From Blair to Spartacus and Back(less)

This time last night I was sitting on backless black-leather chair listening to myself talking to a man in Atlanta.

What I was listening to was what I had been saying a second before - a microphone fault which the consoling woman at the CNN studios in London said had often floored much better broadcasters than I am.

The subject of my necessarily halting interview (at least the backless chair makes one sit up straight) was Tony Blair's evidence to the Iraq War inquiry yesterday, a subject in which seven years ago I was a peculiar authority, a role I have happily abandoned since.

During that war I spent thirty days with Blair and wrote a nightly diary about it wich became a book. In 2003 I could have done quiz-shows on Blair-in-Iraq, the kind where you get a black leather chair with a proper back and an earpiece that doesn't tell you what you've just been saying at the moment when you are trying to say the next thing.

That was then. This week I've just published another book of nightly diaries - this time about following the route of theSpartacus War 2000 years ago. CNN is probably not so much interested in that but others have been, I'm pleased to say: a particular note of appreciation for the Spectator.

Yesterday afternoon I was back to writing for The Times about Iraq - a version which anyone who couldn't understand me on CNN can read here.

And last night, a three minute segment of hearing myself in my ear (confident.. .confident. . .no doubts. . .no doubts. . .no risk. . no risk?. . ), feeding back on myself between London and the southern United States, struggling to speak against an echo,  was all an appropriate reminder of strangeness gone by.

Comments

[Truthlord]

What is all this nonsense about Blair and Iraq?
Blair should be arrested for treason for secretly becoming a Roman Catholic while P.M.(he did this as he admitted to avoid controversy)-while at the same time allowing in some six hundred thousand fanatical Roman Catholic Poles-thats one sixth of the British population.
These have now joined their other alien foreign born brothers to produce as expected a crisis in Primary schools due to lack of teachers and accomodation for the huge numbers of children born to these non British parents.
And how terrible for the great Guardian newspaper to lengthily report this crisis- giving its cause as -"the influx of people into the towns and cities"- what people ? fromwhere? Not a word!!
Blair is an Irishman who speaks with an English accent and who pretends hes Scottish.
One wonders what bizarre deal was cooked up between this crazed messianic creature and the Pope...
Was there a suggestion that if he helped in the Catholisation of Protestant Britain, twenty years after his death a Saint Blair would arise from the ashes of New Labour?
Of course since hes been living in the pockets of Israel for the last three years or so I suppose he might have aimed for Cheif Rabbi as well

[Susie]

Your article "It was though there was a play with the script already written" in The Times on 30 January, was spot on. My 2 blogs for January on Tony Blair on www.aglobalmidlifecris.com show who the writer of that script could be!

[Dion Per Sona]

My Goodness: have we all been expensively scammed by The Pretender of the Faith?

An intricately monstrous creature comprised in equal parts of Rommel and Cromwell, the Desert Rat and an oddly composed Defender/Pretender, surfing the values and free of the ethics, activated wholly and solely by box office calculations and services rendered for pre-agreed fee?

Which crept out of the pages of Alice in Wonderland, through the looking glass, starkly and toothily, Maggie Redux without the bottle?

Have we been seduced by shibboleths, hypnotised by potted Mis-Histories, mistaken our way?

There are those who have always thought so, and those who have just found out.

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