Tony Blair: Courageous and Duplicitous

With his memoirs now out, quite a few people in the United Kingdom would award their former prime minister, Tony Blair, a medal for hypocrisy because of his evasions on the Iraq war. They shouldn’t overdo it. Not a few of them would merit a hypocrisy medal too. 

The spectacle of seeing Mr Blair insulted and humiliated at his book signings, so that he was forced to cancel one such event at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly, London, is nauseating. For a man who played an essential role in what the public regarded as laudable humanitarian interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and even Afghanistan; who helped end the conflict in Northern Ireland; who led the Labour Party to a record three consecutive election victories; for that man to be reduced to a target for rotten fruit is distressing confirmation of the negligible attention span of his countrymen.a