Beyond satire is Blair’s appointment as Middle East envoy. Blair is the most wholehearted Zionist ever to lead a major British political party - including Balfour. He is at one with the religious right in the United States in having a gut Zionism perversely engendered by fundamentalist Christian beliefs.

Remember, Blair is leaving today because he was forced to announce his departure last summer. Even the eternally supine Labour Party revolted over Blair’s support for the Israeli attack on the Lebanon. Blair is going because he sacrificed his last remaining political capital to block a UN call for a ceasefire. He did this, knowingly and deliberately, to give the Israelis another two weeks to devastate Southern Lebanon from the air.

This is the man who, in the Rose Garden, moved the UK away from the EU consensus and lined us up uncritically with George Bush’s professedly pro-Israeli policies. All that is without counting the buckets of Iraqi arab blood on Blair’s hands. No self-respecting Palestinian representative, of any party or group, should have any truck with Tony Blair.

Blair is the most famous liar in the World, since the Iraqi WMD debacle. Why should anybody trust him as an envoy? writes Craig.

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Blair: Possibly the least probable candidate for the job in the known universe, writes Marina Hyde in the Guardian.

Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s the Quartet’s fifth horseman

Be of good cheer. Just weeks from today, former British prime minister Tony Blair will emerge from the where-are-they-now files to take his first trip as Super Middle East Peace Envoy Man (warning: may not actually possess superpowers).
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The view that there are Spice Girls with a better shot at engaging key Arab factions appears to be one endorsed by a remarkably broad church of analysts, given the region’s fabled inability to concur on anything. Almost the single notable exception thus far has been Fatah negotiator Saeb Erekat, who made the vaguely unsubstantial claim that “the Palestinians wholeheartedly support Mr Blair’s appointment”.

Clearly, George Bush so loved the idea of Middle East peace that he sent his only lapdog to have a crack at it, despite the fact that messiahs have a history of running aground in the region. But then, the US president does have form with jobs-for-the-boys appointments that seem so preposterous that they must be presumed to be satirical. Do recall the time he put Henry Kissinger in charge of the 9/11 investigation, in which among other tasks the erstwhile secretary of state was required to divine why some foreigners disliked America so much.
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There are tasks for which only a superstar force of nature will do, but the one in Palestine is widely held to require a self-effacing kind of diplomacy, and we can only hope the great actor’s second act is wildly different from his first. If not, only nihilists could relish the poetic justice of Mr Blair having to run up against elements of his true legacy, as opposed to the splashy initiatives with which he might prefer to be associated.