Blair: maximum assurance, maximum delusion

""The point about Blair is that he combines maximum assurance with maximum delusion." The comment, made privately by the leader of a Labour council, is the exact and perfect judgment. No other analyst need apply.

To hear Tony Blair calling for continuous war on Friday was instructive. Smooth, ingratiating, as always, and utterly natural, he sounded like a man saying that this was clearly the weather for a scarf and a woolly hat. The words induced one more increment of despair. Of course we must keep up the war on terror, of course we must go on killing and being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, if necessary, London, unlike cowardly not-pulling-their-weight Stockholm or Paris.

There is something unbalanced about the jaunty normality the man imports into approving a course of conduct in its fourth year of calamity. The message is very assured, very delusional. "It would be catastrophic not to continue with the 'war on terror'." Let us re-phrase that very slightly: "It would be catastrophic not to carry on with the catastrophe." It is a pleasant, smiling, glamorous face, and it is our national duty to save it."

"If only he'd studied history" - Edward Pearce