Cash for honours: Blair held meeting with key witness

The cash for honours scandal is taking a distinctly new twist with the news that Tony Blair is to be questioned by the police, making him the first sitting Prime Minister to be interviewed by the police in a corruption enquiry since David Lloyd George.

Up until now the Labour Party have sought to portray themselves as above the fray, with Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, telling the BBC it would be "wrong to comment on a pending investigation."

However, it now transpires that Blair held a meeting with Sir Gulam Noon, a "key witness" in the cash for honours scandal at the height of the police investigation. What did they talk about? Are we seriously to believe that they were discussing the World Cup?

Opposition politicians last night questioned Mr Blair's judgement and called on the police to interview him about the meeting. There is now speculation that Sir Gulam, who lent the party £250,000, could be included on Tony Blair's resignation honours list: such a list may not have to be independently vetted.

The Independent on Sunday has also learnt that the Prime Minister sent hand-written notes to two other Labour donors after their peerages were blocked by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Barry Townsley, who lent £1m to the party, and Sir David Garrard, who lent £2m, both received personal letters from Mr Blair, who had nominated them for Labour seats in the House of Lords, after their peerages were blocked.

Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay, a Liberal Democrat peer and former member of the joint committee on House of Lords reform who last night questioned his judgement in meeting Sir Gulam Noon, is to table questions in Parliament. " This is very grave for Mr Blair," he said. "The Prime Minister must now tell the police why he invited a key witness in their corruption inquiry to meet him in Downing Street.

It also now transpires that Lord Levy was the "senior member of the PM's circle" quoted in March as saying:

"Blair knew exactly what was going on. As far as he was concerned, it was absolutely legal. It wasn't a matter of convincing him... It was a matter of everyone convincing each other."

Leaving aside whether or not any impropriety has been committed, one has to concede that Blair is acting recklessly. No Prime Minister in his right mind has meetings with "key witnesses" in a police investigation in which he himself may be called upon to testify.

It's not that there's anything illegal in it, it's simply the look of the thing. It looks seedy. It looks like you are trying to settle on a version of events before being interviewed.

The Blair who came to office promising to be "whiter than white", after eighteen years of a Tory party that ended up mired in sleaze, would never have taken part in such a meeting.

But then, that Tony Blair has long gone.

I remember the exact moment that he vanished. It was precisely when the UN refused to accede to the second resolution on 1441. Up until that point one of the things that had always endeared me about Blair was his need to do "the right thing". It almost physically pained him. He wasn't left wing enough for my tastes, but I did believe him to be a good man.

We all watched as he aged 10 years in the ten weeks leading up to the Iraq invasion. We watched as he toured TV studios facing ever more hostile audiences in what Alastair Campbell nicknamed, the masochism tour. In those weeks he clung in every interview to the forlorn hope that people would be assuaged if he were to get that second resolution.

When it failed to materialise, Blair had made too may promises to Bush to ever turn back, and there came a point when he simply said, "Sod them." He couldn't please us and Bush at the same time, so the juggling act essentially came to an end.

From that moment on, the Blair that worried that we all thought he was "a pretty straight kind of guy", resigned himself to being judged by history - knowing that our judgement of him was a rather damning one.

The doubt and the need to please that had been so endearing, simply vanished. Knowing that we disapproved, he adopted a siege mentality in which he was right and we were wrong, and he essentially stopped caring what we thought.

It's that essential lack of care about what we think that led Blair to be foolish enough to hold that meeting. The younger Blair would have understood that the perception of impropriety is just as important as whether or not any actual impropriety took place.

The older Blair simply doesn't care.

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Tags: Blair, Labour, cash for honours, Lord, Levy, scandal, Sir Gulam Noon,