"I'm Not Tony Blair"

It is the sort of legend that should be borne by all manner of merchandise. Did you hear how the audience approved? He hated them, and at last they feel able to express how much they hated him. Around this time in 2007, we were heading into the first season for a decade in which Halloween, Guy Fawkes, Remembrance Sunday, Advent and Christmas did not feel faintly illegal, and were not acts of defiant resistance to the Occupation of our country by someone who was essentially her enemy. But now, under the Heir to Blair, we are back to where we were.

The superb Peter Oborne, whom Ivan Lewis could give the job of deciding which journalists should be licensed and which should not, was on fine form on last night's Dispatches. The most inappropriate Middle East Peace Envoy imaginable has conflicts of interest coming out of his ears in order to enhance even further the fabulous wealth that has come his way in return for having lied this country into war, to which he has blithely admitted on television with no apparent adverse effect. Does it only count if you say it on Newsnight, or on the Today programme, or to a Dimbleby? It turns out that he is nothing but a paid shill of Wall Street, Murdoch, the Israelis and the Gulf monarchs. Among other things, he is paid by J P Morgan to stop the starvelings of the Gaza Strip from exploiting their own supply of natural gas.

The wonder is that he has not been made United States Secretary of State. Perhaps he would have been if the Presidency had passed to two of the very few people in the world even viler than he is? One of them promised to nuke Iran if so instructed by the Israelis or by her viciously misogynistic (and Jew-hating) campaign backers in the Gulf. The other, on whose behalf she was really running, was Mr NAFTA and Mr GATT, the man who caused the crash by repealing Glass-Steagall, the Butcher of Bosnia and the Monster of Mogadishu, the bomber of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in order to distract attention from his sexual activities that he falsely asserted were no such thing. Tony Blair always wanted to be him.