In Tony Blair's own eyes he is pure as driven snow

Tony Blair is simply beyond parody, as this video reminds us yet again.

Faced with the media exposing his shady financial dealings, built on contacts from his glory days invading Muslim countries, and by using as cover his current role as Middle East “peace envoy”, Blair falls back on the supreme attribute he has used throughout his adult life to escape from revelations about his misdeeds: his effortless ability to lie and deceive, grinning from ear to ear, while proclaiming himself  a paragon of virtue and moral rectitude.

Interviewed on Indian TV last week, Blair denied categorically that, since he stepped down as prime minister in 2007, he had benefitted in any way personally from the huge sums which have flowed into his bank accounts, which some estimates now put at over £60 million.

We can’t know all the details of how he has accumulated this fortune in such a short time because he has set up a network of companies to hide his income.

But someone who has acquired a family property portfolio of seven houses worth an estimated £14m,  who has earned at least £9m as the world’s highest paid public speaker, who has “consultancy” contracts with banks and insurance companies bringing in at least £4m a year, who has pocketed a further million from oil-related companies, and who was paid £27m for advice to the tyrants who rule Kuwait, hardly has a cash flow problem.

On top of this, at the British taxpayer’s expense, he receives annually a pension of £64,000 plus £90,000 to fund his private office. Not to mention the taxpayer picking up the tab for the £1m a year cost for his “peace envoy” office in East Jerusalem, which takes up the entire fourth floor of the American Colony Hotel -- one of the most exclusive in the world.

But, insists Blair, he has no interest in money and is only motivated by his life’s mission to promote global “peaceful co-existence”.

How then to explain the deal which opened up the West Bank to competition for mobile phone networks, which Blair was instrumental in setting up, using his contacts with the Israeli government?

Blair claims, “I made absolutely no gain out of it at all”, neglecting to mention that the company that has benefitted hugely from this contract is Wataniya Mobile, a client of the bank JP Morgan, which also expects to make billions from the deal, and which  just happens to pay Blair around £2 million a year as a “consultant”.

This is just one example highlighted recently by journalist Peter Oborne of how Blair hides behind protestations of good faith and humanitarian concern his activities on behalf of banks and companies with nothing but financial interest at heart.
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/tony-blair-watch/818-whiff-of-corruption-never-far-from-tony-blair-and-his-millions

That Blair could seek to justify his role in the mobile phone deal, or the Gaza gas contract he is trying to facilitate – again with JP Morgan connections at stake – by claiming his only motive is to serve the Palestinian people, is beyond contempt.

Blair must know by now that he is http://www.presstv.ir/detail/201976.html">regarded as a pariah by most Palestinians, including its leaders, one of whom has said:

It is unfathomable how anyone could ever think that the words “Blair” and “peace” could share the same sentence. This is, after all, the man who:

• As prime minister led Britain five times into war – more than any of his predecessors – in Iraq in 1998, in Yugoslavia in 1999, in Sierra Leone in 2000, in Afghanistan in 2001, and in Iraq again in 2003;
• Was “shoulder-to-shoulder” in 2003 with George Bush in the illegal Iraq war which cost the lives of one million Iraqis, made at least four million more refugees, and from which much of the country remains in ruins today;
• Refused to support the almost universal condemnation of Israel’s barbaric attack on Lebanon in 2006, a refusal which was instrumental in Blair having to leave office two years earlier than he intended;
• Disappeared on holiday– hardly appropriate behaviour for a “peace envoy” to the region -- when Israel was attacking Gaza in 2008/9, devastating its infrastructure and killing 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

Palestinians are not alone in regarding Tony Blair as not just a pariah but as a war criminal who would have been held to account long ago if international justice was worthy of its name.

He knows he cannot go anywhere in public without fear that there will be an attempt at a citizen’s arrest, or that a local judiciary will, as in the case of Argentina’s General Pinochet, seek to have him extradited to answer the charge of crimes against humanity.

Blair has got away with so much criminality, corruption and deception throughout his political career that he is probably confident in his ability to escape the scales of justice in the future. But there are many millions across the world who live in hope that one day the eternal grin and endless lies will be wiped from his mouth from behind prison bars.