Mick Hartley

This could be a kind of reductio ad absurdum piss-take of all the over-heated Blair-hate journalism since Chilcot. Unfortunately, it's not. Charlie Gilmour at VICE rings up a Catholic priest to ask – Is Tony Blair Going to Hell?

Despite the scathing assessment of the Chilcot Report – an investigation into the Iraq War which was published this week – former Prime Minister Tony Blair is unlikely to face human justice for leading Britain into a conflict that left as many as one million Iraqis dead. The International Criminal Court has admitted it has no power to prosecute him. Even so, for Blair, a devout Catholic, could it be a case of "out of the frying pan and into the unquenchable lake of burning sulphur"?

I called up Father Martin Newell, a Catholic priest and peace activist, to find out.

VICE: Hello Father Newell. What do you have to do to get sent to hell these days?

Father Newell: It's not as simple as that. Catholic teaching says that hell exists but we're not sure that there's anybody in it. People can repent of anything and hopefully they do. God's mercy is infinite. We all depend on God's mercy. We're all sinners. We all do things wrong. There are very serious sins – mortal sins – certainly: murder, for example. We can talk about the invasion of Iraq being mass murder. A sin like that, unrepented, would mean that you are effectively in hell. Obviously lying about something as important as the reasons to go to war, for example, would be a massive offence against truth.

How stained is Tony Blair's soul?

It's not possible to speak about the state of another man's soul, but it would appear that he has lied to and deceived the public. He seems to be deceiving himself now. He led the country into a war which was completely unjust. In a sense we are all complicit but in this country he has the highest share of that complicity in mass murder that's still going on. He opened the gates of hell, metaphorically speaking, with the chaos that's come out of the invasion of Iraq. What he's done has caused massive evil and suffering. Morally he's in very serious trouble.

And so on. 

No one now credits the one million Iraqis dead figure, but that's hardly the point: the whole piece is scraping-the-barrel vile. The writer, Charlie Gilmour, is the spoilt-brat step-son of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, jailed for protest violence in 2011. Clearly his political thinking since then hasn't matured noticeably.

There does seem to be something in the water at VICE. Here's Sam Kriss – Why I Need to See Tony Blair in Prison:

If you're like me, you want to see Tony Blair in prison. To face justice for what he did, because crimes should not go unpunished – but also because you want to see it, because you need to. Like an itch in the world, the sense of something maddeningly out of balance; everything happened the way it did, and Tony Blair is still not in prison.

I need to know what it looks like. Blair trapped in a small white room behind a locked door – I imagine him standing, not pacing or hunched over in despair but stock-still as if to attention, but with those mad and manic eyes of his trawling the four blank walls for anything he can say or do to get himself out of there, eyes so used to the grand sweep of crowds and cameras that they don't know how to adjust to such a small space, zipping timorously from blur to blur in search of escape. Tony Blair shrouded in the baggy droop of a prison jumpsuit, the arms that used to order armies and missiles from one side of the world to the other now hanging limply by his side, only a creature now, a thing of bones and rot. Tony Blair in the dock, lips pursed behind Plexiglas as they read out the charges, his terror pulsing in a little vein under his chin, forgetting everything his lawyers and PR guys told him to say in the fizz of a panicked brain, stammering, whining, desperate, and finally silent, mouth still flapping uselessly, wheezing without meaning under the omnipresent glare of his own guilt. It's a nice image. It helps me sleep….

Tony Blair is not a person like other people, but something ugly and strange, a flesh-demon casting its charms, something that to do its evil first needs to be loved….

Tony Blair stood on top of a pile of corpses, and tried to get us all to agree how reasonable he was. Because he just doesn't understand; like a spoiled child or an incontinent dog, he doesn't understand what he did. And that's why I need to see him in prison, to see the full realisation trickling across his face, to see him finally, after two decades of jabbering, learn to shut up.

Jesus. I'd try a therapist.