Barry: Why ex-PM Blair stays in my firing line

Nov 4 2009 Barry Gibson

THERE are only two things that cause me to swear at the TV.

The first, of course, is football. When watching a game, I feel moved to offer advice to the players using some choice Anglo-Saxon words.

Not that they ever seem to take any notice.

And the second thing that will lead me to fire a verbal volley at the telly is the appearance of Tony Blair.

Every time the former prime minister pops up on TV I find myself telling him in words of one syllable where he can stick his interfaith dialogues, or whatever it is he’s blathering about that day. Not that he takes any notice either.

Mr Blair makes me angry, not just because of what he did when he was running the country.

But also because I had wished he would be banished from our TV screens when he was forced out of Downing Street two years ago.

I had hoped the next time Mr Blair appeared in a news bulletin he would be standing in the dock in The Hague.

But no, every month or so, up he pops to blather on about something or other he’s up to in his very well-paid retirement. Sometimes he’s banging on about how great religion is, on other occasions he’s telling us all how he’s going to bring peace to the Middle East.

Every time I hear that insincere voice it makes me to come out in curses.

And each time I see Mr Blair on the TV, I think of just one word – Iraq.

All those tall tales of WMD, all those lives lost in Tony’s War, his moral crusade.