I doubt the Butler Report will lead to the Prime Minister's demise (The Argus, July 15).

He will only be replaced, no doubt claiming personal reasons, when the Parliamentary Labour Party judges it to be expedient in order to ensure the return to the Commons their greater number in the next general election.

It will not be because of a sudden flash of moral insight. Every single MP from all sides, but especially those on the Government benches, who supported the Iraq invasion knows they are guilty of participation in, at best, collective self-deception as the Butler Report implies or, at worst, subordination of honesty to political self-interest.

Iraq may well be better off without Sadam Hussein in charge but it was never the right or duty of a supposedly enlightened British Government to participate in the overthrow of a foreign government and claim a sudden and immediate threat of aggression as justification when many experts had shown no such threat existed.

To claim the Prime Minister and, by association, the many MPs who supported his propositions, acted "in good faith" and failed to ask the right questions and listen to informed judgement and wiser counsel serves only to illustrate the weakness of a style of government that recruits its members (and potential members) from a class that is professional in the art and artifice of politics but amateur when it comes to the real world.

-Ernie Milner, Hove