It's the option now facing Tony Blair if you believe Matthew Norman of the Independent, Press Awards Columnist of the Year for 2008. Though Blair may never have to face trial provided he's careful about where he goes, and though he may seem to remain of the view that he took the right decision over Iraq, and though his financial situation may be a very comfortable one indeed, Norman nonetheless has the confidence to assure us that things for Blair are more... sad. How so? Well, Blair 'must trudge through his remaining days as a pariah', which is, it seems to Norman, justice.
More still than that: 'there will forever be eagles pecking at his liver'. What solace to him his millions 'as he tosses and turns in the desolate small hours'? Norman knows, you see, that 'the sunken eyes and haunted expression betray his fear of arrest, and even more so his awareness of the loathing felt for him here and around the world'; and that 'he will be tormented until the only Judgment Day he tells us means anything to a demigod whose stature far transcends the insolent judgments of mankind'.The penalty from which death alone can free Mr Blair is soul-crushing futility. For the rest of his life, he must push the boulder of his self-proclaimed innocence and self-protested good intent up the hill, aware that he cannot reach the summit but powerless to evade the pointlessness of trying.
How sad! I mean, how sad Mr Matthew Norman. To pack so much elegance of phrase into a short piece condensing an animosity. To generalize from the feelings held about Blair in 'some quarters' - one's own - to an assumption of universal pariahdom and loathing. So dogmatically certain are some of the denizens of those 'quarters' of there having been only one truth about the Iraq war, that they blithely assume that everyone must feel the same about Blair as they do. But worst of all is what is least likely to be noticed. I know nothing about his metaphysical outlook, but Norman here offers a secular version of the belief that there is divine justice: Blair may not get what's coming to him, but don't worry, all those of you who also loathe him; I, Matthew Norman, am in a position to assure you that Blair is suffering all the torments.
Not a believer in divine justice myself, I am willing to believe that the idea may sometimes have a value: giving strength to people to carry on in adversity; discouraging futile rage. But Norman's version has nothing to be said for it. It's a form of artificial and forced self-comfort, a self-satisfied preening in the service of the loathing it pretends to think universal.