Normally anybody who criticises Jeremy Corbyn is guaranteed knee-jerk support by the British media which apparently feels that it does not even have to pretend to be non-partisan when it comes to the Labour leader. The only political figure similarly subjected to automatic demonisation is Tony Blair, so when he fiercely attacked Corbyn last week for supposedly focusing on “the politics of protest” at the expense of “the politics of power” it was interesting to see which man would be targeted.
Almost without exception, critics from Nigel Farage to Michael Moore denounced Blair as the root of all evil in the Middle East and beyond. Some claimed that he was so discredited that his views were no longer worth listening to, and others suspected that he was carrying out a pre-emptive strike before the publication of the report of the Chilcot inquiry, which is expected to criticise him severely for his actions in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.