The mountain that brought forth a mouse

How the negative ISG report will affect the US President is not immediately clear, but it will certainly further dent Mr Blair's credibility, and although the report is expected to include documentary evidence that the Saddam regime was capable of producing WMD and probably intended to do that if it could evade international scrutiny, it is believed to fall far short of proving that Iraq was the "imminent threat" that Mr Blair and Mr Bush both claimed it to be. Meanwhile, in London, the Hutton Enquiry into the apparent suicide of the Ministry of Defence expert David Kelly close on, September 25, and various evidence heard by the Enquiry Commission have revealed several glaring anomalies. Statements made by the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, for example, are in direct contradiction with extracts from the personal diary of Alastair Campbell, until recently Tony Blair's personal advisor, on a number of points. Even the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, once a staunch supporter in public of Mr Blair's stand on war against Iraq, has now said that in private he had always tried to persuade the Prime Minister to re-think. And the results of the latest Guardian/ICM poll indicate that in the face of the Hutton Enquiry, the failure to find Iraqi WMD and the ongoing crisis in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, Mr Blair's personal rating with the electorate has taken a nosedive, with 61 per cent of voters now thinking that the war was unjustified and that the country was deceived over that question. Now in the wake of the negative findings of the Iraq Survey Group, the damage to Mr Blair's standing will be especially severe as he was personally instrumental in placing British and Australian investigators on the team. According to a US intelligence source, a draft of the ISG report has been sent to the White House, the Pentagon and Downing Street, and it could not come at any worse time for Mr Blair, just days before the Labour Party Conference where he will have to face up to many uncomfortable questions.

The end of an era

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It is always sad to watch a piece of contemporary history come to an end, be it an institution or a period of time. It is even sadder for those who have been witness to the steady and irrevocable decline, the days of glory and power slowly giving way before the remorseless march of modernism. Fleet Street in Central London, once the home for most of the British national Press, and a real centre of power second only to Downing Street, is soon to become no more than a mere entry in the pages of street directories and telephone books. Five hundred years of history are thus coming to an inglorious end as Reuters, the most famous and the only national English language news agency still left in Fleet Street, prepares to sell up and move to Canary Wharf in East London's Docklands area, in the wake of the major broadsheets and tabloid papers. This thronging narrow street in the heart of Britain's capital city, known a mere 100 years ago as the Street of Adventures, is now destined to live out its remaining years perhaps as a street of ghosts.

The adventure began in the year 1500 when London's very first printing press was built next to St. Bride's Church in Fleet Street, around which, as written in the records of the church, "a heavy concentration of ecclesiastics who had a monopoly of literacy" had grown up. And the exodus began in the early 1960's with the departure of the London offices of the newspaper the Manchester Guardian, although it is only during the past twenty years or so that the inexorable demands of economics have been speeding up the process. At one time, nearly every national newspaper as well as many provincial papers had offices clustered within a radius of less than a mile and all of them except for just two -- a publishing house and the French news agency AFP -- have left. The offices of the once legendary London Press Club are still located in Fleet Street, although instead of the entire storey in a tower block they once occupied, they are now housed in three small rooms in St Bride's Institute. The days of hot-shot press conferences and lavish cocktail parties are long gone, today's Press Club does not even have a private bar of its own.

People who have had close association with Fleet Street in one way or the other, fondly remember it in its heydays. As one of them, an octogenarian gentleman who spent his entire working life in the Street of Adventures, recalls: "It smelt of power, and the competition to get stories, which were breaking all the time. It was a wonderful place to be in, a fun place….. It is most sad to walk up Fleet Street now. It really is a ghost town."

Speaking of the passing of an era, British journalism lost one of its brightest luminaries on 22nd September. Hugo Young, senior political commentator for The Guardian for nearly twenty years ever since he left the post of Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times, succumbed to cancer barely a week after writing the last of his twice-weekly columns. Since 1989, he had also been the Chairman of the non-profit organisation Scott Trust which owns The Guardian, the Sunday broadsheet The Observer and other sister journals and played a key role in guiding the papers through many important developments. Hugo Young was also a broadcaster and the author of at least two standard works, One of Us, a biography of Margaret Thatcher, and This Blessed Plot, a chronicle of Britain's love-hate relationship with the European Union. Although he was one of the sharpest critics of the British Prime Minister's decision to join the US President in going to war against Iraq, he remained on good terms with Mr Blair despite their differences, just as he was respected by Mrs Thatcher even after being highly critical of her in the book he wrote about her. A number of prominent voices from British and European public life including, among others, the Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Chancellor Gordon Brown, the former Foreign Secretary and leader of Commons Robin Cook, the Liberal Democrats leader Charles Kennedy, the BBC Director General Greg Dyke, the President of the European Commission Romano Prodi, European Commissioner and former Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten, as well as many of his colleagues and close associates paid glowing tributes to Hugo Young, all praising his liberal objectivity, integrity and rigorous detachment, describing him as "a great spokesman for the decent, humane and just instincts of the British people." As a regular reader of The Guardian, I always pursued Mr Young's political columns with avid interest and, indeed, I must confess that his views and comments significantly influenced at least some of my own thinking. His demise in the prime of his life -- he was only 64 -- leaves a vacuum in British journalism that will be hard to fill.