It must be hard, if you live outside Britain, to realize quite how unremitting a campaign has been waged against Tony Blair and his government since the end of the Iraq war. Day after day their record on Iraq has come under attack–from the media, from disaffected members of the Labour party, from critics of the war in general. Some rough blows have been struck.

A new pitch of animosity was reached around the middle of July, when the left-wing weekly the New Statesman published what was effectively an anti-Blair issue, in the course of which it described him as a psychopath. The New Statesman is only a shadow of its former self, but in the quarters where it still commands respect there was a certain amount of consternation. “Psychopath” was surely going a bit far, even by current standards. Wasn’t it time to adopt a more measured tone? But then later the same week came news of the suicide of David Kelly, the government scientist who had expressed reservations about an official arms dossier to a BBC reporter–at which point the recriminations exploded in earnest. “Violent polemique en Angleterre,” announced Le Monde on its front page, and it wasn’t exaggerating.

The idea that Blair had Kelly’s blood on his hands quickly became the cliché of choice. A former Labour minister, Glenda Jackson, called for his immediate resignation. So did the Guardian’s heavyweight commentator Hugo Young. The Sunday Timescelebrated his arrival in Japan, just after he