The claim made by Ken Macdonald, that Tony Blair was narcissistic in saying that he did what he thought was right, is a really interesting one. What exactly does it mean? It goes well beyond simply disagreeing with Blair's stated reasons. So what does it take to be narcissistic, and how (if at all) is this displayed by saying that you did what you thought was right?
Broadly, a person is narcissistic if he or she is too self-absorbed, too taken up with his own doings and concerns and problems and state of mind; and perhaps, though by no means necessarily, is too self-admiring. (Someone who thinks constantly about her own shortcomings, and interprets her experience entirely in terms of what it shows about them, may be narcissistic, but she certainly isn't self-admiring.) A person whose primary concern about some terrible action is to insist that he wasn't involved, that he isn't to blame, is perhaps an example of one kind of narcissism.
A person who believes that saying, 'I did what I thought was right', thereby justifies what he did might well be narcissistic, since belief in the rightness of one's own action isn't an adequate justification for it, and if you think it is, this could be the result of being a bit too impressed with the importance of your own moral purity.
Someone who believes that saying, 'I did what I thought was right', provides other people with a reason to do the same thing might also be narcissistic, since the rightness of an action isn't a reason for doing it, and neither is believing in its rightness, and neither (with certain exceptions) is anyone else believing in it. (Note, for those who are interested in this kind of thing: the rightness of an action isn't a reason for doing it, because an action being right amounts to the fact that there is all-things-considered reason to do it. But that fact isn't itself a further reason for doing it.) Believing that your own moral judgements provide other people with sufficient reasons to act might arise out of an inflated and narcissistic sense of your own importance. Someone who keeps banging on about his belief in the rightness of his own actions might well be narcissistic, and is very probably self-admiring, since such discourse is often a form of self-praise, and one's own rightness is unlikely to be the most important or interesting thing for other people to think about anyway.
However, a person who has been charged with acting as he did for reasons such as a desire to keep in with America, or to flatter George Bush, or because of oil, or of imperialism or colonialism or militarism, and who has also been charged with telling lies about his reasons for action, might quite legitimately say that he did what he believed was right - that is, he believed there to be morally compelling reasons for acting as he did, rather than the scurrilous reasons which are being attributed to him by others. There's nothing narcissistic about defending yourself against criticism. (Eve Garrard)