Hain: Bush's administration is the most rightwing ever.

You can always tell when an administration is deemed to be on the ropes. Suddenly, people who once feared you, feel free to openly challenge you and start discussing your shortcomings in the press in the hope of distancing themselves from your administration.

And nobody has been more loyal to the Bushites than Blair's administration. Which is why it was so telling that Peter Hain has felt free to talk about them in the most disparaging way.

Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary, also claims in an interview to be published today by the New Statesman: "The neo-con mission has failed ... It's not only failed to provide a coherent international policy, it's failed wherever it's been tried, and it's failed with the American electorate, who kicked it into touch last November.

The problem for us as a government ... was actually to maintain a working relationship with what was the most rightwing American administration, if not ever, then in living memory."

It says a lot about how doomed New Labour now consider Bush to be that Hain could even make these comments. Six months ago this would have been unthinkable.

Nor do Hain's comments excuse the Labour government for their support for what they now admit was, "the most rightwing American administration, if not ever, then in living memory."

Hain is working from the same assumption that Blair works from. That the relationship with the US must be maintained at all costs.

I personally disagree. I think that if the UK had refused to follow the US into Iraq then ordinary Americans would have asked themselves why, in a way that they would not have questioned France or Germany's refusal to join their coalition.

Blair's greatest worry was that America must not be seen to act alone. It is that mindset which led to him acquiring the epitaph of Bush's poodle. The truth was "the most rightwing administration ever" was acting alone. That was the whole point. They were ignoring international law; indeed, like the true neo-cons they were, they were actually refusing to acknowledge that international law even existed.

That was the whole point of Bush saying that he didn't "need a permission slip" to defend the US. He was attacking the entire validity of the UN Charter.

Blair's fear that the US would be seen to be acting alone led him into providing the US with a fig leaf of respectability, a fig leaf of respectability that Bush and Rumsfeld exploited for all it was worth, enabling them to talk of a coalition that, in reality, did not actually exist.

Hain, by saying what he is now saying publicly, is proving that many in the Labour Party now see the Bush administration as holed beneath the water line, otherwise he would never speak with such candour.

However, the time for such candour was before the invasion, and there are many in the Labour Party who will not be won over by the expression of such sentiment so long after it could have been useful.

Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, told the Fabian Society: "The current situation in Iraq is absolutely grim, so let us be clear about that truth. Look, the intelligence was wrong, the de-Ba'athification went too far, the disbanding of the army was wrong and, of course, we should have the humility to acknowledge those things, and to learn. I am not insensitive to the huge well of bitterness and anger from lots of people in the party."

Benn is right. There is a huge well of bitterness and anger spread widely across the Labour Party.

Nor will that anger abate until Blair has fallen on his sword. Indeed, there are many of us who would like to see him tried as a war criminal. Although we are well aware that nowadays trials for war crimes only happen to leaders from the Middle East and former Yugoslavia.

However, Hain is to be applauded for at least being the first to publicly acknowledge just how extreme the Bush administration has been. The American media have been complicit in the lie that Bush and his cohorts represented some kind of middle ground, when in actual fact they were dangerous extremists. Nor does the blame lie solely with the American media. The Republican Party itself played along with the notion that the neo-cons were Conservatives, when facts on the ground told a very different story.

Of course, none of this could have happened without the backdrop of 9-11, which the neo-cons exploited mercilessly.

However, even allowing for the understandable wish to protect the US in the wake of the worst ever attack on American soil, there are certain crimes that have been committed by this administration that even that terrible attack will not justify.

Guantanamo Bay, the notion that the US might legally indulge in torture, the use of secret prisons and the practice of rendition; the list is endless.

One day, all who acquiesced in such practices should be held to account. And on that day, Blair's name will be writ large.

Hain is merely the first to put his head above the parapet and state what we could all see to be true.

George Bush and his neo-con allies were extremists. Why has it taken so long to acknowledge something so obvious?

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