Blair Rage: It’s Still There, You Know

The madness: it is still distorting reality, only the fever has abated somewhat and so it rumbles barely audibly like a malfunctioning subwoofer.

Blair rage. I never really got to the bottom of the psychological trauma, and much of it has now been redirected towards other targets: the “extreme right-wing policies” of the Coalition Government; the disillusion with Barack Obama; the evils of capitalism and Rupert Murdoch.

A lot of the stuff about the “Murdoch empire”, as this wobbly multinational media company is often known, though, is sublimated Blair rage. For many of my colleagues in journalism, the untold story is that Tony Blair pioneered a new form of Faustianism, which involved a political leader giving Murdoch what he wanted in return for the endorsement of his newspapers.

The first part is mush, as I pointed out here, and the reciprocal is equally dubious, in that Murdoch’s support tends to follow public opinion rather than lead it. What is surprising, as Andy Coulson gently tried to tell the Leveson inquiry, is that Murdoch’s British newspapers supported Gordon Brown for so long, not that they switched to the Conservatives.

The most acute form of the paranoid delusion concerns the Iraq war and consists of two exhibits. One, Blair and Murdoch spoke on the telephone a few times just before the invasion. Two, every single one of Murdoch’s x newspapers around the world (the figure is always different, and always precise) supported the invasion. Neither is remotely surprising or even very interesting.

The implication of the first is particularly dotty, though. Is it alleged that Murdoch was secretly a cheese-eating surrender monkey looking for a last-minute excuse to tell all his x editors to change tack and condemn the invasion? Or perhaps that Blair was, and that Murdoch had to stiffen his sinews in the dark hours of doubt before (mostly American) tanks rolled?

Which brings me to yesterday’s ruling by the Information Rights Tribunal that the notes of Blair’s side of a telephone conversation with George Bush in 2003 must be published. I agreed with Gus O’Donnell’s reasons for not publishing here, and I disagreed with the Information Commissioner’s decision that the notes should be published here.

As I said:

The only reason for thinking it important that these transcripts must be published is that they contain the hidden “real” reason for going to war – because that decision was so unreasonable that no right-thinking peacenik could have made it.

The reasons that Cabinet and Parliament authorised military action were the reasons given at the time. It was not possible for Blair to have secretly “committed” the UK to war in conversation, or correspondence, with Bush.

The Information Commissioner should not be siding with the conspiracy theorists, but, more importantly, he should not be allowed to undermine the US-UK relationship in this way.

And to a final bit of the madness. George Monbiot has published correspondence between him and Noam Chomsky in which Chomsky says that Bush and Blair should be hanged, prompting Monbiot to exclaim

I agree that Bush and Blair should be – well, not “hanged” exactly – but prosecuted “by the standards of Nuremberg”.

As a friend of mine wrote on reading this exchange:

Thus once more Moonbat’s essential weakness is revealed: he gives every impression of being a fully-fledged lunatic, but when the whiff of real loopiness is in the air he turns tail and runs towards sanity like the big coward that he is. His fatal flaw: an ineradicable streak of reason. Sad to see.

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• takeoman

  I would appreciate it if you didn’t shout despite being in my seventh decade my hearing is still fine. The fact that he won 3 elections, or rather the party he headed did, is a matter of historical record but now like those who went before him as PM he has been consigned to the dustbin of history, unlike Arnold he won’t be back.

• takeoman

   Young BS, I seem to recall that you have on occasion made the odd spelling/grammar error (don’t we all ). In view of this should we conclude that you don’t understand politics?

• BlairSupporter

  The “odd” error? Very occasional, in all modesty/pedantry. We can conclude that I don’t understand odd politics. Occasionally.

• timberanddamp

  Afghanistan has never evolved over thousands of years, its run by primitive tribes, and warlords, if there was not a political crossover from Iraq and the oil revenue, and the American backlash of 9/11, then this subject would never have been an issue, the Americans lost interest in Afghanistan when the international game of tug of war ended, with the Russians withdrawal in 1989, to paint Blair as a patriot or international statesman is a travisty, and a slur on true statesmen, he is a self-serving puppet who follows his own best interests, and changes direction dependent on which way the wind blows, check out his real motives and his real intentions while these actions were taking place, full investigations, and criminal charges, are long overdue.    

• timberanddamp

  This can apply to many countries in the world, but it does not give any other state the right to selectivly invade a soverign country or depose by force its elected government, and then to execute its leader on a false charge of WMD, If this was the case then we would all be in a perpetual state of continuous world war, if the American”s and the British are so agreaved by world abuse, why have they not invaded Zimbabwe, and executed Robert Mugabe, for crimes against humanity, why did Blair support the actions of dictators such as Assad of Syria, or Gaddafi of Libya, I think the points made prove themselves.   

• timberanddamp

  I think that you, BlairSupporter, and John Rentoul, as a matter of extreme urgency should seek out a copy of Manfred Mann”s Earth Band, “Blinded by the Light” I can understand to a degree your blind support as it has no doubt benifited yourself, and other migrants, the other two named will remain a mystery.  

• timberanddamp

  I think that you, BlairSupporter, and John Rentoul, as a matter of extreme urgency should seek out a copy of Manfred Mann”s Earth Band, “Blinded by the Light” I can understand to a degree your blind support, as it has no doubt benifited yourself, and other migrants, the other two named will remain a mystery.

• Kugelschreiber

  TIMBERANDDAMP,

  No no, I’m not a migrant, in fact I actually am strongly against excessive IMMIGRATION into Britain and I detest the free movement of workers across the EU.

  Perhaps my opinions diverge from those of Tony Blair’s, in that area. Of course, I don’t agree with EVERYTHING that Tony Blair opines upon or does.

• Kugelschreiber

  TIMBERANDDAMP,

  Surely, if Tony Blair really was a “self-serving puppet” as you put it, then he would do what a lot of wealthy,privileged people often do, that is, just forget all about everyone else,  and just look after NUMBER ONE or one’s close family, & live the life of luxury & nothing else.

  But he hasn’t done that has he, instead he has chosen to try and exert a BENEVOLENT INFLUENCE on World events.

  For example, I heard him strongly recommending that younger AFGHANISTANS would really benefit from a good EDUCATION , to help them develop their powers of thinking and judgement so that they can embrace only the GOOD things in the MOSLEM religion and throw out & reject the “POISONOUS” aspects of the Moslem religion.

  This is what I heard Tony Blair say, in so many words, if I understood it right.

• timberanddamp

  Im afraid that you are very gullible, and naive, but dont worry he mislead the whole of the british nation for a very long period of time, check out the face behind the mask, Blair only looks after Blair, he has used his influence in the middle east to set up numerous consultancy and various other agencies, to mask his true intentions, these activities are channeled through shelter companies set up by himself with the assistence of a web of corporate lawyers, to cover his tracks, so as to recieve large amounts of monies from these secreted sources, he is like a boat going down a river never looking back at the wash, before you jump to his defence check out his track record, and whats behind his outward signs of altruism, Blair is a shallow showman, who will pick up on any issue to advance his own position, look past the rhetoric, and spin, check out the facts, look past the facade, and discover the real reasons behind his actions, you will find his only concern is his own advancement, and self serving profitabillity.