The man who, as prime minister, was said by his spokesman never to "do God" turns out to have been "doing Him" all along, like those Roman Catholic cardinals in communist countries whose status used to be kept secret to save them from persecution. Tony Blair knew how distrustful the British are of religious enthusiasm and so kept quiet about his faith while in office. But now he is a free man, he has revealed to the world that it was indeed his religious conviction that enabled him to do his job as the head of government. He disclosed this in an interview last week with Time magazine marking the establishment of his Tony Blair Faith Foundation, through which he intends to spend the rest of his life trying to unite the world's religions as a force for social progress.
I wish him luck in this daunting venture, but the more interesting thing to me was what he said about the role of his own faith in his conduct as prime minister. "You don't put a hotline up to God and get the answers," he said. "What faith can do is not tell you what is right, but give you the strength to do it." Now, what is this supposed to mean? By his own admission, God did not tell him that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis; but he said that God nevertheless gave him the strength to do it in the face of its unpopularity.
God did so despite the fact that His vicar on Earth, and leader of the church that Blair recently joined, considered that invading Iraq was a bad thing to have done. So what made Blair so certain that he was doing right when even the Pope disagreed?
Blair seems to have fallen for some Lewis Carroll-type logical fallacy that runs something like this: I believe in God; people who believe in God are good; people who are good do not do wrong; therefore, what I do is good. Maybe Blair is not quite as mad as that, but sometimes it feels like it. It sometimes even feels as if he measures the rightness of his actions by the amount of opposition they provoke.
I always suspected Blair of unwholesome self-righteousness, and now he has come very close to confirming it. With the born-again George Bush suffering from the same problem, the poor Iraqis never had much of a chance.
· One of the most cringe-making moments of Blair's time as prime minister has just been recalled with enthusiasm by Cherie. This was the occasion in 2004 when they popped off to Sardinia to stay at Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi's seaside villa with its seven swimming pools. To have accepted the hospitality of this rightwing billionaire, with his suspect business practices and anti-constitutional tendencies, shocked the Labour party and was seen as a breathtaking example of the Blairs' contempt for Labour sensibilities. One might think that Cherie would choose never to mention it again, but in an interview this week with an Italian magazine she recalled it as one of the most thrilling of all their freeloading holidays. Not only was she unashamed of her husband's closeness to Berlusconi; she boasted of the "friendship and trust" that existed between them. And she went on to enthuse extravagantly about the entertainment Berlusconi provided. "I have never had an evening like the one I had in Sardinia," she said. "Fireworks lit up the words 'Viva Tony', and we all sang Summertime together."
The picture of Blair in his Burberry polo shirt and Berlusconi in the bandana he wore to cover up his hair transplant singing a Gershwin song together is one so awful that I doubt if I will ever get it out of my head, but I am sure Blair felt at the time that it was the right thing to do.
· This week, after Brigitte Bardot's fifth conviction for provoking discrimination and racial hatred, French prosecutors have said they are sick of taking her to court and have pleaded with her to desist. But the comments on French media blogs seem to show that public opinion is generally on her side.
Since retiring from the cinema more than 30 years ago, the 73-year-old former "sex kitten" has devoted her life to campaigning against animal cruelty, and once sold all her jewellery to fund her crusade. This has earned her admiration, as well as ridicule; and there are many who think that, even if she is a bit nutty, her cause is honourable and, in a free country, she should be allowed to say what she wants in its defence. And, of course, she could, if she didn't have an unfortunate compulsion to denigrate Muslim immigrants in general, instead of just their ritual slaughter of sheep (without first stunning them) at the Islamic celebration of Eid al-Adha.
Her latest conviction was for having written in a letter of protest against the practice to Nicolas Sarkozy (when, in 2006, he was still France's interior minister) that Muslims were "destroying" France and its culture. This is an implausible claim in a nation that has always liked its gigot d'agneau, but hardly one likely to provoke race riots. Bardot was nevertheless fined £12,000 for her comment and ordered to pay about £800 in damages to two anti-racist groups.
Bardot is unable or unwilling to disentangle her defence of animal rights from her fear of immigration and nostalgia for an ethnically pure France, which is a shame. But the law is an ass when all it does is give a wide public airing to opinions of which hardly anyone would otherwise have been aware.
· This week Alexander lost faith in the people's wisdom when 18-year-old Jessie failed to win BBC1's I'd Do Anything contest when she was obviously the best: "Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh and Barry Humphries all thought so, too, and I wasted lots of money calling up to vote for her. It was more distressing even than the outcome of the Eurovision Song Contest."