Short Shrift; We Know All About Clare Short, Her Strong Views On Iraq and Tony Blair. But What About the Woman Behind the Principles? In Her New Book She Confesses All. Well, Almost

Summary

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IN April 2003, Clare Short was all set to leave the government over the war in Iraq and its reconstruction. Tony Blair, switching on his legendary charm, persuaded her to stay on, in the process making promises he couldn't, wouldn't, or perhaps never intended to keep. A month later, when it became clear that the United Nations had yet again been ignored, Short felt she was left with no option but to resign. "It seemed," she writes in An Honourable Deception?, her account of those febrile days, "I had been a fool to believe the promises, and all the attacks I had taken for agreeing to stay in the government had been for nothing. I had thought I was making a sacrifice for a higher purpose. It seemed that I had simply been used."

A year and a half later, Short is no longer in the Cabinet but she is still, as she has been for the past 21 years, MP for Birmingham Ladywood. Two decades in parliament have not varnished her Brummie accent, nor has the fire in her belly gone out. She is routinely described as a "conviction politician" or a "maverick" or - not intended as compliment - "Mother Teresa", not the kind of person who jumps to attention when the Whips crack. On the eve of the US election we meet for coffee in her office in Portcullis House, an ugly block opposite Big Ben which cost considerably more than the Scottish parliament to throw up. Inevitably, Iraq remains top of her agenda. How does she see things panning out?

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Short Shrift; We Know All About Clare Short, Her Strong Views On Iraq and Tony Blair. But What About the Woman Behind the Principles? In Her New Book She Confesses All. Well, Almost

"You've always got to look for the optimistic scenario, don't you?" she says, "otherwise you're paralysed and don't know what to do." Her preferred scenario, it transpires, could not have been more optimistic or more misguided, predicated as it was on Bush losing the American election. Even now, one suspects, Short is working on her Plan B.

Her political life has been full of joy and disappointment, from Labour's defeat in the 1992 general election to the consecration of St Tony...

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