Hitchens on Blair

Writing on Tony Blair's recently released autobiography, Peter Hitches doesn't minces his words:

Then there’s the passage in which he claims to have had a premonition that he would become leader of the Labour Party.

‘Premonition’? Ha ha. I long for the day when someone explains just how this no-account barrister rose to high office. (Here I repeat my appeal for anyone who was ever represented by him in court to get in touch.)

How did he become MP for a safe northern Labour seat, and then leader of a major political party? All the books so far written fail to explain this miraculous series of events.

Maybe it really was the finger of destiny, as Mr Blair seems to imagine. Carole Caplin might know. Or maybe (my preferred explanation) it was really a good old Labour Party machine fix, which began with a search for someone malleable who was the absolute opposite of Michael Foot (no walking stick, no donkey jacket, no ideas, no books, no thick glasses, looks good on TV) and ended with an unhinged war on Iraq.

Note, as Mr Blair admits, that being Prime Minister was the first and only job in government he ever had. There’s a fascinating story to be told one day of how this grave national mistake came to be made, but this isn’t it.

Meanwhile, these memoirs – written in a consistently jokey style – are much more like those of an actor than those of any politician I’ve ever come across. He looks back on the great stage of history, across which he was ushered, inwardly baffled, by skilled directors and producers, much as some old ham might look back on his days in ­Hollywood. Iraq... do we really want to do it again?

Read the rest of Hitchens' Sunday column here.

I'm a bit skeptical about how someone so eloquent could be nothing more than an "inwardly baffled" actor. But Hitchens does ask some pertinent questions.