Is Tony Blair any better than the email fortune seekers?

Maurice O'Brien • Published 26 Aug 2010 09:30

THEY keep coming; from Egg, HSBC, Halifax Bank, HM Revenue & Customs, sprinkled among the daily trail of bogus bonanzas from Nigeria.

Whether tickling your get-rich-quick fantasies, promising to refund money you never lost or determinedly intent on depriving you of what little you have, one wonders would the email system collapse for lack of use if these shysters ever took a holiday together.

Either way, when the offer over the proceeds of Tony Blair’s book arrived, I hope the Royal British Legion didn’t email back its account number, sort code and mother’s maiden name!

Blair himself clearly no longer needs bank accounts. His journey, supposedly taken on our behalf, yielded so much dosh that he’s opening his own bank.

Firerush Ventures No. 3LP doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue but, barring a political comeback of Lazarus-like proportions, at least he can be confident it’s safe from the clumsy clutches of his old mucker Gordon. And as for those ‘fans’ prepared to be vetted and microchipped before being gratefully escorted by a phalanx of heavies into a darkened room to gaze in Trappist-like silence at the balding Yo B bonce, while the great man scribbles on the flyleaf of his biblical tome; do me a favour. Mind you it’s vaguely reminiscent of ordinary guy Tony’s first visitation to Reading 10 months after his 1997 elevation to the deity, when we were required to believe his audience wasn’t carefully handpicked, that the questions weren’t framed and vetted in advance and that the stage-managed meeting with his unquestioning disciples wouldn’t have turned Ceauscescu or Kosygin green with envy.

When I sceptically aired such doubts in these pages the local party apparatchiks burst a collective blood vessel.

Many have since scuttled off into the political hinterland but I wonder how many copies of Blair’s book they’ll be buying. Anyway, here’s my idea if you’ve got a spare £25. Forget the book. Put aside a couple of quid a week until mid-October and then pop £25 in the box for your Royal British Legion poppy.

IT’S BEEN suggested GIs may have lacked dignity as they shouted “we won” and yeehawed their way out of the murderous mess that is post-Blair/Bush Iraq.

Believe me, for anyone who remembers the shameful scenes as the last US helicopter left the American Embassy compound in Saigon in 1973, with former Vietnamese allies being literally hurled out and left to fend for themselves, the Iraqi exit was decorum itself.

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