The perplexing question surrounding Tony Blair: How does he manage to sleep at night?

In an interview for the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair made a case for EU exit discussions being conducted by those from the Remain camp. The interview occurred just a few days before the release of the Chilcot report. A couple of days later on BBC Radio 4, he claimed that the UK should keep the Brexit options open. It was widely interpreted that the Telegraph interview was to offer his services to the exit negotiation team. However, the subsequent Radio 4 interview would have done little to enhance those claims, with the exit camp fearing a back-door betrayal of the will of the people after the Brexit referendum. After all, keeping Brexit options open equates to keeping options open to re-join the EU.

The timing is interesting as the Chilcot Report on the US-led invasion of Iraq will be published on Wednesday the 6^th of July, after seven years of deliberation. Generally, government-initiated inquiries tend to exonerate currently serving or relatively recently retired senior politicians, or at least delay the process; presumably in order not to diminish public confidence in the system. It is to be hoped that Tony Blair’s raising of his own profile is not because he’s managed to escape the kind of scathing criticism from Chilcot that many think he deserves. It’s been suggested by some that Tony Blair could face war-crime charges by the International Criminal Court as a result of the Iraq inquiry, but the ICC have said that the decision to go to war with Iraq was outside of its remit. Without the relatively-recently serving PM Blair having to face such dire consequences, it’s possible that the Chilcot Inquiry team may well have felt able to fully mete out criticism of Blair if they thought it was deserved. Let’s hope so anyway.

Tony Blair has recently admitted to failures of intelligence in going to war with Iraq, and that will likely be his stock excuse against criticism by Chilcot. But lest we forget, the accusations against Blair were for deliberately ‘sexing up’ the sparse intelligence that Saddam had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (the dodgy dossier) in order to justify the UK joining the then US President Bush in an invasion of Iraq. This had apparently been promised to Bush by Blair a year earlier, despite the UN weapons inspector Hans Blix claiming that no evidence of such weapons was found during 700 inspections. The destabilising removal of Saddam Hussein, and consequently Muammar Gaddafi, was perhaps the most important factor in the current tumult in the Middle East and the refugee crisis that in all likelihood precipitated the EU referendum in the UK. The Remain camp could be forgiven for thinking that Tony Blair contributed massively to the UK voting to leave the EU, with all of the ironies that entails.

Tom Bowers, award winning investigative journalist, has claimed in a book that when in office as PM, Blair appointed an enthusiastic pro-immigration minister, dismantled UK border controls and reclassified asylum seekers. This, Bowers claims, resulted in an increase in the population of over 2 million during Blair’s time in office, while all the time banning his own MP’s from ever discussing the policy for fear of alarming the public. It was estimated at the time that about 70% of all new immigrants voted labour. So as well as perhaps being in line with EU ideology (by reducing the homogeneity of the individual EU states in line with the Coudenhove-Kalergi doctrine) it was also clearly beneficial to the Labour party in being able to replace the diminishing traditional working class vote. It seems that if true, it’s further evidence that it was not beyond Blair to mislead the electorate in the pursuit of his own agenda. He clearly shouldn’t be trusted in his dealings with the EU. In fact he shouldn’t be trusted at all.