George Galloway didn't make many friends in the rightwing press when he used the above epithet to describe George W Bush and Tony Blair, although he did later take back his "insult to the noble wolf". Still, Geoff Hoon was looking decidedly canine this morning on the BBC, although perhaps more of a scraggy bitch than a skilled predator. Two things emerge from his performance, which I will shortly adumbrate:

1) Geoff Hoon is an idiot.

2) Geoff Hoon is willingly setting himself up as fall guy for the Prime Minister by offering such patently nonsensical answers.

To clarify, the Defense Secretary actually went on television, after the Prime Minister had "conceded" that he didn't know the 45-minute claim related to battlefield munitions (odd way to describe self-exculpating bluster), to tell the public that although he did know about the claim he didn't see fit to inform Blair about it, because "there wasn't a debate about it at the time", and he didn't correct any of the newspapers with their stupendeous claims about destruction in 45 minutes because "I didn't see any of the newspapers at the time, so correction didn't come into it". Moreover, actually, there wasn't that big a deal about it at the time in the press, it didn't become a big deal until the BBC inflated it out of all proportion with its silly stories. (How would he know this if he didn't see any of the papers?).

Fortunately, just to test our man's devotion to the facts, someone kindly e-mailed me a couple of telling nuggets of information. First, here is Hoon on Sky News (4th February 2004)...

 http://leninology.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_leninology_archive.html#107600688385110864