A telling silence
- 6 Nov 06, 01:11 PM
I went to today's prime ministerial news conference planning to ask about ID cards - the topic Tony Blair had himself chosen to highlight. That changed when the PM opened with not a single word about the conviction of Saddam Hussein yesterday. Not long ago he would have hailed the decision of an Iraqi court to convict the ex-Iraqi dictator as a turning point. His decision to say nothing about it until prompted was telling. Silence can be deafening.
Telling too was his hesitation when invited to condemn David Cameron's "tough love" speech. It was a phrase, he recalled, first used by Bill Clinton and amounted to pretty much the same thing as his call to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime". Though he did remember the line later when he said that if you had a drug dealer living on your street then you don't want to give them love, you want them evicted and prosecuted.
