The UK's quasi-neocons and quisling right

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1476671,00.html

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the 5 May 2005 Guardian, argues that the UK Conservative Party needs to rethink the US alliance and speak for England. Wheatcroft suggests that the Iraq invasion was not popular with Conservative voters.

It was only popular with "the quasi-neocons and quisling right who dominate the Tory press, as well as the Tory leadership."

Wheatcroft tells us that George MacDonald Fraser, on the Today programme, related that he had never in his life felt more ashamed of his country than he had over Iraq.

He could not get out of his head two pictures, one of a small Iraqi boy with his arms blown off by American bombs, and another of our prime minister smirking sycophantically at President Bush's side.


Wheatcroft refers to the "high Tory" Charles Moore, who writes in the Daily Telegraph that Blair deserves to win because of his brave determination to ‘maintain our most important alliance’? Wheatcroft mocks people like Moore who are happy to see Britain become ‘a client state of Washington’, and the British army ‘serve as the American foreign legion’.

Kenneth Clarke and Malcolm Rifkind were critics of the war.

· Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of The Strange Death of Tory England