Oh, pack it in

The New Statesman has a special issue, Blair: The Reckoning. It includes many pictures of manic grinning and much good writing, the best of which is David Hare on Iraq:

At a moment when the west needed great secular leadership, it was given instead demented religious leadership. A man who arrived in politics as the voice of modernity and reason became, at his own wish, that most ancient and mystic of figures: the prophet unloved in his own country.