Despised of Men

So blame me. I voted for Blair, didn’t I? I cannot say I loathed the Tories, nor despised them nor say I hated Thatcher and all her works and therefore voted New Labour.

Though that is what I said at the time and they were some of my reasons. I catch myself repeating it now sometimes. But those are now the wrong words and I should not have used them. For such things they are hyperbole. They must be reserved, now, as they should for other inhumane ones, for the Israeli regime, its actions and the personnel who perform them.

Even then, having been over-used, those words are hardly strong enough. But they are all I have.

And now, I truly do, in the full meaning of the words, loathe and despise Tony Blair. Leading us into a misbegotten war for purely political reasons and self-aggrandisement, only veneered with the morality that should have informed them, that hardly anyone in Britain of any intelligence can understand, let alone endorse, was bad enough.

To change a party almost surreptitiously from a socialist one to a conservative one that has, centimetre by centimetre, dismantled all kinds of welfare and education structures that it not only conceived but we thought it held inviolable, to, inch by inch, restrict our civil liberties in the name of a war on terror conceived by a regime in another country, and then to toady to its wishes, was bad enough.

So I said I came to loathe and despise him for that.

I should, since in a way I have been involved with words all my life, have been more circumspect. I have read enough history to know that words like these should always be held in reserve for the circumstances that really do require them, like ‘tragedy’ and ‘disaster’.

For now, having thought his title of “Middle East Envoy’ was some sort of honorarium, a title without a job, merely to gain lucrative lecture fees in the USA, in which view I thought I was confirmed by his near Trappist silence about the issues and problems of the Middle East, he has spoken.

What he said merely confirms that he always was George Bush’s poodle. That, about to receive a medal from the American Congress, out of vanity he has not the moral courage to propose anything that would upset the American love affair with Israel and risk its members jeering him instead of cheering. And why he converted to Catholicism instead of Judaism is beyond me.

So I do now loathe, despise and hate Blair, not only as a politician, but as a human being. And this time, I use the words in the full sense of the meaning, not as casual hyperbole in political debate.

I would like to see him in a London street some time in the future. Though I dare say he will find Sacrament, Santa Fe or Seattle even, more to his liking. Not to spit on him, not to throw a shoe at him, not to accuse him of war crimes.

To look at him, and see all those around me do the same, with that glance that says so obviously: “Shouldn’t I recognise him? Wasn’t he famous once? What a pity to see him like that now. Was he on Big Brother. Or was it American Idol?”

I cannot think of anything that a politician who tried to choose celebrity over morality would find more hurtful and destructive of his psyche. Especially of a man who sold himself as someone who would preside over fresh bright happy dawns and has instead offered blood red sunsets. And I hope he lives a long and fruitless life, so as to be punished to the full by it.