In praise of Tony Blair

I missed this ironic tribute to journalists’ enduring fascination with themselves, or, rather, with themselves as seen through the phantasm of “Tony Blair”: a Guardian leading article entitled “In praise of … Tony Blair”. Gosh almost as postmodern and witty as that Channel 4 pile of crock I didn’t watch (right), thereby extending my life by 60 minutes.

Which is, of course, partly what the Guardian’s tosh was about. It starts with the fake apology for defending the indefensible: “the schmoozing with big business, the crushed liberties, still less the loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives”.

Dismiss without thought that the Labour Party once had business supporters.

“The crushed liberties”? What? What are you braindead Shami Davises and David Chakrabartis on about? CCTV? DNA samples? Which have convicted thousands of serious criminals?

And then the “hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives”. As ever, the casual exaggeration of that which is dreadful enough not to need exaggeration. Does the Guardian not know that no one is allowed to discuss the pros and cons of the invasion of Iraq if he or she does not understand the controversies over the death toll, and that there is no credible evidence of a toll as high as 200,000?

As for Robert Harris’s odious and self-regarding The Ghost, I have expressed myself on that before, with, I hope, greater clarity than the Guardian leader-writer, who implies that Harris’s book reveals at the end “what it is that makes Tony tick”.

Given that what happens at the end of Harris’s wish-fulfilment is that the Blair character is killed by the distraught father of a soldier who died in Iraq, this seems a little tasteless, no?

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• jonathanc87

  I have a feeling that JohnJustice and BlairSupporter are two psuedonyms that John Rentoul is using to give the illusion that his views have the support of public opinion. He’s probably wishing he never wrote the article in the first place when you look at the responses it has gathered from every other commenter. 

• JohnJustice

  Yes, they also didn’t like poison gas and torture instruments up ‘em. That’s why Blair and Bush came to their aid when the opportunity occurred.

• JohnJustice

  Your feelings are as wrong as your opinions.