So, is Mr. Kaminski an anti-Semite or is he not? Not the most important question in the world, but one with surprising resonance in the current British political scene. David Miliband denounced this leader of the far-right group in the EU Parliament, to which the Tories have allied themselves, as a neo-Nazi extremist in order to smear the Tories with associating with Jew-baiters and even Holocaust deniers. It now emerges that Kaminski was indeed in his youth a member of the far-right National Revival of Poland party, but that he left it as a teenager and over recent decades has, according to the impeccable witness of the chief Rabbi of Poland, been friendly and supportive towards Israel and the Jewish cause in general. Nor, rather contrary to Miliband’s allegations, would the party he now leads in Poland, according to the chief Rabbi, be regarded as in any way extremist. The New Labour spin machine appears to have been caught out in the act of manipulating the evidence in order to defame its opponents. Nor is this the first time in a long shot that its spinning has got badly out of control.

Most notably of course it was used to persuade us that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was legal. It was used to pretend that the Iraqi regime had WMD (when even MI6 and the security services advised Blair there was no real evidence for this), and that these could be deployed within 45 minutes (without making clear that this referred, if it was not just made up, to conventional battlefield weapons with a short range of some 20 miles). It was used in the dodgy dossier to claim that Iraq tried to buy from Niger 500 tonnes of yellowcake (for the manufacture of nuclear bombs), even though a visit to the country by a former US Ambassador to Niger had proved this was completely bogus, and the UK security services had been thus informed. It was used by Blair when he told the Commons on 25 February 2003 that the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam’s son-in-law, in 1995 had revealed “the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme”, when Newsweek revealed a few weeks later that what he actually said in his debriefing was exactly the opposite, that “all weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear – were destroyed”.
But it’s not just the whole Iraq miasma. New Labour spin and manipulation have been used repeatedly to evade facing up to and admitting uncomfortable truths – to protect BAE from the SFO bribery investigation into the $43bn Al Yamama arms sales to Saudi Arabia by pretending national security was involved, to obtain large-scale party funding from rich donors by concealing the honours granted to obtain it, to keep deals made with Rupert Murdoch and others secret by sidestepping demands for disclosure, to bully the media into accepting No.10′s interpretation of events by otherwise threatening exclusion from inside information, to mention only a few examples. Indeed I can remember my own early experience of this cynical view of truth and honesty when, a few weeks after Blair became leader, I spoke to him about an awkward issue that had arisen in my portfolio and told him it would be quite embarrassing if the press found out about it, to which he replied: “Then you’ll have to lie about it, won’t you?”

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