By PETER HITCHENS Money machine: Tony Blair, by a card spelling his name as 'Toni Bleyer', talks to the media in Baku, Azerbaijan Is there any way this country can officially disown Anthony Blair? Those of us who were never fooled by him now have to watch as he cashes in on his time as Prime Minister in ways which are actually shaming. His dishonesty, his lack of embarrassment and his greed are all so great that it is now possible to imagine him ending up munching gonads on I’m A Celebrity, perhaps trying to restore his fortunes after yet another failed property speculation. Or singing My Way on a talent show. I am not sure whether to be furious or to laugh at this dark farce. I met Mr Blair before he was famous and concluded that he was an empty-headed soap actor, chosen by the Labour Party to be the plausible front-man for its slow-motion coup d’etat. Then I had to watch the ludicrous transformation of this man, who to my personal knowledge did not know in 1997 that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, into a supposed World Statesman, the victor of Kosovo and the scourge of Saddam. These two wars, one dubious, the other indefensible, were conducted on the basis that Mr Blair is a dedicated foe of tyranny. Quite a lot of people still believe this piffle. But how can they now, after Mr Blair’s trip to Azerbaijan, there to open a formaldehyde factory? The speech which he gave was such concentrated, congealed drivel that it probably had to be carried into and out of the room in a spittoon. You may read it in full on the web. That is not all. Far worse than this piece of prostitution (he is said to have been paid £90,000 for his appearance) is the fact that he consorted, while in this sinister little country, with its President, Ilham Aliyev. Like Mr Blair, I have been to Azerbaijan. Unlike him, I met opposition politicians and heard about its miserable history of censorship, repression and despotism. President Aliyev, like Kim Jong Il, inherited his job from his father, the late KGB General Heydar Aliyev. And Heydar Aliyev inherited his job from the Kremlin, which installed him as ruler of Azerbaijan when it was a Soviet province. Opponents of the current President Aliyev get beaten up or imprisoned. There are reliable reports of torture, including threats to humiliate female relatives of political prisoners. Protesting demonstrators sometimes end up clubbed to death. He ‘won’ his last election with a comically unlikely 87 per cent of the vote. Well, there is an old argument which says that if such people control big oil supplies, we pass over their faults for the sake of our economy. But that is an argument Mr Blair, and his few remaining defenders, simply cannot make – because they all claim to have been so outraged by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny that even his oil couldn’t save him. So I think we can conclude from this well-rewarded little visit that Mr Blair’s outrage against Saddam was as false as it looked. In which case, what is there left of this person that is worth a farthing, let alone £90,000? If the BBC isn’t sucking up to Stephen Fry (who will soon be presenting most of the programmes on all its TV and radio channels) it is sucking up to its other hero, Alan Bennett. Mr Bennett once wrote some fine plays, but has now gone off, largely because he hasn’t grasped that the world has changed since the Sixties. He is also responsible for a rather nasty drama, revived last week, in which the personally squalid Stalinist traitor Guy Burgess is portrayed as a sort of romantic exile. It ends with Burgess prancing through Moscow in a Savile Row suit to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan’s He Remains An Englishman, which is precisely what Burgess chose not to do when he betrayed his country to the mass-murderer Stalin. This insulting tripe is supposed to be a minor classic. Would anyone dare write, let alone broadcast, a comparable play about the loneliness and plight of Lord Haw-Haw or John Amery in Berlin? Of course not. So why does the grotesque and evil Burgess get this treatment? Because the sainted Mr Bennett wrote it. Most sensible people will have been relieved that the case of the offended hijab wearer was dismissed by an unusually wise and independent-minded judge. But the defendants were lucky, if anyone whose livelihood has been ruined by stupid state persecution can be called lucky. Even if the allegations made against Benjamin and Sharon Vogelenzang had been true, it should not have been the business of the police or the courts in a free country. Freed from the ferocious dictates of political correctness – now written into our law – the police would have politely urged Ericka Tazi to cool off and forget it. As for the People’s Prosecution Service, who spend half their time refusing to prosecute assaults and burglaries because the culprit hasn’t actually confessed to them on videotape, and so they’re scared of losing the case for ‘lack of evidence’, and most of the rest of the time reducing murder charges to manslaughter for a quick conviction, what did they think they were doing harassing two decent, hard-working citizens in this way? I’ve said it before and I will say it again. The law has been stolen from the people of this country, and seized by an unrepresentative and bigoted minority of anti-British, pro-crime, anti-Christian wooden-tops, who are often as stupid as they are unhelpful. And when one of us defends themselves against the lawlessness our rulers permit to flourish, the police have the nerve to complain that he or she ‘has taken the law into their own hands’, and then to send them to jail. Well, whose hands should the law be in, exactly? It is also worth noticing that the British Government presents itself as our defender against the Islamist menace, madly spying on kindergartens in search of tiny militants. Yet it uses the laws of England to defend Islam against the slightest criticism here at home. Which is the real policy? David Cameron mouths the standard-issue pieties of all three front benches, namely that military ‘success’ is possible in Afghanistan. Nobody who understands the issue believes anything of the kind. What we have is a failed intervention in an Afghan civil war, increasingly similar to the Russian operation that ended in total withdrawal, with nothing achieved and much lost. The only difference between us and the Soviets is that we haven’t yet realised we have failed. A proper patriot would tell the Americans that they can keep their idiotic war, and that we will be leaving as soon as practicable. But the Tories, as Mr Cameron’s recent sell-out on the EU makes clear, aren’t really patriots. Hence their need to pretend to be, by posing in flak-jackets and going Army barmy, with lots of macho soldier-talk. If this cost no lives and no money, it would merely be pathetic. As it actually costs heavily in both, it is wicked and cowardly. A dedicated foe of tyranny... until there's a £90k speaking fee up for grabs
Last updated at 8:04 PM on 13th December 2009
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Sunday, 13 December 2009
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