Tony Blair and religion: one more crusader nutter?

[malaise]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7111620.stm
<snip>
Tony Blair avoided talking about his religious views while in office for fear of being labelled "a nutter", the former prime minister has revealed.

In an interview for BBC One's The Blair Years, he said that his faith had been "hugely important" to his premiership.

"The public might have been less willing to give him the triumph of three consecutive general election victories if they'd known the extent to which ethical values would overshadow pragmatism," Sir Menzies said.
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Ethical values? Blair? :rofl:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/25/view25.xml

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[LeftishBrit]

1. Blair is indeed a nutter. In all sorts of ways.

It's fortunate that UK politicians tend not to 'do God' in a big way nowadays. With Blair, the situation was complicated by the fact that he converted from Church of England to Catholic: this was an open secret, but explicitly acknowledging it could have opened up all sorts of buried religious-political issues in this country, and e.g. possibly interfered with the Northern Ireland peace process. (This wouldn't apply these days to someone who was Catholic to begin with; but converting in office could still be a tense issue.)

As regards Blair and ethical values, I am reminded of a tutorial I once gave to some students on the psychology of moral development. There is a professor at the University of London called James Blair, who has done a lot of research on moral development, including how it goes wrong in psychopaths. I began a sentence with the words, "Blair's theory of moral development..." and couldn't continue; my students all started roaring with laughter - two of them literally rolled on the floor - at the very thought of the words 'Blair' and 'moral' being included in the same sentence!

[malaise]

2. Lovely post

:rofl: