“Winston’s name fills everyone with rage. Roman emperors killed slaves to make themselves popular, he is killing free men to make himself famous...I would like to see him die in some of the torments I have seen so many die in here” — these were the bitter words the British soldier and diplomat Aubrey Herbert wrote about Winston Churchill at the time of the Gallipoli campaign in 1916, the disastrous attempt by British and French troops to undermine the Ottoman Empire, for which Churchill was held to blame.

There may be Britons who nurse similarly vengeful thoughts about Tony Blair, a politician who, with his defiant rhetoric and stance as a man of destiny, has often seemed to be taking Winston Churchill as his model. Especially Churchillian has been Blair’s habit of nettling progressive opinion by proclaiming the inescapable need to take military action against the enemies of civilization. However, by comparison with his latter-day imitator, Churchill was a figure of genuinely heroic stature who ultimately proved himself indispensable in the historic struggle to save the Western world from fascism. There seems little chance of Blair being thus remembered. The likelihood is that he will be seen by posterity much as he is seen now — as a misguided if not corrupt politician who, out of blind loyalty to the United States, and on the basis of phony intelligence, declared war on an Arab country that posed no immediate threat to British interests, and who thereafter sought to ignore the mounting evidence that he had made a catastrophic blunder.

For the moment — in speeches that seem designed to prepare public opinion for war against Iran — Blair continues to mouth neo-Churchillian imperialist bombast. Now embarked on his “legacy tour”, he was last week exhorting the British public to remember what he has stood for and to ponder the question whether Britain can ever lightly set aside its responsibility for defending democracy. Here was the neoconservative doctrine of “liberal interventionism”, of which he has been such an ardent champion, pushed to a mad extreme. The idea seemed to be that Britain must be ready to intervene any time anywhere, and be especially ready to confront the threat to Western values represented by Islamism. You would never have guessed, as he called for a national debate about Britain’s future military role, that Blair has ridden roughshod over the democratic process. Nor would you have guessed, as he put the case for Britain sustaining its role as a pre-eminent military power, that his reckless policies have so far debilitated his country’s armed forces that their very survival is in doubt.

Yet if the whole Blair story has become at once absurd and alarming, there can be few who are entirely unimpressed by his sheer resilience. It is remarkable that he has stayed in office in a so-called democracy for years after he became discredited in the eyes of his own people and despite having to contend with a rampant rival in the person of Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. The received view is that Brown — whose zeal to supplant Blair has been matched only by his pathological Scottish caution — will succeed him at some stage this year, but last week those who yearn for Blair’s departure were given pause by a futuristic British television drama that imagined events taking a rather different turn. Written by Alistair Beaton and broadcast by Channel 4, “The Trial of Tony Blair” — in which the prime minister was portrayed by the versatile British actor Robert Lindsay — proposed that Blair remained in power following a war against Iran and terrorist reprisals in London, only to end up facing prosecution for war crimes when Brown finally takes over from him in 2009. Twitchy, devious and preposterously vain, Lindsay’s Blair is a hugely amusing satirical creation — and all too credible in conjuring up a warrior politician who becomes subject to Macbeth-like hallucinations about the Arab blood he has on his hands. To be sure, both Blair and US President George W. Bush must at some level be tormented by guilt about the macabre consequences of their “liberal interventionism”. Yet in public at least, Blair has given little indication of suffering from a troubled conscience. On the contrary, with his glazed eyes and staccato delivery, he has often given the impression of being positively robotic.

There is, in truth, something weird about the sheer monotony of Blair’s pronouncements, his endless parroting of the White House and neoconservative line. And given this, it is puzzling why so little effort has been made to lay bare the roots of his beliefs, to explore why he has been so unswervingly loyal to policies which have put Britain and British interests at risk while doing nothing to enhance either British, or geopolitical, security. In the current issue of the biannual magazine, Lobster, which specializes in demystifying power and exposing conspiracies, editor Robin Ramsay points out that in the 1980s and early 90s, before he became leader of the Labour Party, Blair made three trips to the US as part of his political education. Following his first, all-expenses-paid visit in 1986, he returned a changed man; previously a member of the campaign for nuclear disarmament, he was now a convinced supporter of the nuclear deterrent. Ramsay points out that in recent years journalists have been apt to disregard British politicians’ formative influences, in the process ignoring the relationship between the American state and leaders of a left-wing British party which, less than 25 years ago, was anti-American and committed to leaving NATO. Such inattentiveness says much about the decay of the democratic spirit in Britain during the Blair era.

It is rich that Tony Blair came to power promising “transparency”, for that is the last quality for which the New Labour governments he has presided over have been notable. Rather there has been a growing impression of Machiavellianism, of systematic deception and hidden agendas. At times indeed, you could almost fancy that this most duplicitous of British leaders is operating as the agent of a foreign power — or perhaps one ought to say powers, considering that if British foreign policy is shaped by the US, that of the US is heavily influenced by Israel. Certainly, Blair is as close to the Israeli government as to the Bush administration and has served as a dependable mouthpiece of the neoconservative Zionist ideology dominant in Washington.

That he is already making hawkish noises about Iran, strongly hinting that he supports the US/Zionist scheme of bombing Iranian nuclear installations comes as no surprise. The real surprise would be if the bloodthirsty Blair were to counsel against a military option that could have cataclysmic consequences.