A low score in the intelligence test

During an interview with James Naughtie, recorded in his keenly analytical The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, the Prime Minister observed, ‘I never quite understood what people mean by this neo-con thing.’ This is not an obscure term. Can Mr Blair really not know that the neo-cons are a small group of like-minded policy-makers, clustered in or around the top layer of the Pentagon, who began agitating for the removal of Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush became president? When Mr Naughtie mentioned the neo-cons’ uhr-text, The Project for the New American Century, Mr Blair asked, ‘What’s in it?’

What unites Mr Blair and George Bush is their conviction, in the face of the facts, of mission and rightness. In August 2002, Mr Bush said, ‘I’m the Commander — see, I don’t need to explain. That’s the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.’ Mr Blair is not the Commander, but he relies on ‘passionate belief’ instead of information. He can present intelligence documents, stuffed with caveats, as certainties — and later wave them away as wrong.

But passionate belief, faith, and the notion that explanation is unnecessary will no longer do. What is needed is explanation and fact. Only these will answer Boris Johnson’s ‘How could I be such a chump?’

Maureen Dowd’s book won’t change any minds. A columnist for the New York Times, Miss Dowd makes me laugh every week as she sends up the Bush cabinet; but rereading her collection is not much fun unless you just hate Bush. The columns refer to events of the week they were written, as they should, but now, sometimes years later, even news junkies will rack their brains over the references and the jokes will die.