Today the people of Britain will re-elect a psychopath as their prime minister.
To be sure Tony Blair is not a psychopath in the manner of serial killers; he is merely a man without a conscience who in his youth developed a grandiose scheme to become prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Such Walter Mitty or Billy Liar-like fantasies are seldom realised in life - but sometimes, very rarely, they are.
The clinical condition of psychopathy depends on a congenital inability to know the difference between right and wrong. Early on in their lives, psychopaths observe how other people behave, and learn to conform, without having the least idea why people do as they do. A psychopath's conduct depends on social mimicry, dancing the steps without hearing the ethical music which guides them.
So when an event occurs for which there is no personal precedent, the psychopath has no idea how to behave. I know a psychopath who, unacquainted with bereavement, asked why his wife's family were so upset when his wife's father died. He felt no emotional bonds, no loyalty, and most of all, no guilt. He was not an aggressive man, so his psychopathy did not express itself in violence, but he nurtured preposterous fantasies, as psychopaths usually do - and at the age of 33 conceived a plan to take over the multinational company which employed him.
It came to nothing, of course, for it takes extraordinary luck for the fantasies of psychopaths to be realised. Lenin came to power through an absurd, utterly unpredictable set of events which his ruthlessly sociopathic character was able to exploit. Only appalling misfortune enabled Hitler to come to power. In the 1928 elections, the Nazis won 2.6 per cent of the vote and were widely regarded as amusing irrelevance. Five years later, Hitler was Chancellor.
Even as an undergraduate, Tony Blair was a hugely charismatic and intelligent man, and he gathered around him disciples who somehow or other believed in his preposterous project to become British prime minister. The male desire to form a hierarchy and to follow the leader about a particular task is, after all, one of the most powerful characteristics of human society. However, this group of men would never have achieved their aim if Black Wednesday - when the British had to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, costing the economy billions - had not ruined the Conservative Party's reputation for fiscal management.
The beneficiary of that cataclysm should have been Neil Kinnock's successor John Smith, but he died from a heart attack at the age of 54, and then out of nowhere came Tony Blair and his cronies, smooth, determined, focused, ruthless and confident. They knew that modern politics is about presentation and manipulation of the media, and in Alastair Campbell they had a master of these dark arts. He, rightly, had contempt for the journalists he was dealing with. He knew how easy it was to gull, beguile and bully the vapid creatures of the media.
In the past eight years, Tony Blair has torn the morality of British public life apart. No British prime minister since the 19th century has taken his country to war so often. Moreover, he knew that the grounds that he gave for military action in Iraq were factually unsustainable; and to justify war, he repeatedly misled the House of Commons. As it happens, I believe that the American-led operation to overthrow Saddam was historically justified, particularly since that corrupt and contemptible organisation, the UN, was actually helping keep the genocidal beast in power; but no prime minister should be allowed to get away with the wholesale misrepresentation of military realities in order to go to war.
But then no prime minister should have been allowed to get away with allowing the name of a senior civil servant be leaked to the press, as happened to poor David Kelly, and no prime minister should have been able to survive the enquiries into Kelly's suicide, or into the colossal intelligence failures which preceded the war. But in the noble British tradition of Widgery, this is precisely what has happened.
Worst of all, Blair has exercised his conscienceless brain on Ireland. Eight years ago he gave the unionists a letter of comfort which assured them that Sinn Féin-IRA would never be allowed into power before disarmament. The letter was in fact a predated political death warrant for David Trimble, which finally takes
effect this week.
Because he genuinely has no moral compass, Blair really did not know how utterly outrageous it was to invite terrorist leaders such as Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams to Chequers. This is the personal residence of the prime minister - it is not 10 Downing Street, which is the administrative hub of the government. But because the peace process had no precedent, like all true psychopaths Blair had no idea of what was intrinsically right or wrong. The message he thus gave to the nationalists of Northern Ireland was that these bloodstained characters - not the poor wallflower Mark Durkan, who has never seen the inside of Chequers - are the people who count and whom he would befriend and invite to his home.
No British party leader since the unspeakable Bonar Law has had so little grasp of his binding constitutional duties towards Ireland. On Blair's conscienceless watch, terrorists have been cosseted and courted even as Northern constitutional nationalism and the Ulster Unionist Party were systematically destroyed. Today the people of Britain will endorse him yet again. Five more years? God help us all.