Tony Blair still thinks “many times” every day of the death toll in the Iraq war, he has said, nearly six years after leading Britain into the conflict.

The former prime minister told The Times that, while he was not haunted by the decision, “I reflect on it, and am troubled by it, and feel a great sense of responsibility for it.”

“The most difficult thing in any set of circumstances is the sense of responsibility for people who have given their lives and fallen — the soldiers and the civilians,” Mr Blair continued.

“If I did not feel that, there really would be something wrong with me, and there is not a single day of my life when I do not reflect upon it... many times. And that’s as it should be.”

However, he added: “On the other hand you have to take the decision and I look at the Middle East now and I think, well, if Saddam and his two sons were still running Iraq, how many other people would have died and would the region be more stable?”

In total there have been 4,551 coalition deaths — 178 of them British service personnel — as well as civilian casualties estimated at anywhere up to a million.

Mr Blair also hailed new US President Barack Obama as part of his “new generation” of political leaders who were focused on practicalities rather than ideology and partisanship.

“I think there is a new generation of political leaders who find the very traditional pigeonholing rather redundant, actually,” he told the newspaper in an interview to be published today.

“They have undergone this strange experience, certainly for me, but in a sense I think for Obama too, which is growing up with a left politics that was the politics of ideology and then, as we’ve grown to political maturity and taken positions of power, we find that it’s the right that’s got ideology.

Of President Obama, he said: “The thing he does brilliantly is to explain why certain sentiments are inconsistent with the future and can be put to one side.”

Belfast Telegraph