Holy water can't shift these stains

This week alone has seen war criminal Tony Blair invited to address a "security" event at University College London and the Church of England appoint an ex-oil exec as Archbishop of Canterbury.

On top of that Justin Welby has only been a bishop for a year. Did he get the business upgrade or something?

Blair and Welby have a lot in common.

Both have an evangelical fervour established at convenient times and somewhat late in life, and both have a rather chequered past involving misadventures in the avaricious pursuit of black gold.

Welby is a former chief exec at Elf Aquitane and the ex-treasurer of Enterprise Oil Plc - now part of those nice people at Shell - both of which have a highly dubious track record.

You will recall that Elf Aquitaine was the state-run French firm which - when the scandal broke in 1994 - almost brought down the Francois Mitterrand government in what was described at the time as the biggest corruption case since World War II.

As with Blair a number of Welby's former friends are now in jail and both have stains on their hands that no amount of holy water is going to shift.

Still, with an ethically dubious share portfolio like the Church of England Ltd has, they could probably do with someone with experience in the field.

This month they pimped out Church House, the CofE's administrative headquarters, to the merchants of death for the staging of the "chief of the air staff's air power conference 2012," organised by the Royal United Services Institute.

The event was co-sponsored by BAE and General Atomics, both of which have an interesting take on religious conversion. They turn Muslims into piles of ash with drones.

Coincidentally the "security event" at the UCL that Blair is due to address next week is hosted by the Institute of Security and Resilience Studies, which has strong links with … the arms industry.

UCL's decision to invite Blair to be a guest speaker at a "security" event is akin to inviting the Pope to open a family planning clinic.

About the only person who has actively made the world less secure than El Presidente Blair is a certain bloke playing cowboys on a ranch in Texas.

Still, it's nice to see Blair's keeping himself busy, because let's face it being Middle East peace envoy isn't a full-time job.

Avoiding citizens' arrests and a one-way trip to The Hague can be somewhat time consuming, so it's good to know he still makes time for his friends.

And what interesting friends they are.

Apparently he is getting paid £8 million a year to buff up the reputation of that bastion of human rights, Kazakhstan. What is it with Blair and tyrants?

He's like a dog licking its own genitals - he just can't help himself.

The despot in question, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, has, he eulogised, "a combination of the toughness necessary to take decisions to put the country on the right path" and "a certain degree of subtlety and ingenuity that allowed him to manoeuvre in a region which is fraught with difficulties."

That would be the "toughness" which caused Amnesty International to note in its most recent assessment that "reports of torture and other ill-treatment by security forces continue unabated, despite government claims that it was successfully addressing these violations.

"Security forces used excessive force to break up large-scale protest strikes by oil and gas workers … at least 16 people were killed in protests in December."

Say what you want about Nazarbayev but he's consistent.

Remarkably, he's won the last three "elections" with the identical total of 95 per cent of the vote … so you can see why Blair likes him.

The former prime minister appeared in a promotional video for the dictatorship earlier this year in which he spoke of the country having "extraordinary economic potential."

Well, it does for him anyway.