Tony Helps Out Again

Now that his holy mission of bringing peace to the Middle East has turned out so well, the Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair has found himself a modest little niche giving spiritual advice to the Sisi régime in Egypt. The democratic paragons who rule the United Arab Emirates are funding an initiative to develop "business opportunities", and his reverence is being parachuted onto the Sisi sofa to discuss the kind of economic reform that could lead to an outcome with an appropriate ethical dimension. Although his reverence's spokesbeing claims that he will receive no payments to supplement his present pittance of four hundred thousand a week, the moral benefits of such labours are self-evident. A former political associate has even proclaimed that his reverence's sojourn in Egypt will cause "terrible damage" to New Labour's legacy, perhaps by miraculously resurrecting a few tens of thousands of Iraqi collateral-damagees. In any case Sisi, among his other virtues, has forthright methods of taming the feral beast of a non-embedded Press. His reverence has criticised these methods as unjustified and will undoubtedly do his best to reform them: why go to the trouble and expense of imprisoning journalists while drones and cruise missiles wait idly by?