The Daily Mail:

…Asking about Cherie, Miss Oruche said: ‘Are you close?’ To which Lauren replied: ‘We were. Then I made a political decision and spoke out against the war - and she’s protective.

‘Had I not been related to them it’s what I would have written and I pulled absolutely no punches and the rest is history. I’ve been a Labour supporter all my life and when Tony Blair took over the party that I love I campaigned to help the Labour Party believing he was going to be the messiah of the party.

‘Like any other member I got more and more disillusioned and then hurt and then shocked, not on a personal level, hurt on a totally political level and then angry and disgusted and then f**k off’.

Getting more like Jeremy Paxman with every breath, Miss Oruche persevered: ‘Do you feel you should have defended it (the decision to go to war in Iraq)?’

Lauren replied hinting there had been some pressure in the Blair family not to criticise Tony’s decision publicly.

She said: ‘No, it’s as if you shouldn’t say it. “How can you have embarrassed the Prime Minister?” And I would say “hey I haven’t killed 650,000 Iraqi’s” He’s embarrassed by me? I’m embarrassed.’…

And I am embarrassed to admit we actually saw this exchange as broadcast. That said, however, one immediately grasped the depth of Ms. Booth’s personal anguish, for not only must it be a daily hit to your self-esteem to know you are where you are in life mostly because of familial ties to those whose views you claim to despise, but she had here also to find a way to articulate her rationale for justifying Iraqis’ having had no choice but to have remained under the tender care of the Hussein clan into the foreseeable future. Indeed, the inner turmoil she faces in trying to reconcile that latter view with the fact that she almost certainly does not also possess the same sort of moral disgust about the part her beloved party played in having helped create similar widespread death and disorder in the name of democracy elsewhere must be considerable.

…Miss Booth, who is being paid £25,000 for her appearance by ITV producers, presumably only because of the kind of publicity her comments might generate…

In addition, as for ITV’s choosing to pay her that money, that too we can understand . . . knowing as we do of ITV’s warm concern about the fate of the Iraqi people.

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UPDATE: The point to this post is Ms Booth cavalierly displays above what has become the left’s conveniently illogical position on Iraq. In fact, one may more readily understand where paleo-conservatives are coming from in opposing democracy in Iraq if at one time they had similarly opposed majority rule in South Africa. For at least they are being consistent in possessing an ultimately pessimistic view of humanity in not believing either people capable of reasonable self-government.

But what is liberals’ excuse? After all, for decades they had raved about how nothing less than true democracy was urgently required in Zimbabwe (then known as Rhodesia) and South Africa. The cost was often cited as being irrelevant; freedom was, we were bravely told, all that mattered. (Yes, how quick we forget that there were voices in the Labour party in 1965 who called for British troops to invade Rhodesia and overthrow the Smith regime, and I seem to recall that there were also some Americans who snidely wondered aloud from time to time in the 1980s why the U.S. didn’t invade South Africa.)

But Afghanistan and Iraq today? Oh, no, for them the old rules of “democracy now at any cost” somehow have vanished or just don’t apply. According to today’s left, those peoples don’t seem to deserve what Zimbabweans and South Africans once most certainly did.

Sorry, but it just doesn’t work that way. If democracy — with all its failings and (possibly horrific at times) violence — is good enough for Zimbabwe and South Africa, well then it’s also good enough for Afghanistan and Iraq . . . even if the likes of Ms Booth are evidently determined not to want to see it quite that way.