The Blair project: A PM's brief journey

It is a mystery, perhaps only secretly acknowledged, that some people have to go through life facing almost universal opprobrium while remaining fully convinced about their own righteousness. Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, seems one such similarly-afflicted character. There’s , or rather was, that toothy grin, lampooned endlessly, that appealed to some higher calling in the face of scathing adversity, and that ability to sound most self-convinced even as many a spectator would remain lip-curlingly sceptical.

There was, as many a denizen of the isle used to aver after watching the then-PM on TV, the eerie feeling that the man was, well, lying. Through his teeth. A feeling that persisted among even die-hard New Labour viewers — it was that uncanny. Or maybe not. One cannot really come out looking like Little Red Riding Hood after having presented and pushed through those fables about those spectral WMDs in Iraq. There has, in fact, even been a film this year, directed by Roman Polanski , based on a work of fiction, that none-too-subtly makes the conspiratorial case of a British prime minister actually having been a CIA man all through his adult life. And the insinuation against Blair, rubbed in by using actors closely resembling some of his former colleagues, was startlingly apparent.

And now the man seems to have given yet more cause for critics to lambast him with the publication of his memoirs , A Journey. More than anything, it has caused ire due to the perceived character assassination of some of his fellow Labour leaders, Gordon Brown included. ‘Delusional and bonkers’ is what some said of the book. And among other epiphanies, Blair seems to have seen it fit to divulge some details about his sex life, the importance of bathrooms in his life, and his considered opinion that former US President George Bush had ‘genuine integrity and... much political courage’ . And, of course, those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were for real!