Tony Blair is a pariah because he colluded in an act of abundant wickedness, and untold hundreds of thousands died and millions more suffered monstrously in consequence.

Abandon hope of reading anything remotely original, all ye who enter here. That pre-emptive warning may be implicit in the byline above, but I make it explicit today because what you are about to enter is the tragically unlost Danteian tenth circle of hell that is Mr Tony Blair.

If he bores the bejeesus out of this crazily obsessive student of his works, what on earth will another article about him do to those of you in better psychiatric health?

Before you tut, "No, not the bleeding Blair rant, not again," a final plea for your attention. There is something scintillatingly fresh to be said of him after all. Mr Tony, the Daily Mail reveals, has become besotted with deep sea fishing.

"And we're not talking about him standing about on deck... dangling a rod over the side," a friend is quoted as saying. "Apparently, he gets strapped into one of those high-tech seats with a harness, like in Jaws."

Loss of power is a hateful thing to the average victim of undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder, so no one will begrudge him the chance to replace the adrenaline rushes as he prefers. The difference of opinion only arises when the scent of rehabilitation brings him home. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, here he is encircling the upper echelons of public life once again - and if his dream of rehabilitation is to be harpooned, we're going to need a bigger boat.

Whether the vessel capable of torpedoing his monomaniacal self-belief is even buildable is another matter. Armed with a cabal of loyalist ultras in the press, shielded by the adoration of a Prime Minister and Chancellor who know him as "the master", perhaps no force on earth can penetrate his titanium shell.

Any hope that this might be achieved by the Chilcot Inquiry – you remember; the latest investigation into how Mr T and his A Team (they love it when a plan falls apart) took Britain into Iraq – receded this week.

The report, on which Sir John began work in 1732, has been postponed. This is because the Cabinet Secretary Lord O'Donnell, acting on the PM's behalf and in defiance of the Information Commissioner's order, refuses to release details of pre-invasion chats between Mr Blair and President Bush. Now due late next year, the report has been postponed so often that it reminds me of the ancient Passover tradition whereby we Jews, not one of us with the faintest intent of settling there, mutter, "Next year in Jerusalem".

If Mr Tony were content to remain in Jerusalem next year and ever after, using his status as the Quartet's peace envoy as the launch pad for his charitable and commercial endeavours in the region and beyond, all would be well. Who doubts the purity of his motives in consulting for mineral-rich African countries and oil- and gas-laden central Asian dictators? Who resents him his colossal earning power in countries far away of which we know more than perhaps he would wish?

But he isn't content with that, so back home in Blighty a myth takes shape. This holds that he is a prophet wrongly dishonoured in his own land, that he was kicked out too soon, and that he has much to offer us yet. One understands how the fantasy might gain traction. People forget quickly, and five years after he left, they may associate him with the easy credit boom he oversaw, which allowed them to nip off to Prague for the weekend whenever the fancy took. And as he likes to remind us, he was the greatest election champion in Labour history.

Yet there is only ever one reason why a healthy PM is ousted. It is because he, or she, has become a massive liability. Mrs Thatcher thought herself the victim of treachery with a smile on its face, but she went because a vast chunk of her MPs knew, from the Poll Tax, that she guaranteed electoral doom. Gordon Brown was the instrument of Blair's demise, but the cause was the same: Blair, who only scraped back in 2005 after recalling the sidelined Gordon to co-front the campaign, was poison to Labour's chances by 2007.

He was arsenic in the party's bloodstream for a reason so self-evident that it doesn't much matter what Chilcot concludes. Everyone, or almost everyone, knows it all anyway: that he struck the deal with Bush long before he admits; that it was mendacious drivel to claim Jacques Chirac refused to countenance a second UN resolution "under any circumstances"; that the intelligence was cynically stripped of all caveats for political purposes; and that, in terms of foreign policy catastrophe, Iraq makes Suez seem a trifling diplomatic gaffe on a par with mis-seating the Panamanian ambassador at a banquet.

