Confession time: I am one of those people who supported the Iraq War. (Yes, I know). I was so supportive of it that I stopped listening to Start the Week on Radio 4 for several years after Andrew Marr took over and used edition after edition (or at least it felt like that to me) to bang on about the Iraq War from every angle possible, almost invariably featuring someone, or several people, bemoaning the causes and consequences of the Iraq War, accompanied by the murmuring agreements of Mr. Marr. It felt like being harangued by a BBC presenter riding their personal hobby-horse and I missed Melvyn Bragg and Jeremy Paxman's less political versions of the programme. (I've long since relented).
Andrew Marr, talking to Tony Blair this morning, finally confirmed my suspicions about him at that time when he said:
The other thing about that whole period of New Labour politics and what followed was there was a lack of trust in politics. We saw the 2008 crash - and people are still suffering hard after that - but also a whole series of scandals, weapons of mass destruction and so forth. I was a journalist at the time and I felt misled by that.
It certainly felt at the time (to me) as if he'd fallen out of love with Tony Blair (along with many others at the BBC).
And, it turns out, he had.
And that he'd taken it personally too.
In my feistier previous-but-two blogging incarnation I wrote about that famous clash between Alistair Campbell and Andrew Marr in 2010 after Andrew had made a disobliging introductory quip about the 'dodgy dossier' during a Marr show interview:
Well, he clearly did have an opinion of this after all. Obviously.
