Blair’s personality is hard to understand. At the centre of it there is a paradox: he is undoubtedly a man of immense faith and conviction, but he is also terrifyingly dishonest. The Chilcot Inquiry has confirmed that at the root of this paradox lies Blair’s juggernaut of an ego.

It is highly revealing that as a student Blair did not want to be Prime Minister, he wanted to be a rock star. He still has the rampant self-regard of a demented celebrity, and this is behind his capacity for insincerity. For Blair, his messianic self belief that whatever he pursues is right, justifies lying on a grand scale in order to get there. So he has made deceit his political art. 

In 1997 the newly elected Tony Blair let the Labour Party accept a £1 million bribe from Bernie Ecclestone to change legislation on tobacco advertising, and then declared to the nation that he was a “pretty straight kind of guy”. Britain should have taken note: you should never believe someone who tells you they are honest. And if ever there was a fundamental discrepancy between claims and deeds it can be seen in Tony Blair’s subsequent career.

Watching him come back from the dead at the Chilcot Inquiry was an unnerving experience, like reuniting with a former friend who had let you down. All of those famous mannerisms which once convinced the electorate he was a decent man had a very different effect last week. The staccato intonation, emphatic hand movements, nods of the head, little chuckles and complicit smile almost seemed disrespectful in their flagrant insincerity.

Some have praised Blair for his robust defence at the Inquiry, but the strength of his assertions was completely at odds with the weakness of his arguments. Blair’s style of justification has always been solipsistic, demanding that the public just accept his own conviction. Such defences are completely insufficient. His tedious refrain, “I did what I believe was right” is little different from claiming, “I believe what I did was right.” As a frighteningly self-regarding man, Blair is incapable of seeing past the imagined infallibility of his own judgement.

This can be seen in almost all of his answers to panel. In defending the importance of 9/11 he simply ignored the irrelevance of Al Qaeda to Iraq, and fatuously stated, “I regarded it as an attack on us.” Equally, his defence of the infamous dossier entitled ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction’ depended on what it was that he thought. Why was a document assembled like a piece of A level coursework, ripping claims off PhD dissertations found on the Internet, presented to Parliament as “extensive, detailed and authoritative”? After dramatically removing his glasses, Blair answered, “I did believe it, and I did believe it frankly beyond doubt.”

The panel weakly accept Blair’s profession of ‘belief’ as sufficient. However, ‘belief’ is not an answer: it merely opens up the question of why Blair believed what he did. Some of the earlier revelations of the Inquiry can help us with that question. Many, such as Foreign Policy advisor Sir David Manning, have testified that Blair pledged British support to Bush at his Texas ranch in April 2002. So by the time the dossier was published four months later, Britain was already on course for war. It is clear that such dossiers were not objective cases for war pieced together by professionally impartial Civil Servants, but hack jobs cobbled together by Alastair Campbell to justify what was in fact a foregone conclusion. Blair believed in the threat of WMDs simply because he wanted to believe it. What is more, he wanted Parliament and the public to believe it.

Blair also let slip in his interview with Fern Britton last year that even if he had known before that there were no WMDs, he would have wanted regime change in Iraq. So if it wasn’t about the weapons, we still have to ask: why was Blair so intent on taking us to war? Once again, the answer is his ego. A friend of Blair’s recently described him as “like a girl who wants to go to all the best dances”. When the big players were going in against the baddies, Blair desperately wanted to be part of a battle between good and evil. The opinions of one million Britons who marched in protest, the two MPs who stood down from the cabinet and the UN were never going to stop his mission.

Like the egotist who fantasizes about his own funeral, Blair is preoccupied by his legacy. Behind Blair’s catchphrase ‘move on’ is a belief that all his actions represent political progress/ Godly providence. Blair depicted himself as the grand interpreter of progress, perpetually ‘moving on’. But we have not moved on. In terms of peace in the Middle East and Britain’s respect in global politics, we have taken a big step backwards. That is Blair’s legacy.

Read Rob Peal's blog, The World Outside, here.