The Holy Agony

For some reason the Murdoch Times has taken it into its head to interview the Ascended Incarnation of the Vicar of Downing Street, who has been doing such a splendid job keeping the peace in the Middle East. Although not haunted by that day on the sofa when he decided to take the country to war over the weapons of mass nonexistence, Tony does of course reflect on it, and is troubled by it, and feels a great sense of responsibility for it. Did he do the right thing? "Of course you ask that question the whole time. You'd be weird if you didn't ask that question". Actually, given the doings under consideration - attacking an essentially unarmed nation, colluding in the deaths of thousands of harmless civilians, conniving at kidnapping and torture, breaking the military covenant, abandoning those Iraqis who helped and lying to the public - I suspect you'd be weirder if you did.

I see I have called Tony a liar; how very unkind of me. Something else that emerges in this most recent sermon is that Tony does not think it nice to have people distrusting his motives or saying that he lied. It is not clear whether Tony deigns to offer any startling new evidence that he told the truth at any point, other than once or twice by coincidence; so it looks as if he will just have to suffer. However, that is not the most difficult thing: "the most difficult thing in any set of circumstances", such as being out of prison and counting the cash with Cherie, to take a random example, "is the sense of responsibility for people who have given their lives and fallen – the soldiers and the civilians." Like many pious persons, Tony has a great sense of responsibility for people once they are too dead to be a bother - soldiers who don't ask for money to be spent on them that would be better spent on identity cards and nuclear missiles; civilians who have the courtesy to be discreet about their bereavements and mutilations and poisonings. If Tony did not feel that sense of responsibility to the corpses rather than to the living, "there really would be something wrong with me, and there is not a single day of my life when I do not reflect upon it ... many times," while remaining out of prison, having all four limbs and no dead children and counting the cash with Cherie. And, in the judgement of Tony the moralist, "that's as it should be."