Henry Porter is already known on this blog as one of those critics of the Iraq war blind to everything that might have moved others to support it. Yesterday he surfaced again for one more deep inhalation of Oh-Blair-Me. You may or may not care to sample it for yourselves. I will merely draw attention to one nice feature. Porter says:
It [the Chilcot committee] will no doubt make sensible mandarin points about the law, proper procedures and good government, but as with the other inquiries into Iraq, the British public has been deprived of proper satisfaction. We don't need a show trial, just a sense that penitence of a genuine sort or an admission of guilt has been wrung out of some of the Chilcot's witnesses, especially Tony Blair.
It's as if he takes it for granted that he, Henry Porter, speaks for the entire British public. But that's not the nicest feature - the rich, ignorant presumption of it. The nicest feature is that on some level Porter knows it not to be true that he and the British public are at one. How do I know he knows? This is how. The opening sentence - which I have omitted - of the paragraph just quoted reads as follows:
A report will eventually be extruded by the Chilcot committee, by which time most people will have long since given up caring about Iraq.
If so many - he says 'most' - will just stop caring where he for his part can't get over it, it may be because some large proportion of them didn't share his view in the first place.
