Marina Hyde - Here's how Tony Blair really can face the judgment of history
The great thing about the judgment of history is that the defendant is never around for it. It is handed down in absentia, and unless Earth has an extradition treaty with the 357-room celestial palace in which Tony Blair's idiosyncratic brand of faith presumably leads him to imagine he will spend eternity, then the former prime minister is safe to continue telling every second interviewer that "history will judge me", or that he is "prepared to be judged by history".
If only it were possible to leave someone else's body to cryogenic science, instead of being limited to freezing oneself in the hope that medical advances could effect reanimation at some moment down the line. By means of a whip-round, I'm sure we could soon raise the necessary funds to keep the Blair corporeal form on ice in some secret Alpine lab, to be awakened at whichever vantage point in the future even he would concede might be lofty enough to survey his works. And then … well, then he would be forced to survey his works.
Come my afterlife revolution, in fact, there would be a special circle of hell reserved for history-will-judge-me types, where they would be forced to absorb those very judgments before an audience. I rarely find myself searching for any kind of violent end to the personal journeys of the age's grotesque, great and small, though others will disagree. For instance, there are those who may wish for climate change deniers such as Jeremy Clarkson and James Delingpole to be swept away by a literal and metaphorical wave of poetic justice, in some disaster movie-style punchline to their heroic battle against science. But I must say it would be quite enough for me to imagine them being forced to read the history books they appear to think constitute their get-out-of-jail-free card, in which their flat-earthedess relegated them to mere comic footnotes.
Seated at another desk in this most chastening of eternal reading rooms would be Mr Tony Blair, perusing the history books of the future, with a live webcam trained on his face to transmit every individual moment of realisation of his own wrongness. It's only a hunch, of course, that Blair's fundamental wrongness will be the judgment of history. But it is the nagging suspicion engendered by each and every one of his interventions into early 21st century global affairs, with the latest one being a case in point.
To Egypt, then, and Mr Blair's declaration that the military removal of a country's first democratically elected head of state represents exciting progress for the Middle East, along with the violent crackdowns and human rights abuses that have followed. There is no point wondering if this announcement came shortly after he followed a white rabbit down a hole; he has lived so long in his moral Bizarro World now that to apply even his own logic to his utterances is as pointful as reasoning with a fart... read more:
