Some time late last week Tony Blair was on the radio for some reason that I cannot now remember. I’ve tried to find the interview on the Today Programme’s schedules on its website, but I can’t. The only thing I can think of is that it was perhaps an old recording of Blair dating to the publication of his “memoirs” almost exactly a year ago. (I’m putting “memoirs” in inverted commas here, by the way, specifically for Tony Blair. Of course, all human memories are imperfect, all are interpretative, selective, or inaccurate in some way and to some degree or another, but I like to think that most people are basically honest and doing their best, however imperfectly, to remember things as they really were. I assume therefore that most people, if they write their recollections about their lives or careers, write memoirs. As for Tony Blair, however: he has never to my knowledge knowingly spoken the truth about anything in his entire life, unless it happened to coincide with his interests and designs, and seems capable only of constructing or in this sense reconstructing reality only inasmuch as it suits him or his ends in some way or another, so I am calling Tony Bliar’s memoirs “memoirs”.) Anyway, I digress, and I apologise for the absence of the aforementioned contextual details, but they are really not that important anyway. And I apologise if this is basically a year behind the times, although I’m sure many would agree that it never hurts to remind ourselves of the mendacity of Blair. So, anyway, whether Tony Blair said it (again) last week or whether last week I was reminded of what he said a year ago, what’s important is what Tony Blair said and what Tony Blair said was this: the thing that he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting. Let me repeat that. The thing that he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.
I repeated that because it is impossible, utterly impossible, for a normal, decent human being to assimilate the moral implications of these words in merely one reading. Those implications are simply too immense and too appalling to take in without reading them at least twice. It is also impossible for any normal, decent human being to comprehend the fullness of their implications straight away. When I heard those words, I had to repeat them, albeit perhaps in paraphrase, back to myself a number of times, and I had to spend a considerable period thinking about them, in an attempt, perhaps as yet futile, quite possibly ultimately futile, to think my way all the way around their moral enormities. I knew right away there was something terribly wrong going on, but it took a long time to take in the fullness of the wrongness. So, before going any further with this post (if you’re still reading it, then you have obviously not yet abandoned it in exasperation at ever knowing what my point is, though I would not have blamed you for having done so), but, as I say, before going any further, abandon your screen, make a nice cup of tea, or coffee if you’re a foreign Johnnie, and think through as far as you can, short of causing yourself mental injury, obvs, what Tony Blair said: that the thing he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting. The thing he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting. Right, go on, off you go.
Back? Good. Right, I’m going to say it one more time: the thing Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting. That is to say, he does not regret the most, or indeed at all, as he has several times insisted, the wanton error of believing in Saddam’s phantom weapons of mass destruction just because he soooooooo wanted to believe in them and have a war in Iraq and show the President of the United States his bum. Just the other day the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller (yay, some relevance), revealed yet more evidence that Blair followed instinct on Iraq to the extent of defying evidence—as we all know well enough already—and as none of Blair’s self justifications will ever make us un-know. Nor indeed does he regret the most that this act of staggering incompetence and irresponsibility has led to hundreds of thousands of military and civilian deaths, hundreds of thousands of deaths, deaths of human beings, human deaths, hundreds of thousands of them, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of other people who have been physically and psychologically wounded. Nor the fact that this deadly goose-chase distracted from the business of holding to account those who actually were responsible for the 9/11 atrocity, which was really where all this began. No regret that the Iraq war allowed Osama bin Laden to live nearly a decade after committing mass murder, that the Taliban are still running riot in Afghanistan, that there are Muslims all around the world, including within Britain, who are motivated (however wrongly) to murder their fellow citizens because the Iraq attack made them feel that it was actually an attack on them. No, not these things; not these things, no. What Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is saving foxes from being hunted with dogs. Yes, what Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is saving foxes from being hunted with dogs.
I find it surreal, almost unbelievable, that Tony Blair actually regrets that he has saved many thousands of animals from ritualised slaughter, from being hideously killed through the process of being torn to pieces by crazed dogs under the charge of even-more crazed men and women who chase these beautiful animals while tooting absurd horns and wearing ridiculous costumes. He regrets that. He regrets that! That is something that he regrets! Actually regrets. And not only does he regret that, but he regrets it more than he regrets anything else in his premiership. That is, he regrets saving these beautiful animals from dogs and cruel lunatics more than he regrets the hundreds and thousands of needless human deaths he directly and personally caused through his stupidity, rashness, and hubristic insistence that he was right about Saddam’s weapons and that all the experts were wrong. If that is so, and it is so, however incredible it may be seem, then he is truly one of the most amoral men ever to have lived. Not immoral as such. Not evil. But nevertheless a man completely blind to the significance of his actions, a man who is thus completely incapable of understanding the gravity of what he has done, of seeing the consequences of his actions in any sort of rational and indeed decent perspective. It appears indeed that he is some kind of off-the-autism-scale moral unrelativist who can only judge the events he put into motion by a calculus of how it somehow affected him, rather than by the calculus of pain caused to others, as admittedly incalculable as that may be. Sadly, therefore, it seems he is a man who will never be able truly to regret anything he has done, not in any recognisably sensible way. So there is certainly no chance that whatever severely attenuated and probably in fact in his case non-existent part of his brain that we might call his “conscience” will be as tortured as it certainly ought to be by the truly terrible things he has done.
No comments:
Post a Comment