I heard the impressive Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5, state on Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 that British intelligence had been disappointed by the spurious link made by the administration in Washington between the 9/11 attack and the then regime in Iraq.

Presumably that disappointment must have extended to our then Prime Minister.

Many of your readers will recall that Tony Blair often invited the electorate to draw that same mistaken link in many of his speeches and statements which he made in the two years before and after the invasion of Iraq.

Clearly we can now see that this part of Mr Blair's case for going to war was based on nothing more than his slavish following of George Bush's neo-con line, rather than on any information of our own.

Given that most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, one could be forgiven for thinking that the more obvious link was to be made with that dictatorship.

But given the red carpet treatment given recently to King Abdullah by our Government, that can't possibly be the case, can it?

ALAN FISHER Witney Road Finstock Witney