Here’s a view of Tony Blair that may be unfamiliar to most of us:
Throughout his years in office, he kept inviolable his belief in the existence of a purely beneficent essence of himself, a belief so strong that no quantity of untruthfulness, shady dealings, unscrupulousness, or constitutional impropriety could undermine or destroy it. Having come into the world marked by Original Virtue, Mr. Blair was also a natural-born preacher.
Reflecting psychobabble, “the modern tendency to indulge in self-obsession without self-examination,” he asked forgiveness in a final address:
Bless me, people (Mr. Blair appeared to be saying), for I have sinned: but please don’t ask me to say how.
Etc., by the pseudonymous Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, contributing editor of City Journal, and Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, whose thinking is said to have been adopted by Rudy Guiliani.
Blithe Spirit 