Here's one of those book-of-the-year features in which various more or less well-known folk pick their book of 2010. Once you get there, make your way over - by means of the little arrow on the right - to Simon Winchester at number 21. His book of this year is Tony Blair's A Journey; but not for reasons that flatter either the volume or its author. No, rather because it has provoked Winchester.
It provoked in me inestimable feelings of a deep disappointment, derived from the astonishment that Britain's political system, and her sheep-like, TV-obsessed voting public, had ever handed the reins of a government that had once been in the hands of such as Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury, Lloyd George and Macmillan (not to mention the greatest of them all) to so mediocre, vain, mendacious, tawdry and intellectually shabby a figure as this memoir's author. I want Tony Blair forgotten... [etc]
This outdoes ordinary Blair-hatred. For not only is he (the former prime minister) mediocre, vain, mendacious and all the rest of it. These bad qualities also rub off on those who participated in electing him: the British voting public is nothing less than 'sheep-like'. I remember similar judgements on the US voting public after it handed George Bush a second term. And I can only imagine what one is supposed to think, along similar lines, of the French and Italian voting publics, to say nothing of any other national voting public beyond these four. So... Blair-hatred plus contempt for humankind. I hope Simon Winch[e]ster has been enjoying his Christmas.