Ah, what it is to have the gift of self-awareness, and how we pity those without it. Tony Blair got off the phone to his friend Muammar Gaddafi and reported that the Libyan leader was delusional and could not face reality. He did not understand that the people had put up with him for long enough and it was time to stand aside for a new leader. I suppose we should be grateful that Tone didn’t use the RAF or mustard gas when he was of a similar mindset.
The Blair-Gaddafi business, the criticisms of the former New Labour regime for its ‘cosy’ relationship with the psychopathic Arab fruitcake, have attacked the right people for the wrong reason. Blair’s narcissistic desperation to be seen as a statesman with a larger role abroad than Britain deserves was almost always wrong-headed and was ultimately disastrous — and we’ll come to that later. But cajoling Gaddafi to come in from the cold and renounce whatever weapons programmes he was working on was rational, pragmatic and surely to be applauded. Better that than another invasion with hundreds of thousands dead and al-Qa’eda sniggering in the wings, poised to step in.
But it was the other stuff, the peripheral stuff, that demeaned our government and by extension our country. It is fine to bribe or strong-arm a lunatic like Gaddafi if it achieves the ends we desire and does not harm his people; it is not right to be his best mate and take holidays with him, as Peter Mandelson did, or to use your relationship with him for personal financial gain, as Blair has done. That’s filthy and should be truly shocking to all of us. It has long been a belief of mine that almost all of the manifest evil in the world has Peter Mandelson somewhere at the heart of it — floods, pestilence, plague, annihilation etc — and sure enough, there he is enjoying a grouse shoot with Gaddafi’s smug, puffed-up idiot of a son, Saif al Islam, back in 2009.
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