Consider Anthony Lynton Blair, the duplicitous pied piper who led his country into the Iraq war. At the very least Blair is guilty of gross incompetence ­ to say nothing of the legal and moral issues in promoting a conflict that has killed up to a million people.

Yet today he receives an annual income of £12m and lectures students at Yale University on 'faith and globalisation'. Blair's knowledge and expertise in this field are far from clear. Whether in Iraq and the Occupied Territories, Lebanon or Afghanistan, his legacy has been one of violence, chaotic adventurism and failure.

Blair's disturbing combination of self-righteousness, dishonesty and intellectual vacuity was painfully revealed during a recent appearance on the totemic Daily Show, when he laid the blame for the violence in Iraq entirely on al-Qaeda and "Iranian-backed militias".

If this is the kind of wisdom that the global elite are paying for, then the current financial crisis is perhaps not so mysterious after all.

When Blair lectures his Yale students, he might recall the words of the Christian theologian Walter Rauschenbusch in 1910. A key figure in the American 'social gospel' movement, Rauschenbusch once prayed for "a vision of our city, fair as she might be... where all success shall be founded on service, and honour given to nobleness alone".

A century later we could not be further away from that ideal. What we do have is an increasingly dysfunctional democracy whose choices oscillate between Mandelson of Foy and Osborne of Bullingdon. And until the public shows the same level of outrage towards this state of affairs that it has shown towards two puerile 'comedians', such men will continue to rise and rise.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45780,opinion,blair-brand-and-ross-are-spirits-of-our-bullying-age-matthew-carr