Campbell complained that Marr was "settling scores". It was a weak reply, but it captured the element of vindictiveness in today's Blair-baiting. Like spurned teenage lovers, former Blairites wail that he ravished them and then betrayed them, and that he must pay by suffering every kind of humiliation. They cannot accept that Blair made an honourable mistake: knowing that Saddam Hussein had possessed the means and the will to commit genocide in the past, he believed that the dictator continued to possess them in 2003. The accusation that he was guilty of human error is not good enough. Blair must have lied to Parliament and the country. He must have known that there were no WMD in Iraq but went to war anyway. The result of the almost sexual revulsion behind the campaign against him is that we are now on our fifth inquiry into Iraq. Like the European Union with the Irish electorate, the media class will keep demanding inquiries until they get the right result and find that Blair conspired to steal their virginity.

The peculiar rules of British television add to the adolescent atmosphere. Because they require broadcasters to pretend to be impartial, journalists cannot admit that they made a political misjudgment and analyse their own failings as well as Blair's. You can never ask them why they supported a politician they now damn as wicked, and invite them to explain their mistake. The ideological mistakes and betrayals must be on the other side and on the other side alone because they must maintain the fiction that they are innocents who do not possess political beliefs. Infantilism follows because only children can be the truly innocent victims. Political maturity requires grown men and women to accept responsibility for their choices.

Do not expect the fit of petulance to pass. Blair is like Margaret Thatcher now — a politician for whom the broadcasters can never have a good word. In Mo, Channel 4's otherwise excellent drama-documentary on the last years of Mo Mowlam, Blair appeared as a despicable and vain figure who plotted to take the credit for Mowlam's hard work. Channel 4 could not say the British Prime Minister had to get involved in the peace process because the Irish Taoiseach and the American President were already involved. It ignored the realities of international diplomacy and dismissed Blair's achievements because, I suspect, the climate in broadcasting is such that to declare that he was not all bad is like announcing that you have seen the sweet side of a serial killer or possess sympathy for the Devil. 

One day, probably about 30 years from now, a cultural historian will go through the political television of our time and wonder why, if Blair was such a palpably evil man, he managed to win so many elections.