Last August, the defence minister John Spellar described the no-fly zones over Iraq as “international zones, designed by the international community”. This is false.

The facts of Iraq’s epic suffering are now unassailable. The latest report by Unicef says that half a million young children have died in eight years of economic sanctions. That represents almost 200 deaths every day.

The great American reporter Seymour Hersh is at war with the American military over his j’accuse in the New Yorker that a much-lauded general, now a member of President Clinton’s cabinet, ordered his troops to fire on retreating Iraqis on the eve of the Gulf war ceasefire in 1991.

This month, two extraordinary men came to London and spoke about a silent holocaust, and not a word of what they said was reported.

The Foreign Office continues to send out its standard dissembling letter on Iraq. Dozens of copies have been forwarded to me by members of the public bemused or angered by the contempt in which they are clearly held by the civil servants responsible.

“All governments are liars,” wrote the great American muckraker I F Stone, “and nothing they say should be believed.” He exaggerated, although not by much.

On the eve of an election campaign, the Blair government is attempting,with mounting desperation, to suppress a scandal potentially greater than the arms-to-Iraq cover-up. This is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps many more, caused by decisions taken in Whitehall and Washington.

While his more senior colleagues in Whitehall and Washington understandably fall silent on the mounting deaths in Iraq, the Foreign Office minister Peter Hain has become a strangely aggressive voice in promoting the failed and lethal embargo.

Britain and America’s pilots are blowing the cover on our so-called ‘humanitarian’ no-fly zone.

A compliant press is preparing the ground for an all-out attack on Iraq. It never mentions the victims: the young, the old and the vulnerable.