WE ARE RIGHT TO BE SUSPICIOUS OF BLAIR'S MOTIVES

Sometimes I wonder about where MPs live and if they ever meet ‘ordinary’ people (except in their surgeries to talk about the disgusting bus service and drainage failures). I mean socially, to have a normal chat with them. Does it ever happen?

I read Tom Harris’s blog and occasionally comment on it. I almost never agree with the guy, but that doesn’t matter really. He writes well; not surprisingly as he was a journalist in real life, and at least when you disagree with him he usually publishes your comment... although he rarely replies to it unless it is to put it down. I guess that’s not surprising really. He does get some very critical comments.

I was a bit surprised today though to see his wholehearted backing for Tony Blair over the donation from his book earnings to the English British Legion, and a slapping down of the British public for being less than enthusiastic about Blair’s actions and for being suspicious of them.

I realise of course that one has to be loyal to one’s leader, even ex-leader, and that the right winger Blair was probably a bit of a hero to Tom who always seems more like a Tory than a Labour man, specially a Scottish Labour man. (I wonder if Blair would even know who he was.)

Some might say I should get out more, but in the last 10 years, I have to say that I have never yet met a person who liked Tony Blair or who had any kind of respect for him. The nicest thing that I have heard said of him is that he was better than Brown… but that really isn’t much of a compliment. I’m therefore surprised that the reaction should come as a huge surprise. Maybe Tom just moves in rarefied right wing circles in which it is considered correct to invade countries because your senior partner’s deputy wants their oil, regardless of the hundreds of British troops whose lives you ruin… or end, and the hundreds of thousands of “the enemies’” ditto.

But not only do I disagree with Harris’s robust support of his beloved Tony, but I reckon that he’s way wide of the mark about it only being in Britain that people would be suspicious of self serving slime balls like Blair. I’m sure that the French would be equally suspicious of anything that the imperious Sarkozy might do that seemed half decent, or for that matter of Chirac (but then would he ever do anything decent?).

He ends his short piece with this:

“But the sneering and sheer nastiness in the response to this gesture is nauseating and shines a glaring light on a side of the British character of which we should not be proud.”

Nah Tom, it shows that we have your wee mate bang to rights. He’s a slug!

Pics: The horror that Blair inflicted upon Bagdhad's innocent population in persuit of approval from Washington. And Tom Harris, one of Blair's few fans.