This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Oh, for goodness’ sake leave the pathetic Blair creature alone. He will never understand what he did and probably didn’t understand it at the time.

He isn’t very bright and now lives a lonely, meaningless life of empty speeches delivered to bored businessmen in return for money, which will have to be penance enough.

If you want to blame anyone for the Iraq disaster, look at yourselves. I opposed it at the time, and remember how few others did. I don’t really count the Leftist demonstrators, who oppose all wars, just or unjust.

I mean the great mass of patriotic Middle Britain, normal decent people, who were so willingly misled. I mean those scores of MPs of both parties who scuttled, bleating, through the war lobby and now claim, falsely, that they didn’t know the facts.

I mean my media colleagues, who have been trained from their earliest years to doubt what they are told, yet swallowed Alastair Campbell’s great dish of steaming tripe without a thought.

Come on, how hard was it to see that the danger was invented, that the war was illegal and that it was none of our business? I have no prophetic powers but I could see it.

And yet, diddled so blatantly that even an official report now confirms it, you still don’t learn. How many supposedly responsible voters are currently being fooled by today’s attempt to spin us into a stupid conflict with Russia, a country almost nobody in Whitehall knows anything about or understands?

At least as many as were misled by claims of a fictional massacre into supporting the Libya disaster. At least as many as were persuaded by a media chorus to admire Hilary Benn’s feeble, poorly argued speech urging us to bomb Syria.

Is there no idiocy you can’t be gulled into by a bit of atrocity propaganda or the endlessly recycled claim that the chosen target is the new Hitler, who must not be ‘appeased’? A word of advice: if you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. Wars are the mother and father of atrocities, and one day they will come home to us, if we keep launching them against others.

Vladimir Putin is already being turned into the new Hitler. Nobody who knows anything about Russia thinks this is true. But a couple of weeks ago we more or less secretly sent British troops to Ukraine, a country with which we are not in any way allied, and which is a war zone. Was Parliament asked about ‘Exercise Rapid Trident’? I can find no record of it.

We have just made the daft decision to send 650 scarce troops to Poland and Estonia. This is supposedly in response to a ‘Russian threat’ to these countries for which there is no actual evidence. Apart from the tiny exclave of Kaliningrad, Poland doesn’t even have a border with Russia. As the wise academic Professor Richard Sakwa, whose father served in the pre-war Polish Army, has rightly said: ‘Nato grew to meet the threat it had itself provoked.’

If we are not careful, we shall once again create a war out of our own exaggerated fears and by believing our own propaganda. Any of you who are taken in by this have no right to attack Mr Blair. You are as bad as he is. He and his like couldn’t do what they do without your help.

Baffled by the barmy NHS

A member of my family had to hurry to a major hospital casualty department at the weekend. It was the usual NHS mixture – dedicated, overworked and kind doctors and nurses cunningly concealed behind a barrier of wooden bureaucracy bad enough to make you scream, even if you weren’t already in pain.

All ended quite happily. Soon afterwards she received this ludicrous text, which I at first thought was a joke: ‘We would like you to think about your recent experience at the **** **** hospital.

How likely are you to recommend our Emergency Department to your friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment today? Reply 1 for extremely likely, 2 for likely, 3 for neither likely nor unlikely, 4 for extremely unlikely, 5 for don’t know.’

How does one begin to respond to this? She was in considerable pain and distress. She did not consult the Good Hospital Guide (not that there was any choice, given the sparseness of A&E facilities in modern Britain). It’s not a market. It’s organised mercy, and it would be better if it concentrated exclusively on that.

The campaign for justice for the late Bishop George Bell goes on. Bell has been denounced by Church and media as a child abuser without the semblance of a trial.

This was recently the main subject of a powerful debate in the House of Lords. The Church’s response, as ever, was to use the alleged victim as a human shield.

Arrayed in his flowing clerical robes, in a chamber where all speak ‘upon their honour’, the consecrated Bishop of Chelmsford asserted that campaigners for justice for George Bell had ‘made hurtful comments about her’ (the alleged victim).

Have they? I have challenged him to say who these people were and what these comments were. He has not replied, though the Church press office has emitted some irrelevant and evasive guff.

******

A florid face we should save for the nation

How we shall all miss Ken Clarke. This week, while looking like some hedge-dwelling creature roused early from a comfy hibernation, he accurately summed up modern British politics in a few very funny words uttered when he thought the TV cameras weren’t rolling. Typically, he hasn’t complained about the recording being leaked. I disagree with almost everything he thinks, though he was dead right about Iraq and gets too little credit. But he is a modest, thoughtful and funny person, with a real life outside politics, whose wisdom we badly need. Can’t he be saved for the nation? ********

Look, I am resigned to the coronation of Mrs Theresa May as our next Prime Minister. In a cynical way, I am quite pleased by it, as she is so Left-wing that she may well achieve my main aim in life – the final and utter destruction of the Useless, Fraudulent Tory Party.

But spare me the suggestion that she is the new Margaret Thatcher. I’m not actually a Thatcherite, and disapprove of a lot of what the Iron Lady did.

But I did meet Mrs Thatcher, and talk to her, and watch her in action. And Mrs May is no Margaret Thatcher. She is in fact the new John Major.

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