THE RIGHT KIND OF FRIENDS:

'I couldn't have looked my friends in the face if I had opposed the war': She's the firebrand left-wing MP who stunned the Commons into silence when she backed Tony Blair over Iraq. Many said she saved the Prime Minister's skin. After a momentous year, Ann Clwyd talks to Kamal Ahmed (Kamal Ahmed, December 28, 2003, The Observer)

Earlier this year Clwyd was sitting in her office in one of the more obscure corridors of the House of Commons when she received an email with a Pentagon address on it. Opening it up, she saw at the bottom that it was from Paul Wolfowitz, the American Deputy Defence Secretary, leading Republican, neo-conservative and backer of the American 'new world order', including the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

Now, any self-respecting left-wing Labour MP - as Clwyd is - might be expected to tut a little, maybe point out to one of her staff that she had received something 'from that warmonger Wolfowitz' and consign it to the trash icon on her desktop.

Not Clwyd. Indeed, she agreed with most of what Wolfowitz was saying on the issue. 'I wrote this piece about these plastic shredders, and the disgusting barbarity of Saddam's regime,' Clwyd said. 'They were used as an instrument of torture. If you were put in head first you died quickly, if you were put in feet first you died more slowly. 'One of the emails I got after that piece, and I got a lot, was from Wolfowitz. It said that he totally agreed with my reasons for supporting the war.'

In May, following an invitation from Wolfowitz, the two met in the Pentagon.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and as far as many in the anti-war coalition are concerned the man most to blame for events in Iraq, put his head around the door. 'You're the man with the brains,' he said cheerily, gesturing to his deputy. 'I'm just the office boy.'

For Clwyd, it completed a journey. The woman who had once demonstrated with the women of Greenham Common to remove American bases from British soil was breaking bread with someone many of her colleagues consider to be the enemy. 'It was too good an opportunity to miss,' she said. 'He was a very charming man, an intellectual. We joked, and I told him I dreaded to think what my colleagues would think, me sitting here speaking to a neo-conservative in the Pentagon. For me, it was bizarre, talking to someone who had the reputation of Wolfowitz.'

Wow! The necons got to her too?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 28, 2003 9:07 AM