is vital to listen to the patients -- or in this case, the parents. 'You go with the story the parents give you,' he says.

'The clinical story we hear from the group of children we see, is that they did normal things and then they stopped. They lost skills. You say this to people in public health and they say you are just buying into the parents' story.

'Ultimately you've got to decide what kind of doctor you want. Do you want one who, when you describe your symptoms, says it's all in the mind; or gives you two minutes and a prescription to get rid of you; or one who is prepared to listen?'

A London GP, Dr Richard Halvorsen, agrees. 'I was simply staggered when I read the research and I became convinced there was something in this. There were simply so many parents all saying this had happened to their children.

'Of course there's such a thing as coincidence; but we were taught as doctors, if parents tell you something about their children, you assume they are right rather than wrong. Parents know their children better than anyone else.'

Another firm believer is Dr Ken Aitken, a clinical neuropsychologist and autism specialist in Scotland.

Quite independently of Wakefield, he began receiving reports in the mid-1990s from parents worried about their children suddenly showing developmental problems.

When he phoned the Department of Health to see whether this was a wider phenomenon, they said they knew nothing about it. He now believes that one common factor runs through the cases: the MMR vaccine.

'I am convinced that there is a link between the vaccine and the children's developmental problems.' he says. 'The question is whether this is rare or a larger problem.

'If Wakefield is right, we could be reversing problems that are treatable. What I want to avoid is a situation where parents withdraw their children from vaccination and more children die from measles.'

As for the parents, they simply want their fears to be taken seriously.

Tomorrow, in the final part of this series, I’ll look at the way they have battled to find a voice – and their struggle to prove that there is an epidemic of autism among our children that poses urgent questions.

Daily Mail, March 11 2003

He has been mocked, denounced and driven from his job. To the medical and political establishment, he is an outcast and an enemy. But Andrew Wakefield, the doctor at the heart of the furore over the MMR vaccination, believes he is on the brink of vindication.

It was Mr Wakefield, a gastroenterologist then working at the Royal Free hospital in London, who first made the devastating claim that the triple jab for measles, mumps and rubella can provoke both autism and bowel disease in a small proportion of children.

His theory, which exploded into the public arena in 1998, spread alarm among parents everywhere.

The British and international medical authorities united to dismiss it, scorning his research as worthless and insisting that the vaccination was perfectly safe. Report after report was published to rebut his findings, with MPs and Ministers -- including Tony Blair -- joining the chorus that there was no cause for concern.

According to Mr Wakefield, his life was made impossible. His funding started to dry up, professional collaborations were broken off, and researchers were allegedly bribed or threatened not to have anything to do with him.

Realising his work was imperilled, he felt obliged to leave the Royal Free. Now, however, Mr Wakefield has evidence that he thinks will prove he was right all along.

His new research -- which has yet to be published in a medical journal -- focuses on booster MMR jabs, which are given to children around the age of four to reinforce the original injection given at around 15 months.

Among the children in Wakefield's study, those given the booster jabs suffered a dramatic deterioration in both behavioural problems and bowel symptoms.

After the booster, he claims, one child stopped growing for 18 months and another failed to develop at all for five years. There was also a significant increase in acute bowel inflammation in the majority of children who received the second jab.

Such evidence from re-vaccination is potentially explosive. Symptoms appearing after one jab might be put down to coincidence -- the key counter-claim by Wakefield's critics. But if the same symptoms clearly worsen after a second jab, this argument becomes much harder to sustain.

Indeed, such evidence would seem likely to reignite the whole MMR debate. The American Institute of Medicine said that evidence from a booster would constitute a strong case that the vaccine and the symptoms ascribed to it were linked.

The report's author, Dr Kathleen Stratton, told me: 'If such evidence could be well documented -- and so far it hasn't been -- then it would be extremely useful and would certainly provide much more confidence that there is something there to be looked at.'

Her caveat is important, for one thing is certain: Wakefield's new evidence will be subjected to the most ferocious scrutiny by the many doctors and scientists who think that his previous claims are based on bad science.

There are strong arguments on both sides. Experienced and principled figures are convinced that MMR can be trusted. On the other hand, Wakefield is not a lone voice; other experts, and independent evidence, now support him.

