The Moonshine Memoranda: TONY BLAIR

The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured in the 19^th revised edition of Malleus Maleficus' [title withheld] *** (see below): If you wish to report intrusiveness, prejudice or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .

Now it was the early hours. And here is a perfect example of what I’m talking about: Tony Blair was still prattling on about his “deep sorrow” for Britain’s role in the slave trade, saying that “It is hard to believe what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time.” Of course, one of the worst things you can do to the past is patronise it with hindsight. A self-deceiving exercise, and never more so when looking at the slave trade. Nor am I deliberately trying to be provocative. But, let’s face it, fully aware of her past villainy, Britain has taken more practical and constructive steps towards the elimination of the slave trade, and with far more honest application and conviction, than any other nation in the long calamitous history of the entire world. Indeed, I find it distinctly elevating – or, indeed, nothing less than astonishing, given the millennial permanency of the trade - that it was Britain alone which not only eradicated it, but enforced the Abolition of Slavery Act in a deadly game of cat and mouse that cost her navy an estimated 17,000 lives.

Oh, and she abolished slavery in all her dominions!

And still, Tony Blair’s epiphany did not end there. Indeed, in modern clinical experience, schizophrenics are frequently delusional; they perceive, observe, distinguish or recognize dangers that are present only in their mind’s eye. So when Blair, in the run-up to a series of military hoaxes that shook both the Christian and the Islamic world, arranged a wager between himself and the Devil – staked on the basis of doctored intelligence about a perfectly fictitious threat - he allegedly had the interest of the entire planet at heart. The sole witness to this is known to have been a depressed alcoholic under treatment claiming, “we don’t do God”. And some observers afflicted by post-traumatic stress have gone so far as to suggest that the wager was apocryphal. A detailed study of the account does however indicate the existence of a “single-minded, almost manic quest” that may be linked to unconquerable hubris, blinding light, and visions of ultimate sainthood.

The sense of history is clear: Blair was not bad. He was mad. Ignorance is a different matter. And I believe we are all agreed that it is better to be familiar with the facts before proclaiming oneself informed. For the level of ignorance that was being displayed in the calamity of Blair's foreign policy
during Alastair Campbell's years as director of communications and strategy, was extraordinary by

any measure. As indeed, to say the the wrong countries were invaded for the wrong reasons, secularists confused with fundamentalists while a clueless intelligence community retailed progressively destabilizing information, would merely be to report on facts. Not to mention an administration that was blinded by political arrogance and ideological obstinacy, unaware, apparently, that it was collaborating in the greatest geo-political disaster of the past four decades. As, in the event, a more specific charge would be that under the doctrine of collective responsibility the entire UK government of the day may have been guilty of war crimes.

Nor, as is plain from current accounts, was Blair a man to let the problems of global poverty stand in the way of personal profit. When it was the turn of King Abdulla’s ambassador to resolve whether to row the devil ashore or set back out to sea, the Special Envoy to the Middle East named his price: “£ 41,000 a month and 2% commission” - in a secret cash-for-contacts deal that leaves one suitably aghast.[1] And in so doing, indeed, he neglected to mention that it was his own “extensive, detailed and authoritative”[2] greed and ambition which had driven him to a perfectly precipitate war that all but wrecked Islamic civilization and led to the death or flight of millions. Perhaps in the archetypal language of another time, Blair was equally the trickster, the charmer and scoundrel of all ages, the wizard of ancient mythology. Not to mention Cherie the harpist, plucking away melodiously. Meanwhile. in America, he went on to his greatest triumph: the Congressional Gold Medal award. WMDs may be done and dusted, but no judgment on his person or his role in history can avoid reference to a rare facility for dissimulation, to say nothing of the vapidity of his ideas for the preposterous Millennium Done. As for his role of peace envoy to the Middle East, one of the shrewdest judgments of the appointment came from Rami Khouri, a leading Arab journalist: "It's like appointing Nero fire chief of Rome." Oh yeah, Rami, I suspect you've nailed it there. A hot wind is blowing through the souks of Arabia.