It was so smooth. Coming from a rough diamond, it took the breath away. John Prescott, the British deputy prime minister, was speaking to the international media, some time before the House of Commons was to debate the long-held American intent on Iraq on Tuesday. In a voice heavy with apparent rationality and persuasion Mr Prescott stated that the military preparations then reaching their climax, and the debate taking place about them, were about ensuring that the authority of the United Nations was respected.

My car radio almost spluttered into silence in protest at such barefaced spin. My first reaction was of disgust. The second was a feeling of deep sadness that a fellow Socialist should stoop to such a level. A former left-wing militant, Jack Straw, now Britain's staid Foreign Secretary, went on with the spin once President George W. Bush ordered the troops of his 'coalition' to start firing away as the sun peeped over Baghdad on Thursday's dawn.

Tony Blair's New Labour brought to British and world politics a different way of doing things. The thoroughly revised left-of-centre philosophy was labelled and presented as the Third Way. It consisted of an unambiguous departure from Labour's long-held commitment to Socialism. Blair's predecessor John Smith had sown the seeds of such a change in his short spell as Labour Party leader before his untimely death. It is unlikely, though, that Mr Smith would have swung so far away from the traditional left and towards what far too often suspiciously seems little different from Margaret Thatcher's brand of right-wing politics.

Apart from that ideological veering off, Mr Blair's leadership has also truly altered old Labour's way of coming across in the media. The party came to head the spinning polls. It was not that Mr Blair's team invented spin. All politicians since time immemorial have attempted to break up and rearrange facts and truth to their own best advantage. But at least they used to try to persuade, not to enslave opinion.

With the huge impact of the mass media on public opinion spin has become a high art. And, while Harold Wilson had attempted it in the early Sixties, nobody does it with more determination than Blair and his sidekicks.

The new labour leadership in Opposition set about reorganising the party's relationship with the media. Mr Blair himself worked assiduously to woo newspaper magnates and journalists, to try to ensure that the template projection of Labour as a crazy, divided and divisive party was dispelled. He succeeded. Through a mix of bright new faces, a deep well of collective ability, and fairer treatment by the media, New Labour swept into office six years ago. Tony Blair became a Labour immortal. He went on to secure his place in political history by achieving the very elusive feat of winning a second term two years ago.

In the process while he picked up kudos he attracted hisses as well. More and more people began realising that his brand of political spin blurred the distinction between shadow and substance far more than should be within the broad limits of tolerance accepted in the practice of politics. Spin became reprehensible when it turned into a deadly game between competing factions within the party itself, targeting colleagues with abandon.

Thereby it acquired two faces. One was that looking outwards, with the British prime minister and his team revealed as control freaks determined to use the media to project their one version of events, to paint reality in their own colours, as far as can be allowing no space for any other hues to be brushed in. The other was the face looking inwards, with brotherhood and even common decency relegated to the backwaters in the endless positioning taking place.

How does John Prescott fit into the spinning scheme of things? Not at all easily, I would say. He is the working man's politician, a Socialist who has not drifted far from his working class roots. He possesses tremendous power of persuasion, even if his rhetoric becomes far too fanciful at times. Spin is not quite inside his bag of tricks. I used to believe he was too unsubtle and honest to resort to it, directly or through spin-doctors.

Yet there he was on Tuesday, spouting a terrible spin, presenting black as white and trying to seem to be doing so in all sincerity. The truth of this bad week remains that President Bush, aided and abetted by Mr Prescott's chief, Prime Minister Blair, and a few lesser other national leaders, has completely sidelined the United Nations. The Americans tried to bribe and bully other leaders and countries to make them kowtow to the crude, blatantly obvious determination to launch a military assault on Iraq.

They failed. So much so that they effectively declared diplomacy dead, and naked American hegemony alive and kicking all those who refused to do its bidding.

President Bush had often enough declared blandly that he would attack Iraq, whether there was Security Council clearance or not. He tried to convince that an attack had to be launched, but failed. He tried his own blatant spin. He did not stick to the blindingly evident fact that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant to his own people, who was bankrolled and supported by the American government and its allies in the Eighties, because it suited them to build him and Iraq up as a counterweight to Iran.

Mr Bush twisted the truth through his teeth. Straight-faced, he spun across his claim that Iraq had a capability of mass destruction that threatened America. Though he presented no conclusive proof, not even evidence that Iraq was behind or linked to the heinous attacks of September 11, 2001, he repeatedly spun his accusation as a fact. Remarkably this week even Malta's prime minister digested it whole, implicitly backing the attack on Iraq so many others are condemning as unjustified.

The American President conjured up the fear that Saddam Hussein had missiles that could be directed at the US. He tried to rub out of the public consciousness the fact that terrorists had escaped America's fabled security network to launch their evil attack not with rockets, but by turning hijacked civilian aeroplanes into suicidal missiles of terrible destruction.

Bush threatened and cajoled. But he did not convince. So he simply went ahead and effectively and without compunction belittled his loyal supporter Tony Blair. He at least was trying to respond to demands from within his own party and much of the rest of the world for a second, clear Security Council resolution.

In that context, even a man like John Prescott was spun head over heels. He himself resorted to the ugly spin that his government was upholding the authority of the United Nations.

And so it came to pass that, where threats and attempted purchase of conscience failed, the American will prevailed. Tony Blair too got his way in the House of Commons. But at what cost? He clearly wishes to go down in history as some latter-day Winston Churchill. But he will not achieve that because he emulated that man's determination to be different, or perhaps part of the pack but nobody's lapdog.

History will record that Prime Minister Blair's decision to join in military action against Iraq, whatever the cost to the Iraqi people, caused the greatest rebellion any political leader has faced in Britain. In the end, the 'Ayes' had it in the House of Commons votes on Tuesday. Mr Blair got his way. But what a manner to do it.

In a sense he was lucky that he lost only one senior minister. That former Cabinet stalwart was not, as might have been expected in other circumstances, John Prescott. Nor, remarkably, was it unreformed leftist Clare Short, who had spoken out with such panache and calculation the previous week. It was Robin Cook, the Leader of the House. A man not very well liked, but whose intellectual capability has long been appraised as being among the highest within Britain's Labour Party. Above all, he was himself a former foreign minister.

It was the sort of luck a prime minister should not have required. Mr Cook was the honourable exception in an otherwise compliant Cabinet where the aphrodisiac of power works its own particular way. An exception that will suggest to historians that Tony Blair was terribly wrong.

Can it be said, then, that despite the humanitarian cost spin has won the day again? For Tony Blair? For President Bush, who has also thoughtfully worked out who will get the contracts to rebuild Iraq? Rolling tanks and howling missiles will combine with the wails of the innocent to suggest that the answer is yes.

There will be those who will become more and more emboldened with the seeming success of spin, of distorting the truth, of recasting facts and reality according to your own image and ambitions. The world is not a better place because of political spin and the ascent of spin-doctors.

I still would not say that spin has won. The Iraq issue does not translate into a victory for the mighty. The cost of their actions will, unfortunately, be borne by many others. They themselves, as the perpetrators of that folly, will leave behind them a grim lesson that time will make more and more apparent.

Their spin presents their policy in the most favourable way. It does not include candidness and sincerity. Yet, as so often in the past, time will show again that good spin does not make bad policy any better. That is something that our own political class too can do worse than mull over now and again...

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.