Feb 272014
 

What is this? Where am I? Are these the white tiles of the morgue? I think I can hear the whispered voices around me. Is he breathing? No we’re too late, let’s see where the breath has gone, open him up, see if we can catch the last and final fleeting thoughts. Ha ha! There was a piece in the Guardian this morning about the toxic Tony Blair. A man who tried to create a Teflon defence shield around himself, even boasted about it in his autobiography apparently, as though he could live with nothing touching him, nothing getting through. Perhaps it was God who protected him or at least his god-inflated self-belief. He was very fond of saying that he believed he had done the right thing. A puffed-up cock strutting around? Hungry for fame and fortune.

There is an uncomfortable disquiet when I put together the crime of the two that killed Lee Rigby and the “crime” of Tony Blair in being part-responsible for the deaths and injury of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. How many times did we hear the news of the bombing of a wedding party – men, women and children butchered with apparent carelessness? I suppose we manage this by keeping them in separate boxes. We cannot, indeed we must not compare them. Put them together and you might begin to go mad. Death seems to mean something and then suddenly turn the stone over and it means nothing at all. 

Perhaps we simply don’t know what to do with Tony Blair. The prime minister who disappointed us. He not only survives but continues to grow ever richer (from what I hear) and consorts with the super-rich. He is very well networked. His ambition has not yet peaked . . . though perhaps he has been replaced by a hungry ghost that looks surprisingly like an older Tony Blair. Is he breathing? I’m not sure, what do you think?