It's not every day a tingle rush of sentimental pride surges right up your spine, smashes through the barrier of the cerebral cortex and mainlines straight into that area of your brain marked 'MEGALOMANIA - DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT'. But that's what happened to Blair when the Houses of Congress in joint session gave him a standing ovation. Since then he hasn't really come down, and reportedly remains on a high -- grandiose, self-conscious, tetchy, petulant and impatient, with a sign hanging round his neck saying "You cannot know what responsibility I bear in your name". So, should we seriously question his mental state and his ability to think in a mature and measured way? Yes. We should not be surprised if in a private moment he owns up to the title of world saviour: he's only a whisker away from thinking he's Jesus Christ.
If this guy wasn't actually the Prime Minister of a clapped-out power punching way above its weight, he would certainly be a candidate for ping pong in one of the underfunded mental health facilities of the country's chaotic National Health Service. Just for now, though, he's surfing on revivalist rhetoric delivered to a comatose and compliant public which perhaps can't believe quite what it sees before its eyes. A lifetime spent in the sheltered establishment institutions of this most class-ridden of societies (public school, followed by Oxford, the Bar and Parliament) has left him looking and sounding more than ever like the Head Boy of a second-division public school whose exasperated tenor voice rises in self- righteous anger as he exhorts an audience of sullen lazy slackers to work harder, not to smoke, not to masturbate in the lavatories and not to drink themselves senseless whenever the opportunity arises. We "must" do this, we "should" do that, we "ought" to do this. Oh, really? Should we? Ought we? Must we?
Yes we must, Tone says, and very soon a hand picked selection from our top team will play Evil. It's an 'away' match. We expect Good (we're Good) to win (triumph), but Good will only triumph if everyone in the whole school gives it support and cheers hard, and does not entertain ideas that are unworthy or shameful, and does not ask any awkward questions. And that means you...
Tone, wearing his mask of war, which he likes to wear and is possibly most proud of, will be on the touchline, of course. And while he's there he will, conveniently, be removed from the tedium of having, in the second term of his government, to concern himself with such petty matters as the 'delivery' of public services. Mesmerising us from the pulpit of tingle-zone politics, the essential mediocrity of his deeply disappointing administration will slip by unnoticed. He was never comfortable, anyway, with the idea of 'delivery' -- he wouldn't know how to deliver a milk bottle -- and, after all, what is the paring of bunions or the excising of cancers, or the education of the nation's young, or mending the parlous state of its transport system, when put beside his epic and historic duty, no, his biblical duty, on the front line (well, okay, on the touchline) of the battle against Evil?
The Bin Laden scenario is bad enough. That it should be mediated by this most narcissistic and immature of Prime Ministers doesn't make it any easier.
