Susanna Reid wasn’t holding back as she grilled former Prime Minister Tony Blair over his alleged ‘lies’ over the Iraq war.
The former Labour leader appeared on Good Morning Britain on Wednesday morning, just a day after a row between Susanna and former Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow over Blair’s reasons for the UK entering the war.
Susanna’s temporary co-host and former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell appeared to stick up for Bercow during the lively debate.
But things got a little bit awkward on Wednesday morning, as Susanna confronted Blair.
“I’m harking back obviously to what happened in Iraq and the loss of support for labour as a result of that, and how much responsibility you take and what regrets you might have about that,” she said.
(Image: ITV)
He replied: “The problem, Susanna, is that this is what the left of the Labour Party say.
“The difficult is that there have been four Prime Ministers since me. All of them, actually, supported removing Saddam [Hussein] so that would be an odd reason for Labour to be failing [in elections],” Blair shot back.
But Susanna wasn’t having any of it, as she cut in: “Saddam, of course, wasn’t the reason we went to war in Iraq.”
She had clearly caught Blair on the back foot, as he said: “Look, we can debate Iraq or not.”
(Image: ITV)
But Susanna interrupted once more to give the reason Blair had purported at the time for the UK’s entrance into the war zone.
“Weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to be there,” she said.
But the former Prime Minister clearly wanted to keep the focus in the present and off his tenure as leader.
He put in: “Sure, sure, okay. We can debate all of that.
(Image: PA)
“But the point is that in 2005 when I fought that third election, we won all of those County Durham seats.
“We kept Hartlepool comfortably – the Tories, I think, were in third place with a few thousand votes.
“So I think it would be odd if people decided to support Labour then, waited when after all we’ve had 11 years of a Conservative government, then decided to punish Labour for those reasons in 2021,” he explained.
Things also took an awkward turn as Alastair Campbell made a rude joke about Susanna’s hair during the on-air debate.
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She was busy telling Blair that he must now sympathise with women in television, after his lockdown tresses became the subject of many a meme.
“Welcome to being a woman on television?” Susanna asked.
But Alastair interjected: “Are you a woman?”
Susanna opted to ignore the ‘rude’ remark, and continued: “Frankly, what you look like, what you wear, and what your hair looks like is probably the main thing you get traffic about.”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
