And so his real legacy is now that future generations will read about him and remember him as being one of the chief instigators and main players in helping along a conflict that will never end.  Well, certainly not in my lifetime and possibly not in the lifetimes of those who are many years younger than me.

Realistically, ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair will never see the inside of a jail cell, where he surely belongs.  But that’s not what concerns sociopaths like him.

His ‘place in history’, his ‘legacy’, will not be the one he yearned for.  The publication yesterday of the Chilcot Report has seen to that.  And no amount of squirming, slimy and – let’s call them what they are – desperate attempts to tinker with the facts by Blair will change that.

And for guys like Blair that is the true punishment. He’ll go on with his speaking tours and with his rather pathetic attempts to be seen as some sort of wise Elder Statesman. Of course he will. Monsters like him can do that with little embarrassment; it’s in their nature.  But he will always know at some level that even those sad individuals who enjoy the odor of brimstone will now feel just that wee bit tainted by contact with him.  He won’t be beyond the pale because there are enough fools in this world to ensure that he’ll always have a sycophantic audience for his demented and increasingly deluded warbling.  But the Chilcot Report and his reaction to it have damaged him in a very profound way.

And that’s going to sting.  As will the headlines plastered across the world’s newspapers this morning.  We’re going to have to content ourselves with that being Blair’s true punishment.  That and the fact that those who hailed him for sending his ridiculously ill-equipped soldiers to their deaths are now curiously silent.

Blair gets to take the fall when he is of course not the only one to blame.

It’s not much use to those who lost children to this extraordinarily self-obsessed man; but I hope it is some kind of relief to them that he is seen now for what he is – and not just by a few like myself who have for many years called him a mass-murderer.

The power-mad Blair and his money-mad wife, Cherie:  between them, they could almost be symbols of our depraved and decadent age.

No; Blair will never see the inside of a jail cell or endure the ignominy of a trip to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes.  But I wish him many unhappy years of – not regret at the deaths of so many; creatures like Blair don’t do that kind of regret – thinking how different he could have made things if he had just tried to take the moral course instead of the one that would see his name in lights.

Ironically, he got that; just not in the way he wanted it.