Reform UK's home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf looked across the panel desk on BBC Question Time on Thursday night and told Alastair Campbell — the man who sold Britain the Iraq War — what millions of viewers have said about him for twenty years, except this time it was to his face: that he is a war criminal who belongs on trial.
The programme, hosted by Fiona Bruce from Warwick, had brought the two men together on a panel with Labour's Chief Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds, Conservative shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge and Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper. The row that produced the moment was supposed to be about the economy and Brexit. Campbell, who now co-hosts a politics podcast, had attacked the Leave campaign he blames for Brexit, saying its backers had never been held accountable and never apologised, and calling Reform "a bunch of conmen" who are "being found out". Yusuf answered by changing the subject to the one record Campbell can never leave behind.
"I do have to address the fact that Alastair Campbell is calling other people liars and saying they don't take accountability," Yusuf said, "when, as far as I remember, you were the person who presented a dossier to the British people claiming Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. We now know there were no WMDs of any sort. You deceived the British people because you and your old boss Tony Blair wanted to go to war with Iraq, and as a direct result of your deception, Alastair, almost 180 British troops and 600,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. You have told one of the most consequential lies in the history of this country. There are people who are watching this — when you described yourself as a national treasure, they would more aptly describe you as a war criminal, and if there was any justice, you and your old boss Tony would be on trial."
The studio audience broke into applause. Campbell, wearing a poppy and listening with his jaw set, answered with the defence he has given for two decades: "Very good, ok. First of all, Mr Yusuf — six inquiries into it, not one of them found that we lied. Not one." Pressed further, he added: "Six inquiries, cleared by every single one of them. A general election held after the war — Tony Blair re-elected." For about a minute the two men talked over each other before Cooper got the discussion back.
The documented record behind the exchange is this. As Tony Blair's director of communications, Campbell oversaw the presentation of the government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons, the document that carried the claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq. Britain lost 179 service personnel in the war. Estimates of Iraqi deaths vary widely; the 600,000 figure Yusuf used matches a major published study of excess deaths, while other counts of documented civilian deaths run far lower. The Chilcot Inquiry, reporting in 2016, found that the case for war was presented to the public with a certainty the intelligence did not justify and that peaceful options had not been exhausted — but, like the inquiries before it, it did not find that Blair or Campbell had lied. Campbell resigned from government in 2003, in the middle of the Hutton Inquiry into the dossier affair. Both men's claims on Thursday night were pinned on that same record: Yusuf's charge of deception is his; the inquiries' refusal to find lying is Campbell's.
The fight did not end in the studio. Yusuf posted the clip of the exchange with the caption: "Alastair Campbell did not appear to enjoy being called a war criminal to his face. The truth hurts." Campbell shared the post and fired back: "I have heard it from far better people than you and they were wrong too. What I enjoyed was seeing you running away from an argument about Brexit because you would rather talk about anything else. And I loved the smile being wiped from your face when the young woman tore apart your net zero BS. You've got nice suits and nice shoes, but you've got more chance captaining the Sri Lankan cricket team than you have of becoming Home Secretary." A Reform UK councillor answered him in kind: "We're going to make him Home Secretary and you will weep."
For ordinary Britons the moment landed because the argument has never been settled in public, only in inquiry reports: a war sold on a 45-minute claim that turned out to be empty, 179 British dead, and the two men most associated with selling it never prosecuted and never, in their critics' eyes, held to account. Yusuf said out loud, on the country's biggest political stage, what that argument sounds like when it is made to Campbell's face — and the sound the audience made in reply is why the clip is everywhere today.
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