It's That Man Again

Peter Hitchens writes:

Prepare to be shocked. Recently that grand insider’s magazine The Economist said as follows, not expecting people like us to read it: ‘The politicians now at the summit of the Conservative Party have expressed an ardour for Tony Blair .  .  . that might shock anyone overhearing it.’ What do these Tory potentates say about one of the worst Prime Ministers we have ever had? They call him ‘The Master’, ‘the great man’, even ‘our real leader’.

Chancellor George Osborne is ‘the biggest fan of all’. I have warned before about the Tory Party and I hope you’ll listen in future. But perhaps this adulation is one of the things encouraging Mr Blair to clamber out of his grave, like a mummy in a horror film. And perhaps it has something to do with the behaviour of the Civil Service in refusing to give key information to the Chilcot Inquiry into Mr Blair’s war on Iraq. This means the inquiry, which Mr Blair fears will condemn him for misleading Parliament and people, is stalled.

Would senior officials dare act like this if they weren’t confident their political bosses agreed with them? Remember, those political bosses, Mr Slippery and his colleagues, regard Mr Blair as their real leader and a great man.

Matthew Norman writes:

Abandon hope of reading anything remotely original, all ye who enter here. That pre-emptive warning may be implicit in the byline above, but I make it explicit today because what you are about to enter is the tragically unlost Danteian tenth circle of hell that is Mr Tony Blair. If he bores the bejeesus out of this crazily obsessive student of his works, what on earth will another article about him do to those of you in better psychiatric health? Before you tut, "No, not the bleeding Blair rant, not again," a final plea for your attention. There is something scintillatingly fresh to be said of him after all. Mr Tony, the Daily Mail reveals, has become besotted with deep sea fishing. "And we're not talking about him standing about on deck... dangling a rod over the side," a friend is quoted as saying. "Apparently, he gets strapped into one of those high-tech seats with a harness, like in Jaws."

Loss of power is a hateful thing to the average victim of undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder, so no one will begrudge him the chance to replace the adrenaline rushes as he prefers. The difference of opinion only arises when the scent of rehabilitation brings him home. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, here he is encircling the upper echelons of public life once again - and if his dream of rehabilitation is to be harpooned, we're going to need a bigger boat. Whether the vessel capable of torpedoing his monomaniacal self-belief is even buildable is another matter. Armed with a cabal of loyalist ultras in the press, shielded by the adoration of a Prime Minister and Chancellor who know him as "the master", perhaps no force on earth can penetrate his titanium shell.

Any hope that this might be achieved by the Chilcot Inquiry – you remember; the latest investigation into how Mr T and his A Team (they love it when a plan falls apart) took Britain into Iraq – receded this week. The report, on which Sir John began work in 1732, has been postponed. This is because the Cabinet Secretary Lord O'Donnell, acting on the PM's behalf and in defiance of the Information Commissioner's order, refuses to release details of pre-invasion chats between Mr Blair and President Bush. Now due late next year, the report has been postponed so often that it reminds me of the ancient Passover tradition whereby we Jews, not one of us with the faintest intent of settling there, mutter, "Next year in Jerusalem".

If Mr Tony were content to remain in Jerusalem next year and ever after, using his status as the Quartet's peace envoy as the launch pad for his charitable and commercial endeavours in the region and beyond, all would be well. Who doubts the purity of his motives in consulting for mineral-rich African countries and oil- and gas-laden central Asian dictators? Who resents him his colossal earning power in countries far away of which we know more than perhaps he would wish?

But he isn't content with that, so back home in Blighty a myth takes shape. This holds that he is a prophet wrongly dishonoured in his own land, that he was kicked out too soon, and that he has much to offer us yet. One understands how the fantasy might gain traction. People forget quickly, and five years after he left, they may associate him with the easy credit boom he oversaw, which allowed them to nip off to Prague for the weekend whenever the fancy took. And as he likes to remind us, he was the greatest election champion in Labour history.

Yet there is only ever one reason why a healthy PM is ousted. It is because he, or she, has become a massive liability. Mrs Thatcher thought herself the victim of treachery with a smile on its face, but she went because a vast chunk of her MPs knew, from the Poll Tax, that she guaranteed electoral doom. Gordon Brown was the instrument of Blair's demise, but the cause was the same: Blair, who only scraped back in 2005 after recalling the sidelined Gordon to co-front the campaign, was poison to Labour's chances by 2007.

He was arsenic in the party's bloodstream for a reason so self-evident that it doesn't much matter what Chilcot concludes. Everyone, or almost everyone, knows it all anyway: that he struck the deal with Bush long before he admits; that it was mendacious drivel to claim Jacques Chirac refused to countenance a second UN resolution "under any circumstances"; that the intelligence was cynically stripped of all caveats for political purposes; and that, in terms of foreign policy catastrophe, Iraq makes Suez seem a trifling diplomatic gaffe on a par with mis-seating the Panamanian ambassador at a banquet.

Call it an atrocious strategic misjudgment, a dementedly misguided Neocon experiment, a war crime or whatever, it is perfectly well understood in these child-like terms: Mr Blair did a truly terrible thing, with unspeakably terrible consequences for the people of Iraq, the troops killed and maimed in prosecuting his folly, and those who died and were injured here in retaliatory bombings in July 2005, the morning after the 30th Olympiad was hereby awarded to the city of London.

It isn't hard to see why Ed Miliband has appointed Mr Blair as his counsellor on the "Olympic legacy". This is one sea monster you'd want inside the aquatic cage pissing out, and in handing him the satirically paltry role of White Elephant Tsar In Opposition, Little Ed shows what a smart operator he is. In lionising the fallen leader and their wide-eyed admiration for his admitted genius for tactical manoeuvring, meanwhile, David Cameron and George Osborne show that power to them is fundamentally a game... one of multi-dimensional chess, perhaps, but just a game for all that.

