Self Pity As A Substitute For Self Reflection.

Tony Blair's whinge about the behaviour of the British press is true in parts, but demonstrates more chutzpah than Hannibal Lector complaining about the lacklustre conversation of his dinner guests:

He said fierce competition for stories meant that the modern media now hunted "in a pack".

"In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits, but no-one dares miss out," he said.

When it comes to tearing reputations to bits few people can match the sheer viciousness of Tony Blair. The most quintessentially Blairite moment of the last ten years of government was in my opinion the Rose Addis affair. To summarise a 93 year old woman was very poorly treated by the hospital that was supposed to be caring for her, and the response of Tony Blair was to leak her medical records to the press and have his lackeys spread lies about her refusing to be treated by black nurses. They also leaked the medical records of several other patients at the same time.

There are plenty of other examples of Blair using the press to wreck the reputations of those who were politically inconvenient, the smear campaign against former Tory treasurer, Michael Ashcroft, run in conjuction with the corrupt former editor of the Times, Peter Stothard who recieved a knighthood in return, in which wholly bogus allegations of impropriety were drip fed into the public conciousness over the course of a couple of years. Michael Ashcroft was of course in a better position to defend himself than Rose Addis was.

Blair is the adult equivalent of the school bully who torments the other kids until one of them hits back, then he runs to the teacher to sob and demand that action be taken.

Update: This old Alice Thompson article is worth reading, and gives more examples of Blairite reputation destroying than I do here.