Holy Fire

Doubtless owing to the recent Annunciation of Chilcot, the Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair is once more effulging his way through the headlines. Someone has apparently claimed that in March 2003 his reverence ordered a document burned because it suggested that the then-imminent Iraq adventure might be illegal. His reverence has denied the claim, and indeed the offensive document's author, the hapless Peter Goldsmith, was immediately sent back to his desk to think the issue out again and come up with a more appeasing piece of paper. In this case there seems little reason to doubt the Reverend Blair's version of events: by March 2003 the white phosphorous was almost certainly ready for deployment, and these days the pious rarely burn documents when they can burn people instead.