For example, Dr Ken Aitken, a neuropsychologist and autism expert in Scotland, has already performed preliminary research that helps back up Wakefield's new 'booster' study, showing that children who already had developmental problems get significantly worse after a second jab.

Dr Aitken also found that one of the key problems the youngsters display is incontinence -- which is not common among classically autistic children, but indicates a more catastrophic disintegration.

The whole row has been fuelled by an apparent huge rise in the incidence of autism across the western world.

Yet this, too, is the object of the most intense controversy, with experts in violent dispute over whether there really are more children with autism or whether the diagnostic goalposts have simply been moved.

These are profoundly important arguments. But the whole debate has been tainted by the extraordinary behaviour of some of MMR's key supporters, and the sheer recklessness with which dissenting voices have been ignored.

As we are about to see, utterly inconclusive studies have been paraded as proving that MMR is safe. Warnings that the jury is still out, and that more research is needed, have been suppressed.

Key roles in adjudicating on the controversy have been handed to individuals with financial links to the drug manufacturers. Concerns have been voiced that some expert evidence may have been coloured by personal antagonism towards Mr Wakefield.

Most worryingly of all, it can now be revealed that warnings over an early strain of MMR were knowingly disregarded -- only for it to be suddenly withdrawn after it was found to have a potentially fatal side-effect. The fact that children were falling ill was not picked up for more than two years.

Now, with the government still piling on the pressure for every child in the country to be vaccinated, parents need more than ever to know the truth about this whole affair.

Is it safe for their children to have the triple jab or not? Are single vaccines safer? Whom should they trust: the small group of researchers sounding the alarm or the medical establishment?

This series, which continues in the Mail tomorrow, is an attempt to cut through the propaganda that is clouding those vital questions.

AUTISM is a poorly understood disorder, characterised by withdrawal and isolation from the world, along with strange habits and compulsions.

These can include ritualistic hand-flapping, rocking, absence of eye contact, self-injury and consuming interest in inanimate objects.

But the symptoms displayed by children whose parents link their disorder with MMR also include serious bowel disease, loss of language, excessive thirst, recurrent respiratory problems, allergies and food intolerance.

Such a list goes far beyond our current understanding of either autism or bowel disease. And how these two conditions could be connected to one another, let alone to MMR, is one of the most vexed questions of all.

What remains clear is that the level of suffering among the parents of these children is immense. Their lives have been turned upside down, and their efforts are nothing short of heroic.

Some have given up careers to care for their children. Many have little sleep as their children are up for much of the night.

David Thrower of Warrington, Cheshire, has to watch his 15-year-old son Oliver all the time in case he damages himself or anything else.

Rosemary Kessick of Peterborough says of her 14 -year-old son William: 'He is not violent but if he picks something up he doesn't understand he has to put it down, and he breaks everything.

'We've been through several sets of furniture. He gets behind an armchair and starts throwing it. He cannot come into the kitchen at all because he would damage someone.'

Both David Thrower and Rosemary Kessick insist their sons were totally normal before receiving the MMR jab.

They are two of more than 1,000 parents -- all of whom believe their children were injured by the vaccination -- who are pressing claims for compensation against three drug companies in a class action that will come to the High

Court next year.

It promises to be an epic confrontation, and the stakes are enormous. If the parents win, the damage to public confidence in vaccination policy will be incalculable. If they lose, the medical establishment will use the case as final proof that MMR is safe.

The establishment's case rests on what is known as epidemiological evidence. Rather than examining particular instances -- individual children thought to have been harmed by MMR -- this looks at patterns of disease in the general population.

So far, all such studies have concluded that there is no evidence of any link between MMR and autism or bowel disease. For some, that is enough to settle the argument.

'If the claimed link isn't evident in the population studies, it isn't likely to be a major factor,' says Brent Taylor, professor of community child health at London's Royal Free hospital, and a former colleague of the dissident Dr Wakefield.

'The research that suggests there's a link has been questioned by every reputable reviewer I know, and they have all dismissed it,' says Pat Troop, the Government's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. 'This evidence is overwhelming.'

But the idea that epidemiology settles this argument is over-optimistic. For this research prompts more questions than answers.

Every one of these studies is either not equipped to address this particular issue, or has been criticised by other experts as flawed, or deals with questions which miss the point.

For example, much has been made of two Finnish studies, one of which looked at the effects of MMR on groups of twins, while the other looked at 1.8 million children over a 14-year period.

