SEPTEMBER SWAN SONG EVERYBODY HATES TONY BLAIR
Inheriting A Corpse A few words, like a flare shot out to expose enemy positions, can in an instant reveal the nature of a political mind-set, the contours of a particular world view. So it was the other week when a member of the audience witnessing a debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith was asked by the moderator why she kept booing the latter. In a barely coherent harrumph of anger and fetid spleen she spoke four words that stayed in my mind. "Everybody," she shouted, “hates Tony Blair!” It’s the ‘everybody’ that gives the game away. For in her world everybody did indeed hate Tony Blair, who is a ‘war criminal.’ * This, one of a whole set of givens, self-evident ‘truths,’ occupying the unchallengeable reality of the circles in which she moved. She lives in a world in which the notion that Tony Blair is anything other than the personification of evil is as much a given as the fact that Atlee is dead. Consequently, when confronted by a...