History won't forgive the Great Charlatan

"SAY, Hank, who is this guy?"

"Says here he’s Tony B Liar, President of the United Kingdom."

"Jeez, Hank! ’Zat the Limey asshole that put the 45-minutes-tuh-Armageddon crap into Dubya’s State of the Union speech?"

"Reckon so, Bud."

"Then why in tarnation we standin’ up an’ hollerin’ fer him, like Julia Roberts was strippin’ off, or sump’n? Seems to me we soughta be givin’ him the hood an’ handcuffs treatment, down Guantanamo way."

"Hell, Bud, that’s politics. All Ah know is, every time Don Rumsfeld takes out his handkerchief, it’s a signal we gotta jump up an’ make like this guy’s the messiah."

"Say, Hank, did ya clock the wife - Sheree or some dumb Hicksville name like that? Ah’d sooner go home tuh Janet Reno."

"Yeah, an’ what about the gorrilla that’s his bodyguard, or sump’n - guy called Campbell, says he can’t function without him? That’s the kinda face we got the good taste in this country tuh hide under a Klansman’s hood."

"Here we go again - up ya get, Hank, an’ look like you’re ovatin’ from the heart. Ah’m gonna try whistlin’ through ma fingers this time - git a gold star from the party bosses."

"What’d he just say, anyway?"

"Sez history will forgive us, Hank."

"What the hell’s that mean? Sounds kinda like Aydolf Hitler in 1945."

"Don’t mean nuthin’. On the Hill, it’s what we call a soundbite - Joe Public calls it bullshit."

"Kin we sit down now, Bud? Ah paid a fortune for a seat in Congress an’ Ah ain’t hardly had ma butt on it since this guy got verbal diarrhoea. Jeez, look at him - he’s oozin’ more sincerity than a phoney TV evangelist."

"Sure is, Hank. Ah reckon we got us a Grade A slimeball here."

"Where’s he from again?"

"Old Hampshire, Old England."

"Where’n hell’s that?"

"Reckon it’s one of them dirt-poor states of the Union that only jus’ joined."

"Aw, hell, we gotta git up again an’ holler - Ah dunno ’bout you, Bud, but this special relationship crap is playin’ hell with ma haemorrhoids..."

These are dark days for the Leader of All Progressive Humanity. Despite the ringing applause of a well-disciplined American Congress, his stock has never been lower. Even the diplomatic courtesies lavished upon him in the United States disguise a cooling in the administration’s attitude to its most obliging ally. Among the Bush entourage there is a sobering realisation that, had the much-caricatured CIA not insisted on inserting a safety clause into the State of the Union message, ring-fencing the alleged Niger uranium purchase for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, then Dubya might by now have started on the long march that leads to impeachment.

They are all too well aware that it was the Great Charlatan Blair who thrust this bogus intelligence upon the American President and nearly compromised him. Blair, for his part, is hurt by the ingrate reaction of his American allies. What harm if Dubya had told porkies to Congress and the people? The Great Charlatan himself routinely lies to Parliament and people, not as a rare expedient but as a system of government.

The lie is, for Blair, second nature; not something reprehensible, but a creative form of communication. The truth is what the Great Charlatan, at any given moment, would wish it to be. Hence his mendacious claim, uttered publicly and to his face, that Iain Duncan Smith had seen the falsified Iraq dossier and accepted it, when he had not. Blair’s face, frozen with horror, when IDS leaped up and gave him the lie, told its own story: the fantasist in charge of Britain can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood, even when it is in his own interests to do so.

Even among critical commentators, the delusion persists that Blair has reinforced the special relationship with America. In fact, he has done the reverse. Relationships between great democracies depend on a sympathy between their peoples, not their leaders. Anti-American feeling in Britain is stronger today and far more broadly based than at any point in the lifetimes of even our oldest citizens. The theatre in Congress should not obscure the Great Charlatan’s real contribution: he has wrecked Britain’s special relationship with America.

He has done so because he always thought of it as a relationship between the Bush administration and himself. Blair’s natural ally was his fellow slimeball, Bill Clinton. The New Labour charade was modelled on Clinton’s New Democrats. When the Republicans won the presidency, a more principled politician than Blair would have been fazed. Not the Great Charlatan: he resolved to get alongside not just Dubya and the GOP, but the Project for a New American Century. If that meant war, well, you cannot make world statesman photo opportunities without breaking eggs.

Blair’s charlatanry has tainted the cause of the West. Here is the litmus test of his so-called conviction of the necessity of war on Iraq: if the dimpled chads of Florida had fallen on the other side of the fence and Al Gore had become president, who believes that Blair would have urged on him and his team of Democrat appeasers the imperative need for war? Fat chance - it would have been all jaw-jaw at Camp David about the Third Way and other liberal-left chimeras.

It was Blair who, desperately seeking to drag domestic opinion along with him, persuaded Dubya to make weapons of mass destruction the casus belli, rather than the straightforward rgime change that it was America’s instinct to pursue. This was part of Blair’s strategy to involve the United Nations, to placate his own party. That strategy has spectacularly backfired on him: when he pleads for more time to discover weapons of mass destruction - in which the CIA, the State Department, Whitehall, Parliament and the man in the public bar of the Dog and Duck no longer believe - he sounds like a phantom echo of Hans Blix, shortly before the first cruise missile slammed into Baghdad.

It is a characteristic of doomed rulers that, as the end approaches, they seek solace and reassurance away from home: Nicholas II embedded himself at military headquarters, leaving government in the hands of the Empress and Rasputin. The Great Charlatan’s present world tour has the same smell of death about it.

Every augury is bad. Gordon’s amazing display at the despatch box, mocking Tony’s WMD porkies, was the long-awaited raising of the standard of rebellion. Last week the media almost ignored the highly significant resignation of Michael Wills, a Home Office minister, who freed himself to act as one of Gordon’s lieutenants in the Brownshirts’ Machtergreifung. "History will forgive"? Not this time, Tony.