It looks like Tony Blair’s finally going to get a job to which he’s eminently suited: Middle East peacemaker.

It got me thinking about other people who are otherwise wasted in their current careers and what they’d be more suited to.

Obviously, I’m thinking along the lines of Pete Doherty as Drugs Czar, Gary Glitter as Children’s Minister and Stevie Wonder as Formula One driver.

Alastair Campbell as submissive gimp in a Berlin S&M dungeon. That kind of thing.

Please, join in…

…try smearing this:

The queen has been left “exasperated and frustrated” at the legacy of Tony Blair’s 10 years in power, friends have disclosed.

So how do you think the New Labour high command will do it, as they are wont to do? Will we shortly be reading in a sympathetic newspaper about a ’semi-detached’ queen with ‘psychological flaws‘, perhaps? How about destroying her career with trumped up charges?

One’s republican fervour wavers momentarily.

Tony Blair’s resignation speech, first draft

I was born decayed after the Second World War. I was a young man after I was a child. Before that I was a baby. Between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, I was a -teenager.

At that time, I looked at my own country, though back then of course it still wasn’t mine.

Magnificent country, wonderful history, splendid traditions, proud of its past, super people, lovely sense of humour, fantastic fish-and-chips, great train robbers.

But too reliant on old-fashioned verbs. And pronouns. Speeches back then, too wordy. With no mid-sentence pauses for.

Emotion.

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Steven Poole gives us the thinking behind Blair’s resignation speech.

That broiling Friday morning 10 years ago, with that massive parliamentary majority and unparalleled public goodwill, he had the most powerful starting hand dealt to any new prime minister in modern history. The one thing he didn’t need to do was bluff. The murderous thing about Tony Blair’s nature, and thus his leadership, is that he never knew how to do anything else.

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My six year-old daughter’s just been complaining that whenever I make up her lunch box for school, I ‘always’ make her jam sandwiches. This is a filthy lie clearly aimed at undermining my position as most popular member of the household.

Only when I have a particularly stinking hangover - and can’t face lingering over the preparation of food - does she get jam sandwiches and that’s happened about once in the last month. But she obviously only remembers the disappointment of the less exotic sandwich over the glee of a more exciting comestible.

And so, as you do, I got me thinking about the Prime Minister’s legacy. Has it all been endless jam butties? Sure, we’ve had the egg mayonnaise of Northern Ireland but what about the Quorn and cream cheese of Iraq? The rest is jam, isn’t it? Jam yesterday, jam today and jam tomorrow.

…another one closes.

If you hurry you can catch the BBC having its very own Leni Riefenstahl moment.

Update 3.40: Jesus, the BBC coverage is awful. The amount of gushing going on you’d think Stephen Fry had died instead of some raddled war criminal announcing his retirement. I thought Nick Robinson was having an asthma attack he was so breathless.

At least they gave Armando Iannucci a whole 90 seconds for sake of balance.

And so, a slippery, malodorous and rather unpleasant part of the country’s anatomy is finally going to be douched.

(Incidentally, is this photo really the best BBC online news could find of the Prime Minister? It’s chilling.)

But Christ, it’s taking long enough. It’s like watching someone with Dartitis. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is the beginning of the end. It’s more the end of the beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end. Blair might be leaving the Labour Party in the shit today but we still have somewhere around six weeks of him left as Prime Minister.

He could still do a lot of damage in that time although, if reports are to be believed and with a little bit of luck, he’ll be spending the rest of his time in office mainly on the ‘plane.

And so, the millions of words that will be penned about the Blair legacy today (these are some of the best so far, I think) are jumping the gun somewhat and will be incomplete. Blair may yet (pleasantly) surprise us in the coming weeks by handing himself in at the Hague or declaring his plans to join a trappist order when he finally, absolutely, positively, really, really, really steps down.

Update: Nosemonkey on that speech:

Not only does he seem to have confused pre-Blair British politics with late-20th century American politics (liberal vs. conservative rather than socialist vs. capitalist, etc.), but also please note how none of the words “unions”, “workers”, “democracy”, “the poor” or “socialism” appear even once in the entire speech… (”Iraq” appears once, “education” once, “the NHS” not at all…)

A fitting monument to the monumental idiocy and endemic hatred of humanity of the Blair years has been found:

Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.

The crap spewing from the mouths of those responsible makes you wonder if their colons have gone into reverse: ‘Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored’ and ‘[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience’.

