Scooter Libby can be counted another casualty of the Iraq war. Compared to most of the other casualties, he has got off pretty lightly. The consensus seems to be that he will get a relatively short spell in prison – not the 25 years he could be liable for.

In the end, the case against Libby rested on the outing of a CIA agent and the messy details of a cover-up. But the origins of his downfall lie in the Bush administration’s frantic efforts to make the case for the Iraq war. Libby’s boss Dick Cheney asserted in the run-up to the war that there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and had an active nuclear programme. It was Libby’s efforts to try to shore up the argument that Saddam was going nuclear – by smearing people who had cast doubt on the claim - that ultimately did for him.

The Libby affair is reminiscent of the Kelly affair in Britain – which led to the suicide of a government scientist and two government inquiries. Once again, it was the belated realisation that the evidence on Iraqi WMD had been wildly over-spun that lay at the origins of the scandal – and that ultimately ruined lives.

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Tomorrow I am taking part in a propaganda exercise. Or - to be more precise - I will be chairing a session at a conference in Brussels that will launch the new "Movement for European Reform."

It would be difficult to describe the MER as a broad-based movement. In fact, as far as I can see, it looks pretty much a front for Britain’s Conservative party. There are only two political parties represented at the opening conference - the Tories and the centre-right ODS from the Czech Republic. The conference will be opened with a speech from Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister and the closing address will be from David Cameron, the Tory leader.

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Yesterday evening I chaired a meeting at Chatham House with Carne Ross – a former British diplomat and “whistleblower”. Ross was in charge of the Iraq dossier in Britain’s UN delegation in the run-up to the Iraq war. It was his job to prepare the evidence on “weapons of mass destruction” and to negotiate resolutions on sanctions. But the more he worked on the issue, the more “exhausted and troubled” he found himself. In mid-2002 – about nine months before the outbreak of war – he took a sabbatical from the diplomatic service.

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