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Hello you. How are things? What have I missed?

I didn’t see much news in the last couple of weeks but the headlines from the Chilcot Inquiry managed to waft their way to my holiday bolthole. Claire Short and former Foreign Office lawyer Elizabeth Wilmhurst may have got the applause but for me the stars of the inquiry so far have been two other faces from the squalid past, namely Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.

The word that sprang to mind when seeing the pair is reduced. Look at Tony Blair, his tan skin pulled tight like the soiled sheets of a deathbed, the tear of his mouth revealing the bones underneath. With his invisible, inept, and ineffectual peace mission to the Middle East going nowhere fast, Tony has been reduced to whoring handbags for Louis Vuitton.

Now, I know he’s paid a shedload of cash for what he does but does he look happy to you? Intellectually hollow speeches to an endless parade of nodding dogs. The moody accounting. The handbags. Does the money make up for all the crappy, empty jobs he has? Speaking as someone who was once paid quite well for a job I loathed and which made me utterly miserable, I hope not. It would be some small punishment.

But then, as we saw from his evidence to Chilcot, Blair is a man of cast iron certainties. He’s not one for expressing regret or remorse or for reconsidering (‘I’d do it again,’ he declared). He could probably shovel manure for a living and convince himself he’s king of the world. He’s to be envied in a way.

Then there’s Campbell. One thing that Campbell’s evidence to Chilcot revealed was the true nature of what he did (and still does) for Tony Blair. He was a turd polisher. They may have been Tony Blair’s turds (or high-level government government announcements if you want to mask the smell of what Blair squeezed out between 1994 and 2005) but turds they remain. Each morning Blair would drop another steaming load (or initiatives and back-of-a-fag-packet ideas, if you prefer) onto Alastair’s desk who would then get to buffing them.

And with hindsight he wasn’t actually that good at it, as the likes of the transparently awful presentation of the so-called evidence of Saddam’s WMD shows. Look at the automatic scepticism that policiticians’ utterances are met with now and tell me Campbell doesn’t bear a huge responsibility for it. It’s a measure of Gordon Brown’s desperation and impotence that he would put himself under Campbell’s influence. Once a confidante of presidents and kings, Campbell’s now reduced to bragging about all the work he does for charidee on his blog. His blog!

Is Alastair happy? Possibly not. There he is reduced to near tears on the Andrew Marr show. Was his emotional display (if that’s what it was) triggered by the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children and hundreds of British troops? Not a bit of it. Campbell welled up over some perceived slight over his ‘latest work of fiction’, the precious, precious little love.

The delicate flower thought Marr was linking his latest novel to the piss poor Iraq dossiers. I might be a bit slow but I didn’t make the connection. I imagine most people merely thought, ‘Oh God, Campbell’s bashed out another awful book. He’s going to be unavoidable while he whores it’, rather than laughing at Marr’s supposed chutzpah. Still, it’s good to see that Campbell has a softer side. He isn’t just the strutting, jutting, hardman bully of popular legend but also a thin-skinned, whining little prat who can be brought to a breathless stop by Andrew bloody Marr. Campbell’s now trying to cover himself by quibbling over the number of civilian casualties as quoted by Marr. As if there is any number that shows him and his former boss in any favourable light whatsoever.

Campbell should be grateful. In a universe where morality worked properly he wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without being subjected to a thick hail of sputum. Instead there he is, going wobbly over some gentle questioning from an establishment bum-kisser. Still, it won’t have done the book sales any harm.

Anyway. Back.