Long journey into fiction

Fictions by this author have surpassed even his biggest fans' expectations and, while his health holds out, we can expect even more stunning novels which take the genre to ever greater heights of absurdity.

We refer, of course to the launch of the latest Discworld fantasy by Terry Pratchett at midnight and any reader who thought that we might be referring to war criminal Tony Blair's book A Journey are sadly mistaken.

Mind you, you could be forgiven for making the mistake, because the two books have much in common in addition to being launched at the same venue on the same day.

Mr Pratchett's Discworld series is a fantasy construct, dealing with bumbling but incredibly powerful wizards who seem to screw up everything they touch despite their powers, slightly dodgy entrepreneurs who have more than a smidgen of larceny in their souls, political leaders whose Machiavellian machinations are carried out by dupes under threat of very nasty punishments, police who have werewolves in their ranks, wee folk who think that violence is the natural response to any threat and so forth.

Remind you of anything?

Perhaps Mr Blair was trying to emulate the wonderful Mr Pratchett when he set out his work of fiction. If so, he failed dismally.

The Discworld series makes people laugh until they cry. Mr Blair, on the other hand, produces the tears without benefit of the laughter.

His portrait of the British government and the world during the new Labour period bears so little relationship to reality as to be absurd and reveals a profoundly egotistical and unprincipled politician to whom the trappings of power were primary and the welfare of millions came a very poor second.

Everything is seen in astonishingly two-dimensional terms and is interpreted only in ways which reflect well on Blair himself.

Entirely without repentance, the man continues his defence of an illegal, immoral and utterly unjustified war in terms so vague and unreal that many, even his supporters, may well be right when they accuse him of being "delusional."

As for his protestations of sorrow for the plight of those left bereaved by his bloody war, he would have done well to have thought of that before he committed billions of pounds and thousands of military sacrificial lambs to it.

Autobiographical works are, by their very nature, narcissistic but Mr Blair carries the exercise to a whole new level. And, while attempting to justify one unjustifiable war, this warmongering buffoon even attempts to incite another one - with Iran, this time, but on equally shady grounds to those which he used to justify the Iraq debacle.

For an ex-prime minister who religiously defended Britain's nuclear weapons status throughout his term in office to declare that "I think it is wholly unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapons capability" carries the unmistakeable reek of a racism so thoroughly ingrained that the man himself probably isn't even conscious of it.

And to continue to defend the failed and discredited new Labour project is an exercise in self-deception that leaves you breathless at the sheer cheek of it.

His politics and his version of reality are best kept where they now are, on the shelves of a bookshop and out of real politics.

As Unite's Tony Woodley accurately remarked, "The Iraq war is a stain on this nation and new Labour pandered to the casino capitalists in the city."

And if you want to read a good book, read Terry Pratchett's fiction for preference over Tony Blair's. At least Mr Pratchett makes millions laugh, not die.