The tragic epitaph of this society might well be that, at its moment of greatest danger it was led by a politician who appeared to bend over backwards to ensure that the public refused to believe a single word he said — even when he was telling the truth. What has emerged today is the extent to which the police crossed the important line into the political sphere and allowed themselves to be used by the government to push the case of the 90-day period for interrogating terrorist suspects. The Daily Telegraph led the paper on it.

Readers will know that I supported the 90 day provision, albeit with reservations (see post below). I believed, and still do, that the police had made a compelling case for this extension of their holding powers. However, allowing themselves to be used like this was wholly improper — and as we can now see, politically utterly disastrous. For it means they are now seen as politicised (a process which has been going on, as it happens, for a considerable period of time); and once that happens, their claim to be trusted as the dispassionate and apolitical voice of professional expertise is destroyed. People now think that everything the police said in support of 90 days was a lie, simply because they were deployed by the government to say it. In its panic over its inability to persuade MPs of the necessity of the 90-day provision, the government has therefore shot both itself and the police in both sets of feet.

What is even more astonishing is that this is an almost exact re-run of what Tony Blair did to himself over the Iraq war. Failing to persuade his MPs that toppling Iraq was a necessity, he whistled up the intelligence world to help him out by producing material supporting the claim that Iraq had a live WMD programme. This not surprisingly created a ferocious backlash over the politicisation of intelligence, which meant that not only was Blair still not believed — especially when no WMD were found — but nothing the intelligence hierarchy said was believed either, because they had become government patsies. Of course, that world should not be believed as a matter of course since their hard currency happens to be lies and dissimulation. However, that does not mean that everything they ever say is a lie, and the fact was that every intelligence agency at the time believed that Saddam had such WMD programmes running. But the result was that Blair came to be so comprehensively disbelieved that many concluded Saddam was no threat to anyone at all beyond his own benighted people.

You would think, therefore, that Blair might have learned a very hard lesson from that ruinous episode. Not so: the silly chump has gone and done an almost identical thing again with the police and 90 days. In the fable, the little boy who cried wolf was eaten by the beast even though he was telling the truth about the danger. Tony Blair has now achieved the signal feat of being eaten alive twice.