But neither of these was designed to pick up autism or bowel disease. The Medical Research Council's own review of autism research dismissed them as unhelpful to the issue.

Similar importance has been attached to a study by Brent Taylor and his colleagues of autistic children in North London in 1999. It set out specifically to discover whether MMR was responsible for a higher rate of autism or bowel disease than had occurred before vaccination.

This study, however, has been criticised as poorly executed and unreliable. The eminent Canadian epidemiologist, Professor Walter Spitzer, says its sample was too small to provide any meaningful conclusions.

Moreover, he says it could not establish the rate of regressive autism -- when a child develops normally and then suddenly starts to lose skills -- because it had no control group by which to measure it.

Regressive autism is a recurrent theme in stories of children allegedly harmed by MMR, so this is a crucial omission. Professor Spitzer makes the same criticisms of later studies by Brent Taylor, too.

He also fiercely criticises Professor Taylor for not releasing his raw data for independent scrutiny, even when requested to do so by the American Congressional committee which is holding hearings into the MMR controversy. In response, Taylor insists he has refused on legal advice that to release the data might compromise patient confidentiality.

James Roger is a medical statistician who is sceptical of Andrew Wakefield's theory. Nevertheless, he outlined serious limitations to the Taylor study at a meeting in 2000 of the Royal Statistical Society.

The key problem, he says, is that it relied on clinical case notes – the records kept by doctors while they are treating a patient.

James Roger believes these would not have provided an adequate contemporary record, as the doctors were unlikely to have charted the symptoms from when they first appeared. Even if they were eventually told the full story, they

might not record it in their notes.

'Diagnosis often does not take place for two to three years after the parent first becomes concerned,' says Roger. 'Some parents become concerned early, others later, and doctors do not tend to write long family histories.'

Yet research based on case notes continues to be held up as proof that fears over MMR are groundless.

One example, published last year in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, was based on the medical records of more than half a million children in Denmark. It found that vaccinated children were no more likely to be diagnosed autistic than those who had not had the jab.

Some newspaper coverage suggested that this might be a definitive verdict. But these medical records simply won't have told us the full story.

It is one of the main contentions by Andrew Wakefield and many parents that doctors often brush aside both the children's symptoms and the parents' concerns.

'Retrospective studies like this are meaningless,' says Wakefield. 'You go through the clinical records of the autistic children who have inflammatory bowel disease and there isn't a single mention of gastro-intestinal

problems.

'And because regressive autism was very unusual, the doctor mainly ignored the mother when she reported regression.

'Many parents say when they made a connection to the vaccine, they encountered great hostility from paediatricians who noted them down as difficult and didn't listen to them.'

Other widely cited epidemiological studies which are said to disprove a link, such as work carried out by the child psychiatrist Eric Fombonne – an adviser to the drug companies that make MMR -- suffer from this same limitation of using health records.

None of the studies clinically examined the children or talked to their families.

PROFESSOR Brent Taylor robustly dismisses such criticism. A large number of international bodies has accepted his work without demur, he says.

'We looked at a wide range of clinical notes and other health

professionals' records,' he says. 'I can't imagine that such symptoms would be ignored.'

But another claim is laid against him: that he is not a dispassionate commentator on this issue.

Not only has he been for two years a member of the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation, the government's vaccine advisory body whose

reputation would be shredded if MMR was shown to be unsafe; in addition, Wakefield appears to have caused Taylor concern well before the controversy erupted into general view.

In a letter written on December 8, 1997, to a consultant paediatrician who asked about vaccine safety, Professor Taylor wrote: 'There is as yet no satisfactory, validated research data linking MMR and any medical condition.

'There is a zealot surgeon in our adult gastroenterology department who thinks that MMR is the cause of all the problems of the Western world but with a particular down on Crohn's disease (a form of bowel disease) and, in

a difficult to understand association, with autism.

'Both Crohn's disease and autism, of course, often present during the second year and therefore any health interventions get the blame. There is a group of rather unscrupulous sounding lawyers in King's Lynn who are encouraging

families to sue.'

Professor Taylor denies this means his subsequent studies are biased. 'I think I can hold personal opinions and still be a dispassionate scientist,' he says.