Needless to say, this joy-killing drone factory is a flagship academy. It’s replacing three other local schools. The pupils will still have a choice though. They can decide whether not to play football, not to play British Bulldogs or not to play Chain Tig (my personal favourite - by the end of the game the kid on the end is moving at near supersonic speed). All very important in this age of children being groomed for their optimal position in the economy.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what soulless drudgery you can do for your country.

I’ve been leaked a copy of the speech Tony Blair plans to give to the Labour Party next week when he steps down as leader. It’s quite short.

CHECK ON DELIVERY

Clear this mess up for me, would you?

Thank you.

And like that…

We’ve been here a thousand times before. Is Blair mad, bad, a liar or what? In the end, does it matter? It’s still important to challenge his shitty fictions wherever he smears them though. Here’s Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday.

Menzies Campbell (Fife North East, Liberal Democrat)
But is it not clear where responsibility for Iraq lies? The President made the decisions, the Prime Minister argued the case, the Chancellor signed the cheques and the Tories voted it through. That is where the responsibility for Iraq is to be found.

Tony Blair (Prime Minister)
And if the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s policy had been implemented, Saddam Hussein and his two sons would still be running Iraq.

Here’s Blair on February 25 2003:

Tony Blair (Prime Minister)
I detest his regime—I hope most people do—but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN’s demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully.

For an added bonus, here’s stupid old tosser Dennis Skinner making cheap cracks about suicide bombers.

It wasn’t one mistake or one flawed policy that eroded all that initial optimism, it was New Labour’s very meaning. In fact, Blair’s support for Bush was a result of that adoration for the wealthy and powerful. Iraq wasn’t an aberration, it was a consequence of all he stood for. But Iraq is what he’ll be remembered for - forever always, no matter how much he tries to orchestrate a “legacy” around social reforms or whatever. He might as well have got Harold Shipman to say: “It’s not fair. No one remembers how I helped out Mrs Ambridge at the Post Office with her shingles. Just ‘murders murders murders’, that’s all the bastards go on about. Well, they’ll be sorry when I’ve gone.”

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Were you there in 1997? Andrew Rawnsley recorded the scene for the ages. We should have been counting the spoons from minute one:

[Alastair] Campbells’s dilligent deputy, Tim Allan, had slipped into Number 10 a few days before the election to choreograph the coronation of the new Prime Minister. He and his wife were greeted by a crowd of exultant citizens, photogenic young children particularly prominent, cheering ‘Tonee!’ and being gladhanded in return. The superficiality of this contrived spectacle was instantly obvious. They waved identical plastic Union Jacks. The original idea - which was for them to wave Labour party banners - had been resisted by officials at Number 10. They wore uniform t-shirts emblazoned ‘Britain Just Got Better’. Blair’s pageant was composed of party workers from Millbank.

And so Tony reaches his decimation. An anniversary reached by the simple expediency of choosing just about the only profession where his actions and personality aren’t punished with a P45, penury or a savage beating. Well done. What’s left to say other than unspeakable abuse? You need a new language for it.

Tony Blair announced today that he’s going to announce next week when he’s going to announce he’s going.

Right?

Quick nurse, the screens:

Prime Minister Tony Blair has told reporters he would be “delighted” if his child wanted to serve in Iraq.

(Link via Jim)

Something strange and disgusting has happened to a country, you couldn’t help thinking, that gives tens of millions to Comic Relief and just two weeks later echoes Mr Blair’s “am I bovvered?” about the easily avoidable deaths of innocents; a country in which the liberal centre has become so cowed by 25 years of brutal right-wingery that no senior politician from either Labour or the Liberal Democrats will risk the wrath of the right-wing press by venting their outrage that sick asylum seekers (”economic tourists”, in Geoffrey Howe’s deathless phrase) are treated like criminals, seized at dawn and moved to holding pens in their nightwear - in Caroline’s case, not even being allowed to fetch her epilepsy pills - for obeying Norman Tebbit’s diktat about getting on their bikes in search of a better life.

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In trouble with the police? Here’s all you have to do. Doubtless they will look favourably on your predicament.

One’s a massively over-rated show-off, seemingly willing to do anything to recoup their previous, mystifyingly huge, popularity. And don’t get me started on that Tony Blair either.

To be taken on an empty stomach.

Beau has more.

Beau Bo D’Or says it.