In politics, very, very few issues can be reduced to unarguable moral certainties. This is one. Tony Blair is no wrongly dishonoured prophet but a pariah in his own land. He is a pariah because he colluded in an act of abundant wickedness, and untold hundreds of thousands died and millions more suffered monstrously in consequence. It is crude, unoriginal, and, yes, crushingly dull to flog this long-deceased horse again, and if it has bored you half to death to read, imagine what it's been like to write. But so long as this Kraken of deranged self-righteousness believes he has a future in public life, and so long as powerful people are willing to indulge him, it cannot be reiterated often enough. 

And John Pilger writes:

This is a story of two letters and two Britains. The first letter was written by Sebastian Coe, the former athlete who chairs the London Olympics organising committee. He is now called Lord Coe. In the New Statesman of 25 June, I reported an urgent appeal to Coe by the Vietnam Women’s Union that he and the International Olympic Committee reconsider their decision to accept sponsorship from Dow Chemical, one of the companies that manufactured dioxin, a poison used against the population of Vietnam.Code-named Agent Orange, this weapon of mass destruction was “dumped” on Vietnam, according to a US Senate report of 1970, in what was called Operation Hades. The letter to Coe estimates that today 4.8 million of the victims of Agent Orange are children, all of them shockingly deformed.

In his reply, Coe describes Agent Orange as “a highly emotional issue” whose development and use were “made by the US government [which] has rightly led the process of addressing the many issues that have resulted”.He refers to a “constructive dialogue” between the US and Vietnamese governments “to resolve issues”. They are “best placed to manage the reconciliation of these two countries”.When I read this, I was reminded of the weasel letters that are a specialty of the Foreign Office in denying evidence of crimes of state and corporate power, such as the lucrative export of terrible weapons. The former Iraq desk officer Mark Higson called this sophistry “a culture of lying”.

I sent Coe’s letter to a number of authorities on Agent Orange. The reactions were unerring.“There has been no initiative at all by the US government to address the health and econo­mic effects on the people of Vietnam affected by dioxin,” wrote the respected US attorney Constantine Kokkoris, who led an action against Dow Chemical. He noted that “manufacturers like Dow were aware of the presence and harmfulness of dioxin in their product but failed to inform the government in an effort to avoid regulation”. According to the War Legacies Project, none of the health, environmental and economic problems caused by the world’s most enduring chemical warfare has been addressed by the US. Non-government agencies have helped “only a small number of those in need”. A “clean-up” in a “dioxin hot spot” in the city of Da Nang, to which Coe refers, is a sham; none of the money allocated by Congress has gone directly to the Vietnamese or has reached those most severely disabled from the cancers associated with Agent Orange.

For this reason, Coe’s mention of “reconciliation” is profane, as if there were an equivalence between an invading superpower and its victims. His letter exemplifies the “spirit” of the London Olympics’ razor-wired, PR-and-money-fuelled totalitarian state within a state, which you enter, appropriately, through a Westfield shopping mall. How dare you complain about the missiles on the roof of your flats, a magistrate hectored 86 East Enders. How dare any of you protest at the “ZiL car lanes” for Olympic apparatchiks and the boys from Dow and Coke. With the media in charge of Olympics excitement, as it was for “shock and awe” in Iraq in 2003, enter the man who played a starring role in making both spectacles possible.

On 11 July, an Olympics evening, “a coming together of the Labour tribe”, declared Ed Mili­band, celebrated its “star guest” Tony Blair’s 2005 gift of the Games and “provided the perfect opportunity for Blair’s return to front-line politics”, the Guardian reported. The organiser of this contrivance was Alastair Campbell, chief spinner of the bloodbath that Blair and he gifted to the Iraqi people. And just as the victims of Dow Chemical are of no interest to the Olympic elite, so the criminality of Labour’s star guest was unmentionable.

The source of the Olympics’ chaotic security is also unmentionable. As established studies have long conceded, it was the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the rest of the “war on terror” that served to recruit new jihadists and bolster other forms of resistance that led directly to the London bombs of 7/7. These were Blair’s bombs. In his current rehabilitation, courtesy of his Olympics “legacy”, note the additional spin that Blair’s post-Downing Street wealth is concentrated on charities.

The second letter I mentioned was sent to me by Josh Richards, who lives in Bristol. In March 2003, Josh set out to disable an American B-52 bomber based at RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, before it could bomb Iraq. So did four other people. It was a non-violent action faithful to the Nuremberg principle that a war of aggression is the “paramount war crime”. Josh was arrested and charged with planning to lay explosives. “This was based on the ludicrous idea,” he wrote, “that some peanut butter I had on me was actually a bomb component. The charge was later abandoned after the Ministry of Defence performed extensive tests on my Tesco Crunchy Peanut Butter.” After two trials and two hung juries, Josh was finally acquitted in 2007. It was a landmark case in which he spoke in open court about the genocidal embargo imposed on Iraq by the British and US governments before their invasion and the false justifications of the “war on terror”. His acquittal confirmed that he had acted in the name of the law and his intention had been to save lives.

The letter Josh wrote to me was enclosed in a copy of my book The New Rulers of the World, which, he pointed out, had provided him with the facts he needed for his defence. Meticulously page-marked and highlighted, it had accompanied him on a three-year journey through courtrooms and prison cells. Of all the letters I have received, Josh’s epitomises a decency, modesty and determination of moral purpose that represent another Britain and are antidotes to poisonous Olympic sponsors and rehabilitated warmongers. During these extraordinary times, such an example ought to give others heart and inspiration to reclaim this receding democracy.