It’s hard not to fondle that chip on your shoulder when there’s a heavy snowfall here in the north east of England and it is not mentioned anywhere in the national news. Had the south east had the snow we had on Saturday morning, Blair’s evidence to the Chilcott enquiry would have been relegated to the humorous ‘…and finally’ section with reporters yet again placed in snow-covered fields and streets to look cold and a tad fed up while stating the bleeding obvious to camera. The Daily Mail would be calling for an immediate election because the editor’s street hadn’t been gritted while adverts from solicitors offering to sue the Met Office if you’ve slipped would be all over the cable channels.
Meanwhile, Blair. Wasn’t that odd and more than a little creepy? I’m surprised that there has been some disappointment that he didn’t break down and weep or do a Jack Nicholson from out of A Few Good Men (‘You want the spin? You couldn’t handle the spin!’) or just explode into a miasma of smug complacency, but then he never was going to do any of these things. While our involvement in the invasion of Iraq is the most appalling thing a British Government has done in my lifetime, expecting Blair to admit an error or show remorse is like expecting, well it’s like expecting Tony Blair to admit an error or show remorse. He’s that rarest of things, his own simile.
But weep not. He knows that he has lost the only thing a politician truly craves for, his legacy. Not the architect of new labour, not the man who broke the political mould. His legacy is a memory of an intellectual lightweight who tried to buy profundity and greatness on the backs of a hundred thousand corpses.
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