Tony Blair & God

There is an interesting article on the online Spectator by Rod Liddle entitled "God's role in politics - God’s role in politics is not to underwrite bad ideas"
The crux of the article is in these paragraphs:

The longer Blair remained in office, the more pronounced became the shift away from that first and crucial god — public opinion — and towards some other higher being. As that BBC documentary cleverly evinced, towards the end of his tenure Blair rarely expanded upon his reasons for doing some deeply questionable act beyond the look-I’m-an-honest-sorta-bloke shrug of the shoulders and the repeated mantra: ‘Well, I did it cos I thought it was the right thing to do.’ Over and over again Blair cited this as his sole reason for embarking upon one or another catastrophic course of action; he never said, ‘I thought it was the right thing to do, but sadly I was mistaken,’ and still less, ‘Look, I did it cos it was politically expedient and seemed attractive at the time.’

This seems to have been the gift which God bestowed upon his mate Tony Blair: not humility, an intimation of human frailty, an understanding that human knowledge and human abilities are most definitely finite, that given free will we are at liberty to make the wrong decisions as well as the right decisions, but instead a suffocating and deluding certitude. Blair’s favourite phrase — ‘I did it cos I thought it was the right thing to do’ — is an absolutist’s argument: it cannot be gainsaid. And of course the implication is that he thought it was the right thing to do because he was a man of faith and conviction — and so even if everything turned out badly, as in Iraq, his motive or judgment could not possibly be questioned. So it is a statement that requires no evidence, no explanation and still less anything in the way of an apology.

I always knew Blair was flakey, because of his mud rebirth ceremony with his harridan wife and her new-agey Kaballah bullshit, but I had no idea that he actually believed he had a one-on-one link with God, and felt that that justified his decisions. I always thought his support for America was historical and political rather than because of a shared fundamentalism with George Bush.
At least he had the good sense to be embarrased about it and keep it quiet while he was in office.