Mick Hartley

Gerard Baker gets a little hot under the collar at the liberal consensus on Blair:

Next week, you’ll be able to watch the latest — I’m sure carefully researched — television drama about the Blair years from Channel 4. Called The Trial of Tony Blair it imagines the last days in No 10. Robert Lindsay stars as Mr Blair and gives a hint of the challenges he must have faced assuming the character role: “I was angry with the decision to go to war,” he said at a press screening this week. “It was a big, big mistake. I think it was illegal and the situation can only get worse.”

Meanwhile, over at the Tricycle Theatre in radical Kilburn, they’re preparing a similar project — Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq — a Hearing. The Prime Minister, it seems, is to be indicted in absentia for war crimes before an audience (a wholly objective one, I’ve no doubt) and prosecuted by Philippe Sands, the barrister.

And on it goes. These are not minority views, of course, but the near-universal consensus of the educated opinion-formers of our times. It’s hardly even controversial these days to talk of the Prime Minister in this way. People used to shout “fascist” at Margaret Thatcher but I don’t really ever think their heart was in it. With Mr Blair it’s deadly serious. Imagine the raucous, triumphant, mocking Shia at Saddam Hussein’s execution — minus the beards — and you have a sense of what most of these people feel about the Prime Minister.

So at the risk of finding myself in the dock with him when the modern elites have their Nuremberg, let me take issue. His critics excoriate Mr Blair for a decision made in the most excruciating of circumstances. And this from people whose idea of a difficult decision is whether to go The Ivy or Soho House for dinner.

In 2003 the British Government was faced with a selection of unpalatable choices. Leave Saddam Hussein in place despite his record; watch as sanctions and limited military action against him killed his people but left him politically strengthened; or move to enforce the repeated reasonable demands of the international community at the risk of a bloody war. Most difficult of all for a British prime minister, he was faced with a US administration that was determined on military action to remove Saddam. No British leader wants to find himself aligned with a French and Russian president against an American one.

This is the defensive, passive case for Mr Blair. But, yes, there is still another one. His decision helped to remove one of the most murderous figures of the 20th century. It helped to allow benighted Iraqis to choose their own path. Thus far they have chosen sectarian warfare — that’s regrettable. Above all Mr Blair helped to offer all the people of the Middle East the glimpse of a revolutionary future, a route out of the medievalist tyranny. That’s an objective that is still worth fighting for.