A Very Odd Man's Very Odd Journey

Peter Hitchens writes:

What a very odd creature is Anthony Blair. I feel I can justly point this out because Mr Blair has devoted so very much of his gruesomely interesting book to making nasty comments about the weirdness of Gordon Brown.

Maybe Mr Brown is weird. But isn’t Mr Blair just as peculiar? Just, for a start, look at the way he sat during the alleged ‘interview’ with Andrew Marr last week.

‘Audience’ would be a more accurate term. I have noticed he often does this, legs wide apart, with his tie draped over his, er, trousers. Strange, or what?

Then there’s the passage in which he claims to have had a premonition that he would become leader of the Labour Party.

‘Premonition’? Ha ha. I long for the day when someone explains just how this no-account barrister rose to high office. (Here I repeat my appeal for anyone who was ever represented by him in court to get in touch.)

How did he become MP for a safe northern Labour seat, and then leader of a major political party? All the books so far written fail to explain this miraculous series of events.

Maybe it really was the finger of destiny, as Mr Blair seems to imagine. Carole Caplin might know. Or maybe (my preferred explanation) it was really a good old Labour Party machine fix, which began with a search for someone malleable who was the absolute opposite of Michael Foot (no walking stick, no donkey jacket, no ideas, no books, no thick glasses, looks good on TV) and ended with an unhinged war on Iraq.

Note, as Mr Blair admits, that being Prime Minister was the first and only job in government he ever had. There’s a fascinating story to be told one day of how this grave national mistake came to be made, but this isn’t it.

Meanwhile, these memoirs – written in a consistently jokey style – are much more like those of an actor than those of any politician I’ve ever come across. He looks back on the great stage of history, across which he was ushered, inwardly baffled, by skilled directors and producers, much as some old ham might look back on his days in ­Hollywood. Iraq... do we really want to do it again?

And still I meet people who claim that the Iraq War was in some way a success. As the USA formally ends its combat role, the country is lawless, riven by sectarian hate. Despite its supposed ‘democracy’, its politicians cannot form a government.

Iran, supposedly our enemy, dominates Iraqi politics. Christians have fled persecution in their tens of thousands.

Many Iraqis live abroad, too scared to return home for one good reason or another. Women, far from being ‘liberated’, are now forced to wear black shrouds. There is terror in the streets. Power and water have never been properly restored.

The men America paid to fight for it are now deserting back to the insurgency.

The pro-British middle class, destroyed by sanctions, has never recovered. And a new war is in the making over Kurdish control of the northern oilfields.

And then there are the dead and maimed. Until those responsible in high places have admitted this was a dreadful error, we face the risk that they may try again, perhaps in Iran.

They must be made to apologise before any such stupidity takes place.