The use made of such studies by others is another matter again. Although official bodies reviewing the evidence have in general said that the case for a link to autism has not been proved, their conclusions also suggest that the jury is still out.

Yet their equivocal findings have been falsely presented by the Government and the medical establishment as proof that MMR is safe.

The US Institute of Medicine, for example, was dismissive of both Andrew Wakefield's evidence and the epidemiological studies.

It concluded from this: 'The evidence favours rejection of a causal relationship at the population level between MMR vaccine and ASDs (autism spectrum disorders).'

However, it went on to add a crucial rider: 'The committee notes that its conclusion does not exclude the possibility that MMR vaccine could contribute to ASD in a small number of children because the epidemiological evidence lacks the precision to assess rare occurrences of a response.'

In other words, although the link between MMR and autism could not be stood up in terms of the general population, it might be happening at an individual level.

As a result, the Institute of Medicine recommended that the issue receive continued attention. Yet the British Government uses this report, among others, to say 'there is no link'.

Another example of such distortion involves the Committee on the Safety of Medicines (CSM).

In 1999, the committee sent questionnaires to parents who were suing the drug companies over the alleged damage to their children from MMR, and to their doctors.

Only some questionnaires were returned, and the committee whittled this number down even further. It decided that the quality of the information was extremely variable, and insufficient to permit meaningful analysis.

The committee said it could find nothing that gave it 'cause for concern about the safety of MMR vaccines'. Nevertheless, 'it was impossible to prove or refute the suggested associations between MMR vaccine and autism or IBD (irritable bowel disorder)'.

In other words, given the available evidence, the committee was saying that the question was still open.

Yet in January 2001, the Department of Health issued a press release after a 'further review' quoting the committee's chairman, Professor Alasdair Breckenridge, as saying: 'MMR vaccine is very safe. There is no question mark whatever over its licensing.'

The Chief Medical Officer, Professor Liam Donaldson, was equally categorical.

'MMR remains the safest way to protect our children,' he said. 'Concerns that have been raised relating to autism and Crohn's disease are considered by the CSM and other expert bodies nationally and internationally to have been refuted.'

But they hadn't been. Indeed, the Committee on the Safety of Medicines had expressly said it was impossible to refute them.

The way in which such absence of evidence has been persistently misrepresented as proof that all is well led Dr Peter Fletcher, a former assessor to the committee, to protest in a letter to a clinical periodical.

He wrote: 'The readers of this journal may ponder the curious turn of events which has now led to the Department of Health, the Medicines Control Agency, the Committee on Safety of Medicines and other eminent bodies citing negative studies as absolute evidence of safety.'

The most protracted and bitter battle, however, took place over a review of autism research by the Medical Research Council. This was begun after the then Health Minister Tessa Jowell met Mr Wakefield and the parents back in 1997.

The Medical Research Council first set up an ad hoc committee. According to one of its members, autism specialist Dr Ken Aitken, this concluded that there was insufficient evidence to say there was definitely a problem.

'We agreed it needed more investigation,' he said, 'but there was not sufficient evidence to change the policy. But Sir Kenneth Calman, (the then Chief Medical Officer), then issued a press release at variance with this conclusion, in which he said there was no problem.'

Dr Aitken believes that Sir Kenneth’s statement was bound to mislead the public. 'I was concerned that Andrew Wakefield had been given very short shrift,' he says.

The Medical Research Council then set up a bigger review which became mired in argument between the experts and the lay members.

The review had been originally set up expressly in response to MR Wakefield's concerns. Yet lay member Rosemary Kessick, whose son William has suffered so badly since his MMR jab, says there was an immediate volte-face.

'The first thing we were told was that MMR was not in the committee's remit. On the contrary, their premise was, if MMR wasn't causing autism, then what was?'

This is quite remarkable. The committee's eventual report discussed selective evidence about MMR in a show of objective analysis -- yet, in truth, it had ruled it out from the start.

The main dispute, however, arose over a perceived conflict of interest. A number of expert members on the Medical Research Council's panel turned out to be advisers to the drug companies defending the law suit being brought against them by the parents.

As far as Rosemary Kessick was concerned, this turned the review into a farce. 'I didn't see how this could possibly be independent,' she said.

According to the MRC's research strategy manager Dr Peter Dukes, the panel responded to the row by bringing on additional members. 'In the end, there was a broad consensus by the lay group that the process was fair,' he said.

