Just fuck off, Tony

The other night I watched "The Trial of Tony Blair", an amusing British satire about Blair's departure from office and subsequent extradition to The Hague to face war crimes charges over Iraq. It painted a picture of a Blair obsessed with his legacy (and refusing to admit that it was 655,000 dead Iraqis), completely oblivious to the fact that he was universally despised because of Iraq.

It was scarily accurate in all but one respect: rather than waiting for the phone calls to come the day after he leaves Downing Street, Blair has had his staff working on a plan for what he will do after leaving office for the last eighteen months. And he has a cause. After being ejected from Downing Street surrounded by corruption and death, Blair thinks he can resurrect his reputation and salvage his legacy by playing at Al Gore and saving the world from climate change. This remember is a man committed to cheap air travel - to the externalisation of costs and continued subsidisation of airlines by the public, in other words - who does not walk the talk by offsetting his own emissions or travel, who has undermined the efforts of his own government to cut emissions, and whose greatest contribution on the issue has been to toady to the Americans and provide cover for their morally untenable position - just as he has done on Iraq.

But quite apart from having no credibility on the issue, Tony has another problem as well: after Iraq, he is pure political poison who will contaminate any issue he aligns himself to. His input would be counterproductive.

So, my message to Blair is just fuck off, OK? We don't want you, we don't need you, and if you want to save the world from climate change, keep talking about how you're committed to cheap air travel and refuse to change your lifestyle one iota in order to reduce your emissions. I can't think of anything more likely to turn people away from those ideas than that.