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By Christopher King* 12 January 2008 Christopher King considers former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s post-premier career as a multi-millionaire and the reasons for his embrace of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s not difficult to understand how ideas of heaven and hell developed in most religions. Yesterday I wondered whether there might be something in it. We simultaneously received news that our USA coalition partners dropped 20 tonnes of bombs on suspected – not confirmed, mind you – suspected Al-Qaeda targets in Baghdad while Mr Blair took up a part-time job with JP Morgan at an estimated salary of GBP 500,000, will get an estimated GBP 5 million for his memoirs and has already pocketed GBP 500,000 from US lectures. This is the payoff for being Bush’s marketing man for the Iraq war and putting our armed forces at his disposal. He’s moving on from all that and leaving a still rising mountain of bodies, thousands of maimed civilians, millions of refugees and dozens of devastated towns behind him in Iraq and Afghanistan. He agonized on camera for us about the “hard decisions” he had to make, but surely was too modest. Against that payoff? It must have been easy! Life is going to be much more fun now, especially compared with what it would have been if he had refused to go to war with Bush. He might have spent his time setting up an efficient public transport system, building green energy capacity, cleansing our hospitals from hospital-acquired infections, getting our immigration service to record who is in the country, making sure our veterinary services respond efficiently to disease outbreaks and so on. Salmonella infection in eggs is 3.3 per cent after 10 years of the Blair government and 20 years after Edwina Curry had to resign for drawing attention to it. No government computer system has ever worked properly – most are scrapped soon after testing. No government construction contract has ever come in on time and budget. No matter how much money is put into the National Health Service, it disappears without trace. Military procurement is incompetent. Rail fares and council taxes always go up by above-inflation figures. Crime stays persistently high and the prison system has run out of places. We would have been grateful if he’d given it a serious try, but how much would the Americans have paid to have our leader advise and lecture them about fixing all this boring stuff? Not a cent. Not even if he’d known how to do it or wanted to, neither of which he did. Wars are much more exciting, provided your own sons and daughters aren’t in them. Much easier, too. You just let the military go for it and get your spin doctor on the job if anything goes wrong. Have you ever heard of anyone getting into the history books for cleaning up filthy hospitals that shouldn’t have been dirty in the first place? Mr Blair has a new religion too. He’s a lawyer so he has thought this through and we can easily follow his thinking. Your Church of England (C of E) vicar is like your tutor at university; he never says you’ve done the wrong thing, nods gently whatever you say, emits encouraging murmurs and gives some tentative suggestions. It’s all between you and God. Now, that’s a pretty uncomfortable position to be in if you’ve just moved on from having a hand in over a million deaths, leaving aside the non-lethal stuff, and particularly when the C of E disapproves of the Iraq war. You need a fixer like Peter Mandelson and the Roman Catholic (RCs) Church is probably the nearest you can get. Your RC priest is your defence solicitor with an always-active fibre-optic link to the judge in chambers. With them, you don’t have to read the Bible or worry about exactly what it says. The church tells you what to do. So as a newcomer, there’s a good legal argument that what you did before, when the C of E left you to work out every ethical situation by yourself, doesn’t count. As a non-professional in ethics, how can you be blamed? God might buy it if, like the attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, He’s a bit flexible. There’s even a very similar precedent when the emperor Constantine had a lot of problems for some years after he had made Christianity the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire. To make those tough decisions and pacify the empire properly, he put off his own baptism until he was on his death bed, then legally was in the clear. The principle should hold for Iraq too. Because RC priests have much better connections with God than the C of E, confession is another possibility. A sincere confession and a few “hail Marys” usually get your sins forgiven. The trouble is, this might not do the trick with those Iraqi death estimates being what they are. But there could be a way out. The RCs once used to sell indulgences, rather like the UK honours system. For a suitable fee, you could have your more serious sins forgiven and be sure of going to heaven rather than the other place. It makes sense and might still work. Seeing the Pope would be a good idea – always go to the top. These days you don’t put anything in writing or even make a verbal deal – it might be recorded on CCTV and leaked, the way that rat Putin did it in Moscow. But maybe a modest word about all those millions (sterling) to come and a few winks? The Pope knows the score. The Pope probably thought, “Hmmm... Mr Blair should see a doctor about that eye.” I suppose Mr Blair could try penance – vow of poverty and working in a leper village for the rest of his life, the usual thing – but he’s done years of such disgusting self-degradation for Bush he’d probably enjoy the holiday and that’s not the purpose. Maybe working as an orderly in an Iraqi hospital outside the Green Zone for life? Lots of people do it as a normal job but there might be some credit to be had in his case. A short time ago I wrote an article suggesting that there was a good case for the Church of England to ex-communicate Mr Blair and sent it to the Archbishop of York, who is joint head of the Church along with the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose website was unobtainable that day. This is the official Church of the land and I have a vague link with it myself. There was no chance of getting it through, of course, but I was curious about the response. The archbishop’s spin doctor, a lawer like Mr Blair, was disdainful, replied tangentally as one would expect and reminded me: “In a television interview Tony Blair has acknowledged that he will answer to God for his actions, as will we all.” The future tense was intriguing. Mr Blair is, of course, preparing the groundwork and his brief to spin the Iraq war to God. I would not assume to know how God goes about His judgements, but I cannot help wondering how Mr Blair might have the expectation that he will be given the interview. I’m the last person he would ask for advice, but if he were to do so, I would recommend that he gets to know his fellow Oxonian, Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion), lets himself be persuaded of Dawkins’ universe without God and just tries hard to enjoy his millions. I might be wrong, but I suspect that it’s the best he can do. *Christopher King is a retired consultant and lecturer in management and marketing. He lives in London, UK. 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