A distressed Alastair Campbell broke down in tears during a TV interview with Andrew Marr when quizzed about Tony Blair and his new relationship with the British public.
"It's so unfair, why does everyone hate him?", sobbed Campbell when probed by BBC's Marr about the role the public would play in his crumbling reputation.
My Little Tony
Choking back tears he declared, "All us pretty fan-boys are heart-broken. Richard "Dick" Madeley even went on YouTube to defend Tony. Everybody hurts and Simon Cowell may step in with a record to raise funds for any court case he may have to face after the devastation that Iraq has wreaked on him. Did I mention this was unfair?"
Campbell is also thought to be under pressure due to screwing up at Chilcot despite his smugness and a friendly panel. In a second bite at the cherry, he said:
... he had "misunderstood" a question and in a memo to the inquiry said he feared he had given the wrong impression that the then prime minister could have claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction "beyond doubt" even if intelligence chiefs disagreed.
When pressed with a cup of tea from Marr, he replied," He did not sleep with that woman. I mean, he did not mislead Parliament. Look, I've been to hell and back over this so I get confused. Have you read my latest work of fiction? "
Tony Blair is an honourable man.
Satire on life-support. Paul Routledge replies
More on Blair's eccentric take on corruption and BAE:
Ms Short's complaint that the sale of military radar to poverty-stricken Tanzania "stank" of corruption did not prevent from Mr Blair forcing the deal through. ... Britain is too lax in dealing with corporate corruption and bribery ...
Tony Blair is a wealthy man.
11 comments:
Good post, the stroke Campbell pulled is called doing an Iris, after Iris Robinson the first ministers wife in the six counties, who had an alleged nervous breakdown when the media ran a program about the pair of them being on the take, etc.
It is very fashionable these days to call in the shrinks when the hounds start yapping at your heals. (I even saw a newspaper headline today which said John Terry needs professional help about his sex addiction; from a hit man if his wife has any sense.)
Could it be Blair is being called back before Chilcot not to have the soles of his feet warmed, but so he can apologies for the failures of the Iraq war and the UK dead; not because he went to war on a criminal lie and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people.
Thus tying the Iraq war up in a nice pretty bow, if a tad blood stained.
Campbell needs to defend his father figure. He was the same with Maxwell.
The news at the minute is alternating between Campbell doing a Peter Andre act, and Sarah Palin speaking to a convention of racist lunatics. God help us.
I'm wondering if the shrink defence can now be used in courts of law as well as the court of public opinion. We've now had Cherie Blair's "religion" defence —get God and you can assault on the cheap. Although I think she had another religious criminal in mind when she came up with that judgement. No, Cherie, you will not create a climate of forgiveness for the arch mass-murderer with your berserk pronouncements.
They are debasing any sense of accountability and responsibility with their narcissistic bleating. It devalues real mitigating circumstances and the plight of people without social power to whom these considerations should be applied in the interest of justice and fairness.
If they do use the shrink defence it won't be for everyone just the establishment lying hounds. You can just see it now rather than get yourself a lawyer get yourself a shrink.
But don'cha like it though, Campbell may be a sweary tosser but look, he shows his emotional side (blub...sob...sob ...sob). Awww, whatta new man!!
You certainly wouldn't get this boohooing from Malcolm Tucker..that's for certain!!
Btw: Blogged about this as well and linked to your post. Yours is much more eloquent and satirical than mine.
Hi Harpy. Well, it looks like we got the measure of them. They'll have to go back to plan A. No regrets, no apologies, no nuffink.
Wise counsel all.
You can't help but think that Dave Hill has told them all that greetin on tv might be the only thing that saves their sorry asses.
I actually thought that Richard Madely made some good points on their own terms. I think a lot of people seem to be forgetting what things were like in 2003 and how marginalised anti-war voices were in the MSM and political discourse. However, my view is that Britain really needs to change a lot in its outlook and in its views on conflict and bloodshed rather than get into a dispute over whether Blair can be charged for 'leading' people who wanted to be 'misled' into a popular conflict (in terms of editorials and the house of commons anyway).
I say Britain, but I am Scottish, and can’t help noticing one thing about my Southern cousins is their weakness for what may be described as ‘1939 porn’. It seems that the words ‘Chamberlain/Munich/Churchill/appeasement/Hitler’ need only be uttered for Saxon IQs to plummet and for them to accept any warmongering bullshit that some mountebank is peddling.
By 2008 it was perfectly obvious that the Iraq war had utterly failed both morally and tactically. The media was full of mea culpas.
Yet what happened that year? When a tie chewing lunatic decided to bomb an ethnic minority that wanted to secede, and lost a battle, the British media (including Te Graun) were full of ‘Sudetenland’ metaphors and talk of appeasers, blah, blah, blah. 'Vladimir Putin' (on whom the whole thing was invariably blamed despite Dmitri Medvedev being President) didn't use white phosphorus or open up any Abu Ghraibs, but that didn't stop the Brit media being filled with self-righteousness.
It seems that the British print and broadcast media is a beacon for damaged insecure men* who are desperate to spill other people’s blood. Saying that Tony misled them is obvious nonsense. I think that either the BBC needs to have major structural reform or the government should subsidise alternative print media or the Brits should just give up on the MSM altogether. It seems that we are pursuing the later course, which has obvious dangers in itself.
However, let’s not buy into the narrative that all the wise folks in our media were taken in by Tony Blair's utterly convincing dossier and showed an uncharacteristic display of stupidity.
*Being honest the finest example of this is Michael Gove who sadly was born north of the border, but I don’t think this entirely nullifies my hypothesis
What were the good points you think Madeley made, Gregor?
I’d emphasise that saying ‘good points on their own terms’ doesn’t mean that I agree with Madeley’s conclusions or think that Blair was in any way vindicated (quite the opposite), but rather that he helps demonstrate the warped reasoning that led to the conflict.
He was right that the Attorney General supported the legality (which certainly doesn’t vindicate Blair, but which demonstrates both that he was not a lone figure and how unreliable our legal heirarchy can be). He was also right when speaking about how 9/11 shook people up. Obviously there was no connection between Saddam and 9/11, but there was a mood of hysteria and fear (as well as ‘Anti-American’ witch hunts in the media) which led to people supporting a conflict that they otherwise wouldn’t.
Whilst I agreed with the comments superimposed upon the youtube video, I suppose my view is that rats should stay on their sinking ship. Seeing the Daily Mail using their front page to howl that they were cruelly misled (whilst parroting every right-wing cliché of the moment) makes me feel more uneasy than the increasingly mad defenders of the Iraq conflict.
They think we won't notice what they're doing if they cry.
"The walrus and the carpenter were walking close at hand ..." The carpenter weeps for the poor oysters while stuffing as many into his mouth as possible under cover of his hanky.
Gregor, no-one I knew believed there were WMDs. That's why over a million people marched against the war in 2003. If your perception was that this was widely believed, then that says more about who our circles are and what we were reading at the time.
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