Time For An Inquiry/Election?

Call me a cynic, but was anyone else surprised at the Tories demanding an inquiry this week into the Iraq war - and the language being used?

Now I observed it was rather desperate when Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg raised the issue of Iraq last week when he had clearly run out of all other ideas, but for the Tories to try and make cheap capital out of it is amazing.

Remember the Tories are a party who supported the war in Iraq, whipped it's Members to support the war, voted for the war and continued to support the war even when any sort of public support for the war had evapourated. So for them to start telling us that they really thought it was wrong all along is rather rich.

But that is clearly the Tories new tactic. Just pretend stuff never happened, and tell people everything is topsy-turvy now. You love the poor, you love the NHS (but not the people who work in it), you even used public services once. Whether this strategy will work is another matter.

But William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, rather let's the cat out of the bag when he says: "Now is the right time" to hold an inquiry, otherwise files and e-mails may disappear and "memories will fade".

Or to translate: "There is an election coming up and we are desperate".

Why, over 5 years on and after 2 or 3 inquiries into the Iraq war, why does there urgently need to be an inquiry NOW. The truth is that both the Tories and Lib Dems know that the debacle over Iraq is one of the major issues where Labour lose votes. Don't get me wrong, I opposed the Iraq war from the outset, and have nothing against another inquiry, but the timing of these calls is just blatantly electorally motivated.

The Tories are being deeply opportunistic by pretending they were against the Iraq war. All they are interested in is persuading Labour voters to stay at home in May so the Tories can slip into the town halls by the back door.

You would have thought by the Tories making such a scene of themselves over this issue that the Lib Dems would be capitalising on this apparent U-turn - but being Lib Dems they are incapable of doing so (probably too busy working on bar charts), and instead their spokesman, Ed Davey, rather childishly compares the Tories to Ronnie Biggs.

Great Train Robber? Great Vote Robber more like.

Let's face it the Lib Dems are just annoyed at the Tories being opportunistic, just saying anything to get votes, not having any coherent policies and deliberately misleading voters in order to scrape into seats on the back of protest votes. After all that is their job.
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(Photo Source: Christiaan Briggs, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rusting_tank_at_the_Highway_of_Death_in_Iraq.jpg)