Mrs Kessick does not agree, and insists that the lay members were excluded from the decision-making.

'They said the lay members would only be observers and not contribute to the final report,' she said. 'It was outrageous.'

The final report itself is a notably equivocal document. Having found flaws in a number of the studies it considered, the MRC panel concluded that 'the current epidemiological evidence does not support the proposed link' of MMR to autism.

However, an earlier draft of the report -- which I have read – places rather more emphasis on crucial caveats which in the final report are far less prominent.

Referring to the reviews by the MRC and the Institute of Medicine, as well as by the American Academy of Paediatrics and the Irish Department of Health and Children, the draft observed that these had unanimously concluded that a causal link between MMR and autism was 'neither proven nor

disproven'. The final report merely said that the link was ‘not proven’.

The report also acknowledged the finding of these studies that, although the epidemiological evidence did not support the proposed link, it 'could not exclude the possibility that a very small number of children are affected differently from the large majority'.

It added that 'more extensive research would be necessary to provide the consistency and biological plausibility required to establish a casual link between viral infections and autism'.

In its early draft, the Medical Research Council plainly concluded that the jury was still out on a link between MMR and autism, and more research was needed.

By the final, published version, this conclusion was all but buried.

Many believe the only way to resolve this whole controversy is through fresh, undisputed clinical research. 'We don't think any more epidemiological studies have any purpose,' says Judith Barnard of the National Autism Society. 'They are a very blunt tool and do not pick up very rare occurrences.

'Scientists funded by the statutory agencies are firmly of the belief that Wakefield's studies are bad science. So we want to see more research by other people. And not, as the Medical Research Council is now doing, looking at more patient records, but more physiological studies.'

Since the Medical Research Council funds such studies, I asked its strategy manager Dr Dukes why this wasn't being done. 'We have not received any specific proposals to look at the effects of MMR,' he said. 'No scientists have approached us.'

But I have spoken to one highly regarded autism researcher who was one of a group that did offer the MRC precisely such a proposal, but which was unaccountably turned down flat. And this researcher says there have been others.

Now the government has given the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control £300,000 to try to replicate Wakefield's research.

But the scientist who heads the institute, Dr Phil Minor, is being paid to advise GlaxoSmithKline, makers of the MMR vaccine, in the forthcoming law suit.

And one of his colleagues, Dr Mohammed Afzal, leader of the Institute's MMR programme, has been giving free legal advice to law firms representing the companies involved in the case.

This may be one reason why the government has serious problems in regaining public confidence in the safety of MMR.

Parliamentary answers two years ago listed six members of the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation, and seven members of the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, who had declared financial or other interests in the drug companies involved.

According to parent David Thrower, more recent data issued by the committee on the Safety of Medicines reveals that 19 members of these two committees now have such interests.

PERHAPS the greatest cause for concern lies in the history of MMR in Britain.

In 1992, the particular type of MMR being used was withdrawn, as it was discovered that the Urabe strain of mumps vaccine in the mix was causing an

alarming amount of aseptic meningitis, a disease that can kill infants. The Department of Health switched to an alternative MMR vaccine made by a different manufacturer.

But it had known of concerns about Urabe before it first introduced that vaccine in 1989. Months previously, Canada had suspended its use of the Urabe-strain MMR after discovering the risk of aseptic meningitis, and switched to an alternative vaccine.

But the Department of Health went ahead nevertheless and introduced it into the UK.

Dr Elizabeth Miller, head of the vaccines division of the Public Health Laboratory Service, was involved in eventually identifying the Urabe risk in Britain.

Although the Department of Health knew about the Canadian evidence before it introduced the Urabe vaccine here, she said, the risk was considered low at one in every 100,000 doses. It was also unclear at the time, she said, whether the alternative vaccine posed a similar risk.

Nevertheless, she said, the department identified Urabe strain MMR as something for which surveillance needed to be introduced. So paediatricians had to complete a card every month saying whether there had been any adverse reactions.

This surveillance ran for two to three years. A few cases of aseptic meningitis were reported, but the risk worked out at about one in 250,000, even rarer than the reports from Canada.

But amongst these cases, there appeared to be a cluster in Nottinghamshire where the risk was much higher. So Dr Miller conducted a study identifying every case of aseptic meningitis.

