Free Republic

It was a peculiar group that slipped, quietly, into a restaurant called Upstairs on the Square, near Harvard University, for lunch last Tuesday. Over hamburgers and crab cakes, Pat McFadden, Tony Blair's political secretary, chatted amiably with Robin Cook, one of the Prime Minister's harshest critics. The Liberal Democrat Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell and Lord Razzall exchanged pleasantries with Matthew Doyle, Labour's chief press officer. Had they known about the event, Labour backbenchers might have suspected a secret attempt to renew the Lib-Lab pact. In fact, the eclectic collection of politicians, brought together in Boston by a Liberal-leaning lobbyist,...

It has been difficult to grasp the reality of this war, played out as it has been for us in a sequence of images, both on television and in the newspapers, where the editors and picture editors have done their best to imitate television in the printing, on page after page, of enormous colour photographs. It is as if the screen is now the necessary model on which reporting must be based. A reality is not a reality unless shown in 12in by 16in colour. Nothing can quite match the grabbing simplicity of the war picture, the encapsulation of an...