Beggaring belief

Blair has said that failure to get his new terrorism laws through Parliament on Wednesday would send a signal that “beggars belief at such a time”. No, Tony, the message that it would send is that, despite your nine years in office, your missed opportunities, your huge and ever-swelling errors, your arrogant anti-democratic authoritarianism, the shifting quicksands of your lying, your increasingly hysterical frenzy to get a “legacy” beyond some loony managerial fiddling and twiddling, and the lethal mess large parts of the world are in somewhat, though not entirely, because of your gargantuan misjudgement; despite all this, there are still the vestiges of democratic freedom stirring in the mother of parliaments.