During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

I think the record speaks for itself. These are two individuals who have been for the war when the headlines were good and against it when their poll ratings were bad.