This isn’t a figure of speech. The blood of 179 British servicemen and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is on Tony ‘Yo’ Blair’s hands.
Sir John Chilcot’s report, every one of its 2.5 million words, leaves no room for doubt, reasonable or otherwise: Blair is as guilty of those deaths as he would be had he murdered all those people himself. He lied to the people, Parliament and even his cabinet colleagues to draw the country into a criminal war initiated by a harebrained US president expertly primed by the neocons.
“I am with you, whatever,” Blair wrote to George W. Bush, a blanket commitment he had no constitutional right to make without prior parliamentary endorsement. But how else could Tony be seen as a global statesman if not by riding the neocons’ coattails, kissing what was between them as he went along?
In reality Blair was seen as something else: a poodle to Bush’s master, someone who could be summoned with a contemptuous “Yo, Blair!”. But then he would have responded to “Yo, Fido!” if such self-debasement could have paved the way to a place at the top table.
Though Dave has given him a good run for his money, Blair is the most revolting personage ever to disgrace 10 Downing Street in my lifetime. He personifies everything objectionable about the modern world driven by the ‘Enlightenment’ into the pitch-darkness of soulless, mindless anomie.
He’s the quintessential type of modern leader: an important nonentity. For the public, corrupted by the toxic cult of celebrity, responds with enthusiasm to any display of the same qualities that in the past were seen as a mark of a smug, not particularly bright nobody obsessed with self-aggrandisement.
If we listen attentively to a retarded footballer pontificating on the delights of European federalism, why can’t we elevate someone like Blair to Number 10? No reason at all.
All it takes is a vacuous grin permanently pasted on a rather effeminate face, an accent showing signs of efforts to bring it down a few notches, a chiseller’s knack at lying effortlessly – and presto, we’ve got the kind of PM we deserve.
The accent alone is a sufficient telltale sign: Blair knew he had to drop his aitches and do glottal stops to have any credibility with the chaps who belt out Internationale and Bandiera Rossa at their party conferences. However, the aitches had to come back and the glottal stops to drop out whenever he schmoozed his Islington friends or solicited funds at black-tie soirées. It would have taken a superhuman effort not to get things wrong, and Tone would occasionally blunder, though not often.
One charge Blair can be absolved of is that of immorality. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral in that he has no real concept of right and wrong. Whatever suits him at the moment is right, whatever doesn’t is wrong – there’s something Leninist about that, which is what Tony ‘Anthony’ was in his student days. (By all accounts, he was a few other things as well – just Google ‘Miranda’ Blair and ‘public lavatory solicitation’, see what you get.)
The other day Stephen Glover wrote a good article, arguing that such dedicated amorality has to be a sign of mental illness. I’m not qualified to pass clinical judgement, but if amorality, Blair style, is indeed a kind of psychopathology, it’s nothing short of pandemic.
Most modern politicians suffer from it, although admittedly in Blair’s case the disease seems to appear in its severest form. Just look at his relationship with Rupert Murdoch.
Blair could be justified in changing his surname to Murdoch: Murdoch created Blair politically just as he created his children physically. Without Murdoch’s News Corporation, Blair would have been an obscure Labour MP shunned by his parliamentary colleagues for his insane ambition unsupported by any discernible qualifications.
Gratitude would have been in order, but what does Blair do? He has an affair with the old man’s young wife, doubtless causing him no end of grief. But when that happened, Blair was no longer a PM. He was a millionaire socialite, and that’s the sort of thing socialites are expected to do to be taken seriously.
Speaking of his millions, every one of them was made in ways consistent with Blair’s take on morality. Tone has never met a bloodthirsty tyrant he couldn’t love, provided the checques didn’t bounce.
For example, no self-respecting man would want to sully his hands with the dirty money paid out by Nursultan Nazarbayev, who turned Kazakhstan into one of the world’s biggest Mafia families. Yet Blair is proud to have that criminal among his clients, one of many such personages on his list.
“If I was back in the same place with the same information, I would take the same decision,” said Blair about his criminal decision to be with Dubya, whatever.
We can’t expect remorse from an amoral psychopath, but we should expect reasonable grammar from someone who went to good schools. Oh well, Blair may not know that it should have been “If I were…” but he knows something much more important. How to get away with murder.