>> - Blair convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction - we are still looking
>> for them
>> - Brown - no more boom or bust - until the financial crisis
>> - Liam Byrne in a moment of honesty - there's no money left, we've spent
>> it all
The first of those was an outright lie.
There was a reasonable belief that the boom/bust cycle, enabled by successive governments the UK suffered post WW2 had been seen off. The Tories now admit that it was Tony Barber's boom post 71/2 that begat the later inflation. A crisis seeded by banking failure across the west was another thing.
The Byrne memo was typical of messages left by outgoing ministers after losing an election. James Callaghan found something very similar from Reggie Maudling on arriving at 11 Downing St in 1964.
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