'We linked this to the vaccine records and found many cases of aseptic meningitis linked to the vaccine that had not been picked up,' she said.

As a result, in 1992 Urabe-strain MMR was suddenly withdrawn in the UK and replaced with the type of MMR vaccine used today.

The revelation of this débâcle poses some extremely urgent questions. Why did the department introduce Urabe-strain MMR, knowing there to be a question mark over its safety?

Was this not tantamount to gambling with the health of Britain's children? What price the government's vaccine safety surveillance when it failed for two to three years to detect the risk eventually picked up by Dr Miller?

How can we be sure there are no other adverse effects from the current vaccine, when doctors accept that the normal surveillance system fails to unearth most adverse reactions?

Above all, how can we trust the Department of Health's assurances that MMR is safe, when the original vaccine safety trials failed to spot the risk of aseptic meningitis from the Urabe-strain mumps component?

When I put these questions to Dr Miller, her reply was not altogether reassuring.

'It is recognised that pre-licensing trials are not likely to pick up rare events,' she said. 'So you either say you will never introduce the vaccine, or do so with post-licensing surveillance once it is there.

'You need to strike a balance between saving lives through new vaccines and saving lives by safe vaccines. The cost would have been to have children dead from not having the vaccine.'

This may be so, but it makes glaringly clear the risks inherent in any vaccination programme.

The government says repeatedly that MMR is the safest way to protect our children. But why should we trust them when they got it so badly wrong before?

Tomorrow, I will look at the extraordinary way in which warnings about MMR have been brushed aside by the medical authorities, and how Andrew Wakefield and his fellow researchers have refused to be silenced.

Daily Mail, March 10 2003

The Labour party threatens to split itself asunder over Iraq. Last night, the International Development Secretary Clare Short said she would resign if Britain went to war without explicit UN backing.

Ms Short is regarded as the conscience of the party. Her condemnation of the Prime Minister as ‘reckless’ might well trigger civil war within New Labour. Yesterday, a junior member of the government resigned in protest at the momentum towards military action. Several more ministerial aides are said to be poised to follow. They represent overwhelming feeling in the party. A kind of hysteria is rising in the Labour ranks.

Thousands of members have torn up their party cards; Blair supporter Oona King MP is (chillingly) facing deselection in east London by Moslem activists; and George Galloway MP is predicting (inciting?) riots in cities with large Moslem minorities. In an emergency vote in Parliament this week, the government faces a revolt even larger than the previous one, and there is already talk of a leadership challenge to Tony Blair.

If the Security Council fails to agree on a second UN resolution on Iraq, Mr Blair will be left dangling from the cliff by his fingertips.

This is full of irony. For Mr Blair is far closer to his rebellious comrades than might be appreciated. Like them he is a believer in the UN and in the sanctity of supranational institutions and international law. Far from tamely poodling along behind President George Bush, he has been trying to act as a bridge between the US and the appeasers of Europe.

Indeed, Mr Blair himself is largely to blame for his own entrapment at the hands of the UN, since it was he and the US Secretary of State Colin Powell who persuaded President Bush that he had to get the UN on side.

But the truth is that the UN has long been part of the problem, not the solution. It is not merely a corrupt bureaucracy that cannot even enforce its own resolutions. It has also become an accomplice to terror itself: dominated by despotic or tyrannical regimes, presiding over refugee camps that have turned into terror factories under its nose, conducting a genocidal anti-Jewish hate-fest in Durban under the obscene banner of anti-racism.

But Labour members don’t see it that way at all. To go to war without the approval of the UN would strike at the heart of their profound belief in internationalism and the supremacy of world solidarity over national governments.

If the UN were to pass a resolution specifically sanctioning war, all their arguments about it being unjustified and immoral would – illogically -- disappear. If Mr Blair were to broker an extension of the inspection process with a final, final threat of war on the distant horizon, then he would become a hero to his party – the leader who forced the toxic Texan to listen to Europe and mothball his missiles.

If those B52s start taking off from British soil without the UN’s blessing, however, Mr Blair himself will be at risk. Robin Cook, the other known Cabinet opponent of war, may tread more carefully than the emotional Ms Short, not least because once hostilities start it will be difficult to do anything that undermines our boys on the front line.