Call it an atrocious strategic misjudgment, a dementedly misguided Neocon experiment, a war crime or whatever, it is perfectly well understood in these child-like terms: Mr Blair did a truly terrible thing, with unspeakably terrible consequences for the people of Iraq, the troops killed and maimed in prosecuting his folly, and those who died and were injured here in retaliatory bombings in July 2005, the morning after the 30th Olympiad was hereby awarded to the city of London.

It isn't hard to see why Ed Miliband has appointed Mr Blair as his counsellor on the "Olympic legacy". This is one sea monster you'd want inside the aquatic cage pissing out, and in handing him the satirically paltry role of White Elephant Tsar In Opposition, Little Ed shows what a smart operator he is. In lionising the fallen leader and their wide-eyed admiration for his admitted genius for tactical manoeuvring, meanwhile, David Cameron and George Osborne show that power to them is fundamentally a game... one of multi-dimensional chess, perhaps, but just a game for all that.

In politics, very, very few issues can be reduced to unarguable moral certainties. This is one. Tony Blair is no wrongly dishonoured prophet but a pariah in his own land. He is a pariah because he colluded in an act of abundant wickedness, and untold hundreds of thousands died and millions more suffered monstrously in consequence.

It is crude, unoriginal, and, yes, crushingly dull to flog this long-deceased horse again, and if it has bored you half to death to read, imagine what it's been like to write. But so long as this Kraken of deranged self-righteousness believes he has a future in public life, and so long as powerful people are willing to indulge him, it cannot be reiterated often enough.

Please Don't Let Us Forget Why Tony Blair Is A Pariah In His Own Land

elsewhere …..

The Iraq war will follow Blair wherever he goes. He lied, bullied, manoeuvred and deceived in order to get his way. But some now say that's in the long past and we should "get over it".

Little did I think while watching the BBC’s TwentyTwelve about the London Olympics on Tuesday night that just 24 hours later reality would outstrip satire. Yet Ed Miliband’s announcement that his new policy review adviser is to be none other than Tony Blair, giving advice on the Olympic legacy, does just that.

Even at this late stage, Blair could perhaps secure a place in the comedy about the Olympics preparations, giving advice on security to the harassed character played by Hugh Bonneville, who in this week's episode was shot in the leg with a starting pistol.

Blair’s new position was announced at a Labour Party jamboree at the Arsenal Emirates stadium last night. The great and the good paid up to £500 a ticket to hear the good news.

The Emirates was an apt venue, and one in which Blair will surely have felt at home, given his forays into war in the Middle East, backed all the while by the Gulf States, who are a by word for reaction in the region.

I was one of those demonstrating outside the giant stadium to remind the guests that their main speaker was a war criminal. The organiser of the event, his henchman Alistair Campbell, helped to ‘sex up’ the September 2002 dossier that dishonestly claimed that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could hit British interests ‘in 45 minutes.’

Campbell repeatedly used his journalistic talents to spin his and Blair’s way to war, regardless of the consequences.

Whoever told Miliband that rehabilitating Blair was a good idea has obviously forgotten the deep and lasting hatred and contempt that millions of people in Britain feel for him.

They are trying to soften Blair’s image, to portray him as someone only concerned with issues like the Olympic sporting and economic legacy.

But Blair’s real aim is not a few more football or cricket pitches in east London - or even making life easier for businesses and property developers there, though this is closer to his heart.

He wants to return to the centre of British politics – claiming credit if Miliband wins the next election, and helping to turf him out a replace him with a Blairite, probably Miliband's brother David, if not.

Blair has never accepted that he was driven out of office because he was so unpopular - above all, because of his involvement in the war on terror. Anti-war opinion in Britain remains high, but Blair has consistently landed up in the most rightwing neo-con and hawkish camp.

He is already calling for more wars, against Iran and Syria, and refuses to acknowledge his role in the devastation of Iraq.

This makes him a serial offender and one who cannot be trusted to change if he is given a second chance.

