Gerald Warner: This dodgy dossier is a reminder of just how bad Blair was

Published on Wednesday 23 June 2010 19:15

'HEY, look… I mean… Come on…" Cue lights, music - he's back! The Great Charlatan is back on stage, like an ageing rocker trying to engineer a comeback. Entitled A Journey, the memoirs of Tony Blair are an encapsulation of the instinctive mendacity, self-exculpatory whining, rampant self-interest and moral dyslexia that characterised his squalid career.

Much has been made of the fact that Blair is donating his 4.6 million advance to the Royal British Legion; while that is blatantly conscience money designed to deflect criticism of his squandering of British soldiers' lives, less has been made of the fact that such a donation is likely to reduce his tax bill by at least 1.3m. These memoirs are a nauseating reminder of the Blair regime: it is as if someone had lifted a manhole, releasing the remembered stench of a sewer sealed in 2007. To view news footage of the 1990s is to revisit, with incredulity, the surreal circus that was New Labour.

In the foreground, looking scarcely human, is the smirking jackanapes with the appearance half of a game-show host, half of a Thunderbirds puppet, exuding banality, contrivance, insincerity, greed and vulgarity.

Britain loved him. It is impossible to feel a scintilla of sympathy for the current plight of an electorate that voted Blair into power three times. "A thousand days to prepare for a thousand years"… "To every nation a purpose. To every Party a cause…" "I have an irreducible core…" The meaningless Blairguff was lapped up by the chatterati.

Postmen slipped discs hauling sackfuls of hate mail to this newspaper ("How dare Warner denigrate our new, clean-cut young prime minister who will eliminate Tory sleaze"…).

A Journey is Blair's latest dodgy dossier. It demonstrates that the maestro has not lost his gift for self-delusion. "Gordon is a strange guy." Quite. That would be why Blair left him in monopolist control of the British economy for a decade. Every year, Blair sat grinning vacuously beside his Chancellor on Budget Day while Gordon micturated hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money against the walls of dependency junkies' tower blocks. Blair smirked indulgently while Brown ratcheted up a debt of 160bn. Did he even understand the figures? Apparently not, since he still insists Brown was a great chancellor.

Blair's relationship with Gordon Brown is described as "a bit like lovers desperate to get to lovemaking but disturbed by old friends coming round"… (Apologies if you are eating breakfast.) Blair seems to have an ambition to win a prize for romantic fiction, as demonstrated by his tribute (sick bags at the ready) to Cherie's support when he decided to contest the Labour leadership: "That night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me; made me feel what I was about to do was right.On that night of 12 May, 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct…"

Iraq? Here the mood music remains Je ne regrette rien. "I can't regret the decision to go to war … I can say that never did I guess the nightmare that unfolded…" Yet he would have us believe he has wept for the dead, claiming that "tears, though there have been many" do not encompass his anguish. Does anybody believe that this supremely self-centred egomaniac has wept for his victims? The answer to that question amounts to an intelligence test. A medal and standing ovation for Blair from the US Congress demonstrated that one man's death is another man's photo opportunity.

The Scots do not come out of this account well: "they contrived to make me feel alien". He describes devolution as "a dangerous game to play" and concludes limply: "I think it was the right thing to do. I hope it was." Blair claims to regret the passing of the Hunting Act, but says he ensured it was "a masterly British compromise".

Nonsense: Blair allowed Labour class-war fanatics to reject the "middle way" proposals, then used the sledge-hammer of the Parliament Acts to crack a nut. He deplores the Freedom of Information Act because of its inhibiting effect on government while, in the same volume, retailing confidential conversations with the Queen.

Not one word of this memoir can be regarded as reliable, except perhaps the description of Bill Clinton as Blair's "political soulmate". Clinton's infidelity, claims Blair indulgently, was a consequence of his "inordinate interest in and curiosity about people". Yes; particularly 22-year-old interns. Clinton and Blair had the natural affinity of two wide boys on the make. Tony Blair's enduring effrontery verges on the Mephistophelian. Cromwell aside, this has to be the worst scoundrel in British history.