As one who never bought the Bushies’ hogwash in the run-up to the war in Iraq, the only piece of the puzzle that made me doubt my instincts that the Bush team – Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rice – were simply lying about the reasons the reasons for going to war was the strange case of the whole-hearted support they received from British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

He’d seemed a like sensible guy during the Clinton years – almost a Britsh version of President Clinton, sharing the same ability to state his case convincingly and to connect with his audience. How could this apparently otherwise savvy politician buy into the lies, so much so that he was dubbed “Bush’s Poodle” in the British press?

I still can’t answer that one. But now it is clear he went farther than simply buying into the lies:

The Prime Minister was warned it could be illegal for Britain to attack Iraq. Not liking the advice from his lawyers, he pretended that advice was different in public, and persuaded them to change it in private.

We can add this noxious fact to the others we already knew. He lied about a non-existent threat to this country from Saddam Hussein. He lied about weapons of mass destruction which were not there.

And it is clear from all that has happened since this unwise adventure that life for most Iraqis is actually worse as a result, not better as he claimed it would be and still pretends that it is.

It is difficult to imagine a more wretched catalogue of falsehood and incompetence – exposing our soldiers to possible prosecution, debasing the parliamentary process, suborning the intelligence services so that they became propaganda agencies, bullying civil servants into bending the truth, then spending billions on false pretences and, above all, bringing about the deaths of innocent civilians and of British servicemen.

Yet here we are in the midst of an Election, and the man responsible, incredibly, is ahead in the polls and likely to cruise to a third successive victory.

Welcome to our world, mate!