But if the war goes badly, if it drags on or there are heavy casualties, then Mr Cook or other Cabinet sharks may move in for the kill. And in the murky depths Gordon Brown now circles, sizing up his chances. But Mr Brown is himself a divisive figure. Most of the Cabinet resent him. And if Mr Blair were to be deposed for being in the pocket of the US, then the Americophile Mr Brown is hardly the candidate to replace him.

If the war goes well, on the other hand, Mr Blair’s position may well become unassailable for a while on account of his courage in facing down his party, public opinion and the perfidious French. Even so, his problems would not be over. For he would still face a choice between the US and Europe.

The US will not forgive France and Germany for thwarting the disarmament of Iraq. Before 9/11, they might have kissed and made up once the crisis was resolved. Now things are very different. If the UN refuses to support it over Iraq, the US will henceforth disregard it altogether.

And if it is to be believed, after Iraq it will tackle the terror regimes of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia – all despite the UN. And just like now, it will not be in Britain’s interests to fall out with America.

For the Labour party, this will be even more intolerable. For the left invests the UN with a sanctity not afforded to individual states. The UN stands for law, negotiation and compromise as replacements for war. International order has thus become synonymous with a reluctance to fight in self-defence.

Now, however, international order itself stands at a crossroads. As a result of 9/11, America’s view of global politics and its own interests has radically changed. The US will from now on forge what it calls ‘coalitions of the willing’ among countries which are prepared to fight, both militarily and politically, for the defence of the west. This will divide Europe, with France and Germany left out in the cold while smaller nations like Spain or new applicants to the EU like Poland join these coalitions because they judge their interests lie with the US.

And instead of the UN, it suggests a new international forum restricted to those liberal democracies which are no longer prepared to be part of a coalition of the killing.

Mr Blair’s predicament has arisen because he didn’t realise the depth of the split between the British public and the new American world view. In particular, he didn’t grasp that people would be unable to recognise a mortal threat until it actually happened; that they want someone else to deal with Saddam with no risk to themselves; and that they think global terror isn’t really their problem anyway and that it’s all the fault of the wretched Israelis.

Mr Blair bears a heavy responsibility for allowing all these misconceptions to fester – particularly the last -- and failing to show how both the Europeans and the UN have for years been the handmaidens of terror in the Middle East.

Is he now in trouble? If the war and its immediate aftermath go badly, yes. If they go well, it’s the left that will be in trouble as its assumptions crumple into irrelevance and ignominy.

In this new world order, a choice has to be made. Are you for terror or against it? Are you for disarming Saddam, or for allowing him to perpetuate terror and tyranny? Are you for defending the west, or for appeasing those who want to destroy it? There is no middle way possible here, no weaselly attempt to reformulate the question. This is where the world divides.

For Mr Blair, supreme architect of the middle way and a true believer in one world united and transformed by reasonableness and brotherly love, that is the real dilemma on which he is now so painfully – and perilously -- impaled.

Daily Mail, March 3 2003

To judge from the current apocalyptic mood in British politics, one might conclude that Tony Blair should become the leader of the Tories, and – after he sided with the Labour rebels in Parliament last week against war with Iraq -- Ken Clarke should become leader of the Labour Party.

This would neatly resolve two pressing problems: that the Labour Party is near mutiny at being dragged off to war against its will, while the Tories, who desperately want to go to war against Labour but find they’ve been supplied with leaky boots and dodgy ammunition, now think Mr Blair is a reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and the Duke of

Wellington rolled into one.

At the same time, there is a remarkable degree of overlap between Mr Clarke and the Government. Labour MPs may think that every Tory bears an ineradicable mark of Cain, but a few moments’ thought would surely persuade them that this was a match made in bloke heaven.

In the last few days, a number of Tories have been gushing about the leader of the Government they oppose. You’ve got to hand it to Tony, they say; given the terrible political risk he is taking, it takes guts to hold fast to his position on Iraq.

This is an agonised moan from a party terrified that it may be in its death-throes from terminal ideological confusion. Yet extraordinarily, the object of its adulation is himself said to be in dire political trouble. If the more excitable predictions are to be believed, this year may see both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition felled by their own disgusted parties.

Politics is now bewilderingly upside-down. Parliament spoke last week resoundingly in favour of Mr Blair’s policy on Iraq – his majority was 194 votes -- but the MPs who supported him in the lobby, and on whom he must now rely, were the Conservatives.

