There's something about seeing a former prime minister attempting to defend or rehabilitate a legacy. Something about the relentless grinding out of well-rehearsed arguments in the hope that this time they will finally strike the audience, like some revelatory lightning bolt. But the result is so often perverse; every re-statement, every elaboration seems only to heighten the sense of parody, revealing anew why there's a legacy in need of rehabilitation.

It's a spectacle we've witnessed twice this week in the forms of Tony Blair and Tony Abbott. To be sure, there are differences. Blair's intervention took the form of an apology; Abbott's a kind of unapology. Blair is apparently pre-empting the impending result of an almost certainly damning inquiry; Abbott is tending to his fresh wounds for his own reasons, rather than because of some urgent external demand. But at bottom, both men carry an albatross: in Blair's case a catastrophic foreign policy blunder, and in Abbott's case a thoroughgoing political failure.

"I can say that I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong," began Blair when asked – again – about his decision to invade Iraq. Immediately he revealed what sort of an apology this wasn't, apologising for the most passive thing imaginable: receiving something. "Sorry, MI6 stuffed up", is the most direct translation.

Elsewhere, he admitted to "mistakes in planning and, certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime". But even so, he remained resolutely unapologetic for "removing Saddam" on the basis that "today, in 2015, it is better that he's not there than that he is there". All of which raises the question: why, then, are you apologising?