The war will follow Blair wherever he goes - and it should. He lied, bullied, manoeuvred and deceived in order to get his way. He is not the one now paying the price. It is grotesque that Ed Miliband is allowing him to come back onto the political scene again.

The main defence of the Blairites seems to be "say what you want about Tony Blair but he won three elections". But his predecessor John Smith was on course to win the 1997 election, and would probably have won others, given the toxic nature of the Tories for so many years. There was no possibility of the Tories winning in 1997 - but it was Blair who repeatedly underestimated public opposition to them.

And from the moment he took office, his votes went down, Labour losing millions of votes in the next two elections. 

The other Blairite argument is "get over it". Sorry that just isn’t going to happen. There is too much at stake with future wars.

Meanwhile, can it be coincidence that the same day Blair’s appointment was announced, we heard that 3,500 more soldiers are being drafted into Olympic security because of the failings of the G4S private security firm? More soldiers at the Olympics than in Afghanistan?

The BBC’s TwentyTwelve scriptwriters are probably rewriting as you read this.

meanwhile …..

The latest phase of Tony Blair's political rehab campaign was to be found at the Emirates stadium last night at a £500-a-head schmooze-fest featuring a host of Labour MPs and minor celebrities.

For weeks Blair has been laying the basis for his comeback. First he appeared for a sycophantic interview on The Andrew Marr show.

Then he guest-edited the Evening Standard, saying he would like to be Prime Minster again though acknowledging that it is "not likely to happen".

Now he is really stepping up his game. On Monday Blair was due to speak in Lambeth, south London at a Labour Party fundraiser for Tessa Jowell – the only MP (and possibly living soul) to have said they would "jump under a bus" for dear Tony.

The local Labour Party went to significant lengths to insulate the event from outsiders: Stop the War Coalition members were struck off the guest list and local Labour activists known to oppose the Iraq war had their invites mysteriously disappear in the post.

Unfortunately Tessa Jowell and her cohort failed to appreciate the strength of anti-war sentiment in the area as details of the event were inevitably leaked.

Local anti-war activists launched a campaign to kick Blair out of Lambeth. Hundreds of people lobbied Dame Jowell to register disgust with her decision to invite Blair to attend anything but a war crimes trial, and after the threat of protests and further citizen's arrests she was forced to abandon the event.

Fleeing Lambeth for north London and the Arsenal Emirates stadium last night, Blair spent the evening with Labour aficionados willing to shell out £500 to listen to a warmonger use the evening to further his already lucrative career.

But there too, he could not escape the pursuit of anti-war activists. Stop the War were there to welcome Blair and his supporters into the stadium. The man himself was presumably scurried away through a back entrance and was not to be seen.

But those Labour MPs and others who felt it acceptable to wine and dine with a man responsible for countless deaths were reminded of the folly of associating with warmongers, with the incessant cry of "shame on you" as they walked the gauntlet of our protest.

The war crimes of Tony Blair can neither be forgiven nor forgotten.

In case you were wondering if your MP, favourite stand-up comedian, sports personality, or dated pop group, likes to eat nibbles with war criminals, here's a list of those spotted and known to have attended Wednesday's event to hear speeches by Tony Blair, fellow war criminal Alistair Campbell and Ed Miliband:

Hilary Benn MP, David Blunkett MP, David Miliband MP, Ed Miliband MP, Hazel Blears MP, Margaret Hodge MP, Harriet Harman MP, Chuka Umunna MP, Tessa Jowell MP, Ben Bradshaw MP, Douglas Alexander MP, Sadiq Khan MP, Andy Burnham MP, Stephen Twigg MP, Angela Eagle MP, Tom Watson MP, Geoffrey Robinson MP, Eddie Izzard, Jo Brand, Paul Gambaccini, Beverley Knight, Garth Crooks, David Platt, Atomic Kitten, Brendan Foster.

When Reality Outstripped Satire At The Tony Blair Mad-Hatters Banquet