Yesterday’s Vanity Fair audience with Tony Blair is just too annoying to ignore. It’s the maddeningly unctuous atmosphere of the event that really grates. Look at this Q & A session. Watch Sir Christopher Hitchens, radical-turned-establishment-toady, ask: “Why don’t you tell people what the Chicago speech was?” (You have to like the “why don’t you tell people …” which really means “I, of course, already know…”)

In reply, Tony explains the righteousness of liberal internationalism: “it is right to intervene for humanitarian purposes and to remove a regime that was brutalizing its people.” Hitchens, who likes nothing better than humanitarian blood-spilling, was presumably happy with the answer.

Of course, while Tony regales the Vanity Fair crowd with his global feel-goodery; while he swans about the world issuing platitudes about “trust in politics,” there are lots of poor sods dying and killing so that his appetite for improving the world can be satisfied. Sickening, really.