Blair's head, their souls

As the time approaches for the verdict of the Hutton inquiry, knives are out for Tony Blair with a sector of left-liberal opinion. How large a sector it's difficult to know, but many are hoping the verdict will help to do for him. See this Guardian piece, for instance, by David Clark. In today's edition of the paper, the irreplaceable Simon Hoggart sets out one reason why, should all those who share this ambition succeed in getting Blair over the David Kelly issue, it will be a misfortune in the public life of this country and another grave political and moral misjudgement to add to the earlier ones of which, generally, the same people have been guilty. Repeating a point he has made consistently since David Kelly took his own life, Hoggart writes:

In the run-up to the Hutton report, you might imagine that the inquiry will decide who had murdered Dr Kelly, or at least "driven him to his death" as the papers put it...

Dr Kelly was killed by Dr Kelly... What nobody who had dealings with him could possibly have known was that he was suicidal...
.....
The players in Dr Kelly's drama did not have the luxury of that knowledge. If people had had the faintest idea that he might kill himself, they would all have behaved very differently indeed. His minders at the MoD would have been gentler, Andrew Gilligan more circumspect. On a trivial level, I would have been kinder in my sketch about his evidence to the foreign affairs committee. But, without any outward signs, no one could possibly have known the outcome of what they did. To imply that "authorising the release of Dr Kelly's name" was the equivalent of throwing him under a train is silly and hysterical.

This point is so blindingly obvious that it is hard to see why so many people fail to absorb it. Psychological hypotheses in politics are always risky, but I find it hard, too, not to speculate on there being some connection between the venom there is in much anti-Blair feeling today and the intense discomfort which must be produced in many progressive souls by the thought that he was instrumental in disposing of a hateful, butchering tyrant whose overthrow they themselves opposed.