Howard easily brushed him off knowing that his intervention only emphasised Straw’s embarrassment

Howard easily brushed him off, knowing that his intervention only emphasised Straw’s embarrassment. Visibly frustrated by Straw’s failure to drive the stake through Howard, he tried to do it himself. Blair, who had been Leader of the Opposition for little more than a year, made a silly mistake. All that was required was for Jack Straw, the shadow Home Secretary, to finish Howard off. Which he failed miserably to do.”Cheered on by Tory backbenchers, Mr Howard had almost completed his brutal, lawyerly demolition of Straw and Labour’s case when Tony Blair intervened,” reported The Independent.

“Could he have said it was an operational matter and none of his business?” The trap was set. He would take the rap for policy failures, but prison escapes – there had just been one at Parkhurst – were operational matters for prison governors. It sounded as if he were blaming his officials and refusing to take responsibility for his own department.
At the start of that week, he had been humiliated by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, asking the same question 14 times in the most famous interview of his career. Now, just before he got up to make his case, Chris Mullin, the brainy Labour MP, reminded the House that William Whitelaw, when he was Home Secretary, had offered to resign when Buckingham Palace security was breached by Michael Fagan, the man who sat on the Queen’s bed “Was Lord Whitelaw wrong?” Mullin asked rhetorically. Few people understood much about the details, but they knew his defence rested on a legalistic distinction between operations and policy. To understand the real significance of the resignation of Beverley Hughes, let me take you back to 19 October 1995 The House of Commons was full and raucous.

The career of the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, was in doubt. The Americans haven’t done very well in protecting their own so far – let us not mention here the atrocity of the killing, mutilating and public hanging of the naked bodies of US citizens in Fallujah last week – so what chance do their Iraqi servants have?So on 30 June, it’s flak jackets on And dial 000920167
More from Robert Fisk. After all, only “terrorists” could attack the army of the new and liberated Iraq.Therein, to use an old clich?lies the rub. But they want to live in a country outside US control – and this they will not have.So come 30 June, dust off the flak jackets, lie low and – if you are a Westerner – stay off the streets and pray that American-paid Iraqis will protect you, along with the thousands of foreign mercenaries who have already been brought into the country. Will Iraqis respect this new army, this new police force, this new “sovereignty”? I doubt it. They would like an end to the lawlessness, the killings and the kidnaps which have characterised the American occupation for the past year. Black hoods are going to be the face of the new “sovereign” Iraq, the new and “independent” Iraq.Anything, in other words, to get American troops out of the firing line, into desert barracks – where they can be attacked with mortars but will be invulnerable to serious assault – by insurgents, “terrorists” as they will increasingly come to be called.

And favoured for the future US “ambassador” in Iraq is none other than Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-conservative pro-Israeli academic who is a member of the US administration and one of the “hawks” who encouraged the whole disastrous US invasion of Iraq.So what will the “resistance” do? Any guerrilla force will attempt to overthrow this new administration, to attack its police stations and the “new” Iraqi army It’s not difficult to see what the US has in mind Already, Iraqi troops man checkpoints with Americans They share guard duty on Bremer’s palace. They wear shades and in many cases – in Sammara, for example – they mount their own checkpoints wearing face masks and hoods. They should have done so.For what is going to happen on 30 June is not a “handover” of power. We are going to see a mythical “sovereignty” handed to American-paid and sponsored Iraqis who will do Washington’s bidding.