A dozen years ago, in the offices of his Institute for Global Change, I interviewed Tony Blair. On the subject of his fateful decisions over the war in Iraq, he had a series of trusted platitudes to hand. One phrase he used, perhaps one of the lines that he still turns over in his head when he looks in the mirror in the mornings, was this: “People always used to say to me: listen to the people,” he said. “That was a fine idea, of course, but unfortunately the people were all saying different things.”
US president George W Bush and prime minister Tony Blair during a press conference at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland in 2003. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
