The fall of Gaddafi could finish off Tony Blair – Telegraph Blogs

Blair and Gaddafi: friends as well as allies? (Photo: Getty)

It’s beginning to look as if the Gaddafi connection will bring about what even the Iraq war didn’t quite accomplish: the destruction of Tony Blair’s credibility on the world stage. There was more than a hint of Nixonian panic in the videotaped interview the former PM gave to a friendly Times hack over the weekend. The darting sideways glances, the nervous slurping of coffee, the tugging at his trouser leg – God knows how Blair would have behaved if he’d been facing a hostile journalist asking about his strangely intimate links with the Gaddafi family. As it was, I kept waiting for Philip Webster to push a packet of cigarettes across the table, as if putting the suspect at his ease in a police procedural. “A frightened old man,” was the verdict of one young colleague of mine.

Note the venue, too: a courtyard in Jerusalem. Not the ideal location, really, for a “Middle East Peace Envoy” who suddenly finds himself at the centre of gossip about his friendship and possible business links with a homicidal enemy of Israel.

One thing’s for sure: should the Gaddafi regime fall and its private papers start fluttering around Tripoli, the first thing British journalists will be looking for will be any documents carrying the name of Tony Blair.

via blogs.telegraph.co.uk