Author Campbell Armstrong

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Re: Tony Blair (cont'd)

Blair is basically a creepy amoeba of the kind that rises, like pond scum, to the surface. (Admittedly there is a whole load of scum in any given political pond. Some are just that little bit more slimy than others.) He lacks a moral sense. He ignored entirely the outrage of the hundreds of thousand of people who marched against the invasion of Iraq in countries around the world. He ignored the patient pleadings of Dr Hans Blix, who knew more about Iraqi weaponry than the combined forces of Military Intelligence and the CIA. Instead, he sided, as we all know, with the Cowboy Bush. They became buddy-buddy gunslingers. They learned nothing of history, either of them, nothing of international law: invasion of a foreign country is illegal without the necessary evidence. And there was none. There never was.

By all accounts, Blair is now a very rich man. Fools parted easily from their money are said to pay £150,000 to hear him give a speech. I’ve never had the dubious privilege of hearing him speak to special interest groups and corporate types who stump up these fees. What does he tell them? Not the truth, you can be sure of that. More, he now enjoys a position of Peace Advisor to the Middle East. And apparently with no sense of irony. Those lacking in irony are doomed by their inability to weigh the consequences of their actions. He doesn’t see the perversity of his role. Blair, who went to war, is now a Peace Advisor to the same part of the world he invaded? How can this irony not escape him?

Blair shows not only contempt of the democratic system that elected him, he also has a deep wide streak of cowardice. He seemingly found it impossible to admit to the British electorate that he was quietly converting to Catholicism – all the while he was in office, which for many of us seemed too long by far.

I have no time for organized religion and the vast wealth of the Catholic Church, nor its insular self-protective attitude, but it might have been a single gesture of honesty from him if he’d spoken openly about his conversion. Indeed, it may have turned out to be the only honest one he ever made. But he didn’t. Just as he didn’t like looking at the grief-stricken faces of those parents whose children had been murdered in Iraq. He had a chance to do so. He didn’t take it. He had a chance to listen to the massed voices of dissent against Iraq. He remained deaf to their entreaties. He might have informed those who voted him into power that he was converting his religion – but Poor Tony’s head is seemingly a very private, self-centred little module of control out of control.

And yet he remains a public figure. A buffoon of one, certainly. But Public just the same. And now he has a book to sell – and since the royalties go to a good cause, the generous Brit public will probably buy it in its thousands. But he’s aparently afraid of eggs being thrown at him as they were in Dublin last week. Oh, and a shoe almost struck him. Pity he didn’t try it on: it might have fitted.