Saddam hanging deplorable - Brown

And now Gordon Brown has piled in on the events surrounding the Saddam execution.

"Now that we know the full picture of what happened, we can sum this up as a deplorable set of events.

"It is something, of course, which the Iraqi Government has now expressed its anxiety and shame at.

"It has done nothing to lessen tensions between the Shia and Sunni communities."

He added: "Even those people unlike me who are in favour of capital punishment found this completely unacceptable and I am pleased that there is now an inquiry into this and I hope lessons in this area will be learnt, as we learn other lessons about Iraq."

This only appears to highlight the total silence from Blair since the execution. We have now heard from Bush, Prescott and Brown.

It may well be Question Time on Wednesday before Blair finally speaks on this subject. 11 days after the execution. However, it is significant that Brown has pre-empted him.

BBC political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg said Mr Brown's "strong words" will create problems for the prime minister when he comes to speak on the issue.

She said the chancellor's comment "not only preempts Tony Blair but also sort of boxes him into a corner".

The PM's silence has already prompted the Liberal Democrats to question his leadership, she said.

"He is in a very difficult position now and Gordon Brown has made it much harder by coming out like this," our correspondent said.

Blair, through his moral cowardice on this subject, is now starting to lag well behind the news cycle; indeed, he's so far behind the news cycle that his silence is becoming the news.

It's hard to think of anything that he can say that will remove the impression of a British Prime Minister frightened to acknowledge a shameful set of events lest he embarrass his American counterparts.

He will possibly be the last world leader to make a comment on this event. We can all imagine the spineless form those words will take. "Iraqi justice, nothing to do with the rest of us although we are against the death penalty etc, etc."

What has been the advantage in waiting 11 days to say what we all know he's going to say anyway?

The old Blair used to lead news cycles, the present Blair finds himself unwilling to defend the indefensible and yet unable to find the moral clarity needed to condemn it. This is a direct result of the corner that he has boxed himself into thanks to his subservient relationship with George Bush.

He's ending his days in office as an irrelevance on the world stage. It really is time for him to move on.

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tag: Blair, Brown, death penalty, Saddam Hussein, execution, hanging