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Howard says Blair lied in Iraq runup

Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, fighting against the odds to become Britain's prime minister, branded Tony Blair a liar -- about the quality of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war and about the weakness of the legal case for the invasion.

"I'm not criticizing [Blair] for going to war. I'm criticizing him for not telling the truth and for not having a plan" for securing the peace afterwards, Howard said in an interview with reporters on Friday.

"He has a track record of not telling the truth. That's why character and trust are an issue in this election."

Howard, the Tories' third leader since Blair took office in a landslide victory in 1997, has attacked the government on several fronts -- immigration, crime, health and the decision to go to war -- but without yet denting the government's lead in opinion polls.

Howard's focus on Iraq is compromised by his own support for the war, and his stance that he'd have supported the Bush administration even if he'd known Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

Howard clearly sees political capital in questioning whether voters can trust Blair.

But a poll published yesterday suggested that the tactic was backfiring. Some 21 percent of the sample in the Populus tracker poll said they were less likely to vote Labor because of the "liar" allegations, but 44 percent said they were less likely to vote Conservative because of the tactic. Three-fifths of the sample agreed with the suggestion that Conservatives had resorted to name-calling because they lacked a positive campaign.

Populus interviewed 730 adults on Wednesday and Thursday, the days when the Iraq war issue reached a peak. The survey had a margin of error of four percentage points.

The war became a major campaign issue this week as Attorney General Lord Goldsmith's advice on the legality of the conflict was leaked in part, then released in full by the prime minister's office.

The memo, which Blair had steadfastly refused to disclose for two years, revealed Goldsmith's doubts about the legality of going to war without a second UN Security Council resolution. That contrasted with his publicly disclosed summary days later which said a second resolution was not necessary.

Until Blair released the text, Howard told reporters, "we didn't know that the advice was full of caveats and warnings, we didn't know that it changed so much."

Former Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock says he fears the dispute over Iraq this week has badly knocked the party's campaign off course with just days to go before the May 5 vote.

"It is a massive diversion of the campaign for reasons which are understandable -- it's a question of war and peace and the conduct of government so there is a legitimate matter in any general election in a democracy," Kinnock said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend.

Nevertheless, Blair's personal rating has risen: 44 percent of all voters said in The Guardian poll that he would make the best prime minister, up seven points in a week, while Howard's rating dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent.

The survey of 1,547 adults by ICM had a margin of error of three percentage points. Interviews were conducted April 24-26 -- before Goldsmith's memo was published on Thursday.

Blair, 51, and Howard, 63, were both heckled by a television audience Thursday night as they defended their positions on the war, and both sought to change the subject on Friday.

Blair would have lost the crucial vote in the House of Commons on going to war without the help of most of the Conservative members.

Though Howard wasn't the Tory leader then, he hasn't disavowed the war but has hit on issues such as Blair's use of what proved to be flawed intelligence. And that's why he calls Blair a liar.

"We know that the intelligence said on its face that it was limited, sporadic and patchy," Howard said. "[Blair] said the intelligence was extensive, detailed and authoritative. There's no way you can match up those two sets of words."

Howard said he still could have made a strong case for war, even knowing that Saddam didn't possess the weapons of mass destruction he was thought to have.
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