Here:

Media watchdogs rebuked ITV News yesterday for inaccurate reporting when it asserted last year that the prime minister’s faith had played a part in his decision to go to war in Iraq.

Scandalous. As inaccuracies go though, it’s hardly ‘45 Minutes From Doom’, is it? You should have seen the brouhaha that one caused.

But will the time ever come, one wonders idly, when our revisionist historians reconsider the ravings of Comical Ali? The idiocy of most of his statements will, admittedly, endure. Footwear-based supremacy has not been achieved, despite the much-vaunted boast that the Iraqis would be waiting for the coalition forces “with shoes”. But the smile fades when recalling other pronouncements. “Do not be hasty because your disappointment will be huge,” the old crazy warned. “You will reap nothing from this aggressive war, which you launched on Iraq, except for disgrace and defeat.” “We will embroil them, confuse them, and keep them in the quagmire,” he said later, adding that “they cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege.”

There are, of course, rather fewer than 26 million people in Iraq these days, but even those who dispute the precise extent of the population depletion might agree that it comes to something when, in hindsight, several statements by this preposterous character seem more prophetic than anything spouted by the British government at the time.

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He told us that if everyone were to have just three low energy light bulbs in their houses it would save the equivalent of the country’s entire street lighting CO2 output. Obviously, he laughs, we can’t go round telling people what light bulbs to use. But, as one MP testily said, we’re switching the whole country over to digital television without asking them, why can’t we do the same for light bulbs?

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Tony Blair was in Brighton today, making an announcement about the 40 newly unveiled ‘Respect Zones‘ of which Brighton is one. It was a top secret public appearance.

Did he make his speech from one of Brighton’s many benighted housing estates? Whitehawk, for instance? Or Mile Oak just up the road from where I live?

No. The nice shiny PFI-built Jubilee Library was the venue. Modern, you see. There was a small press gathering from which the Prime Minister would not take questions. The photographers would not tell passers-by what all the fuss was about nor would the police officers charged with sweeping the Great Unwashed off the surrounding streets.

According to the Number 10 website, while in Brighton the Prime Minister took part in a ‘Face the People’ session. Stop laughing at the back.

Cherie shuffled away from him to the far side of the bed, hitching the chintz counterpane firmly up to her chin as she went.

‘What’s the matter, Tony? You even need George’s permission to deploy that, do you?’ she said.

Tony, now the lone, cold spoon in the centre of the bed, rolled onto his back and stared unseeingly at the ceiling.

‘Look, sorry, but I think I’ve said all I want to say on that subject,’ he chanted to the darkness. Both the room’s and his own.

‘Oh, get stuffed, Tony. It’s not fucking Nick Robinson you’re trying to fob off here, you know,’ Cherie shot back. ‘We need to have a full and frank debate about whether we need to renew your weapons system.’

‘Or replace it,’ she added darkly.

But Tony was no longer listening. Not knowing whether he was awake or dreaming, he was lost in the flickering movie his mind was projecting on the ceiling. As he watched his life unspooling, he finally realised he was now a bystander in it all just like everybody else.

He saw himself walking in step with an anti-war rally, as powerless to stop the carnage as the singing two year-old being pushed along beside him. Then, he was a small boy at a school parent’s evening. ‘Tony has been copying George’s homework again,’ intoned the teacher gravely. A group of large men in striped suits and smoking fat cigars then forced twenty pound notes into his hand and whispered lewd, menacing requests in his ear.

The scene changed. He was in the greenhouse from the movie ‘Scum’. He knew what was going to happen next. He looked over his shoulder to see who his assailants would be.

An ophidian queue of people stretched out behind him to very the ends of the Earth.

In between the legions of sightless, limbless brown people he could see familiar faces. There was Saddam and his half-brother tossing the half-brother’s severed head between them to pass the time. There was George – George! – with Peter Hain in a headlock. Gordon was gawping so fast for breath in his excitement he looked like a beached fish, gulping for life itself. And at the very end of the queue, standing slightly apart from the throng, regarded and spoken to by nobody was… himself.

His eyes snapped open. The sheets were soaked in his fear, the air still thick with slowly dissipating ghosts.

‘Help me, Cherie, help me,’ he whispered, unable to find his voice. ‘I am God’s lonely man.’

Cherie didn’t stir. She snored contentedly. If the dreams of avarice can be described as content.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)