The Tories’ love affair with Mr Blair, however, goes far deeper than the issue of the war, and illustrates the reason why they are still hopelessly thrashing around with zero credibility. For those Conservatives who imagine that Labour is led by ‘Tory Blair’ have deluded themselves.

They are right about the qualities he is displaying. Of course it

takes courage to face down his party, much of the country, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope and his precious friends in Europe. He displayed the same courage when he took on his party over Clause Four. What he did then was to assert reality over a destructive fantasy.

And on Iraq, I think he is similarly absolutely correct to say that time has run out for Saddam and that he will have to be disarmed by force --although crucially, he has failed to make the case properly and convince the public that war may be necessary to defend the British national interest.

This is because what drives him is itself a dangerous fantasy – the delusion that he can liberate the world and eradicate evil by the imposition of reason. It is small wonder, therefore, that the public fear they are being led into some kind of quasi-imperialistic, missionary adventure. But the star-struck Tories overlook this.

Right from the start, they got Mr Blair wrong. They were mesmerised by him for two reasons. The man was a winning machine; and they thought he had parked his ideological tanks on the Tory lawns.

They never got the point. What he had parked on the Tory verges was merely a hologram of a tank column. His administration certainly spoke the language of the Right, on crime, asylum, public services or personal responsibility; but it acted Left.

Speaking Right was essential to placate the desperate desire of

conservative Middle Britain for order, security and justice. But in practice, this government has gone in a quite different direction: hitting the middle classes, destroying education, family and the British constitution, introducing mass immigration and centralising the public services.

True, much of that is down to the personal agenda of Gordon Brown. But Mr Blair himself is not a conservative but a radical. Like so much of his party, he wants to transform society and human nature itself, believing in supranational institutions like the EU which in actual fact pose a mortal threat to democracy and true liberal values.

But there is one Tory who endorses much of Labour’s agenda. Just look at what Ken Clarke and the Labour Party have in common. Mr Clarke is a fanatical European integrationist. When he was in government, he brought in managerialism, the doctrine that all the public services need is more efficient administration and a balance sheet mentality.

This asinine creed -- which New Labour has borrowed from the Tories – helped reduce the police service to the pitiful condition it is in today. Just like the Labour Party, Mr Clarke noisily supported the NHS while introducing a centralised managerial system that dealt it a near-mortal blow.

Far from restoring education to its true purpose, it was Mr Clarke who axed history from the curriculum after age 14, thus helping promote mass ignorance of the essentials of citizenship. It was also Mr Clarke who, as Chancellor, cheerfully took an axe to the married couples’ tax allowance in order to help square his fiscal circle.

And now Mr Clarke has shown himself a true comrade on Iraq. Like the 121 Labour rebels, he disregards Saddam’s refusal (despite yesterday’s 11th -hour claims) to comply with the UN’s requirement to prove he no longer has the 8,500 litres of anthrax or the 1.5 tonnes of deadly VX nerve agent previously identified by the UN inspectors, not to mention the 6,500 chemical bombs identified by Dr Hans Blix.

Like them, he doesn’t believe there has been any material breach of the UN resolution requiring ‘full, active and immediate co-operation’, disregarding the systematic intimidation of Iraqi scientists, the lies and the persistent obstruction of the inspectors.

Like them, he claims that war would provoke terrorism, ignoring the fact that the first bombing of the World Trade Centre, the attacks on embassies and barracks, the rise of Al-Qaeda and the plotting of September 11 itself all occurred while America and the rest of the world were busy appeasing

terror.

Yes indeed; with this ignorant, lazy and craven speech, Mr Clarke has shown he is definitely the man to lead the Labour Party. Labour MPs are donkeys who hate the fact they are led by a lion; so let them be led instead by a donkey.

As for the Tories, they are donkeys who desperately yearn to be led by a lion. But the leader they have is the lion from the Wizard of Oz, who has lost his courage and who is frightened by the shadow of Michael Portillo into blunders like the recent botched sackings of Central Office bureaucrats.

Yet this particular lion at bay also requires his scarecrow party to be given a brain. Only if it displays rather more strategic intelligence, instead of sighing for Mr Blair or flirting with Mr Clarke, will the Tory Party ever find the end of the rainbow.