Curiously, I do not think it was fear of being traduced or “exposed” by the Murdoch media that made us go easy on him.

It is easily forgotten that in the 1980s and early 1990s, Murdoch struck many across British media as a refreshingly ballsy outside influence administering a shake-up to our deeply conservative trade. And I use the word conservative in its true sense – resistant to change whether from a right or left wing perspective.

New, brash Aussie money somehow seemed to challenge the old media hegemonies. Scale was not in those days any kind of a problem. It was when he got into television that scale began to play. Yet what had defined his entry into newspapers – republican, anti-European, free market economic views, and Page 3 attitudes – played almost no part in the ever-expanding electronic world of News Corp. Not until Fox News, did we see any of that.

Rupert’s defection from his Oz to his US passport was a moment we barely took note of in 1985. But that was THE moment when what had merely seemed to be expanding UK influence went global.  The wielding of power by press barons has been a feature of previous generations of the British body-politic  -  Rothermere, Beaverbrook and the rest – and maybe there are some echoes in what is being laid out in front of us at Leveson, even if theirs was a little more transparent. But we are dealing with the now. That “now” is the Murdoch period.

Retrospectively, what had seemed a harmless, yet deeply un-British incident, in which the media mogul lugged an aspiring JFK-like youthful bidder for power more than half way round the world, today becomes much more significant.

Young Tony Blair, battling to escape the chaotic overhang of the Kinnock bids for power in 1987 and 1992, was prepared to go many uncharted extra miles. When he flew all the way to Hayman Island off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 1995 to court Rupert in his News Corp den, it now seems the moment which captured a shift in how power and influence works in our country.  An aspiring British politician in near-supplication to gain the support of a foreign corporate power.

It was a tableau completed, according to Vogue Magazine in 2011, by the vision of a Blair, standing on the banks of the River Jordan in a white chasuble, ordaining his position as godfather to Murdoch’s youngest daughter Grace.

In between, as the Leveson Inquiry has now heard, British public and private life allegedly became subjected to the most extraordinary period of un-British performance in our modern history. Private secrets were stolen, or so it has been claimed from Leveson’s witness table, and public servants were corrupted.

What had seemed strange and unusual in 1995, suddenly fitted a form. This was a form that apparently penetrated  at every level of our public life.

Where once we would have laughed at Italian corruption, this week we suddenly blanched when we were told it has happened to our own; to our police, to our civil servants, to our prime ministers – even, we are told, to our publicly-owned horses. Now we laugh at ourselves, but with a worrying hollowness.

So far this is less to do with provable criminality, than with a more obvious “culture”. This week’s developments are, after all, police allegations.

This journey that I have described, book-ended by Hayman Island and the River Jordan, is not about who we thought we were, is it perhaps more about who we have now become.

Is that why, as a journalist who has operated throughout this period, I feel a sense of personal failure, even responsibility, when it comes to the reporting of Rupert Murdoch and the influence of his empire?

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So, Tony Blair‘s Head of M15 opposed the “war on terror”. Eliza Manningham-Buller also opposed the invasion of Iraq. I wonder whether she said so at the time. Her confession comes in a Reith lecture to be broadcast next week – but it is already in the can. One wonders whether by the time the Iraq Inquiry reports there will be anyone to be found beyond the former  Prime Minister and his old friend George W Bush, to defend either the “war on terror”, or the invasion.

And yet, beyond Robin Cook and a tiny handful of other political rebels, there were only two “officials” who put their beliefs on the line at the time. The redoubtable Elizabeth Wilmshurst – number two in the Foreign Office legal department – and Carne Ross, a senior UK diplomat at the UN – both paid the ultimate price in both nobility and pensions, in resigning over it all. Both were fast rising stars in their departments, none of their superiors saw fit to join them.

Carne Ross’s book, The Leaderless Revolution, is published this week. I have read it, and it is a remarkable call to arms. Ross believes the present domestic and international “system” cannot deliver the change the world urgently needs and calls on the individual citizen to play his and her part as never before.

The Iraq war is far from over. The killing continues apace – 250 civilians a month according to latest figures from Baghdad. A suicide bomber killed 29 in the capital’s biggest mosque last weekend alone. Just before the invasion, Tony Blair summoned four of the UK’s top Iraq analysts to Number 10 to advise him. All four counselled strongly against going ahead with it. As they left, after a solid one and a half hours of deliberation, Mr Blair is reported by one of the academics as saying: “But you do agree, don’t you, that Saddam is a very bad man?”

Another “very bad man” is still lurking about in Libya today. I first encountered Gaddafi in the 1970s. His was a Green Book-supported cult of personality – but a strangely egalitarian one. Libyans initially did rather well out of him – he spread the wealth about and spent on schooling and health. But as with all such cults, the green turned to brown, and eventually to black, tinged with the red blood of those who opposed his dictatorship.

Once again, the west allowed itself to become obsessed with another “very bad man” with oil. As our own Lindsey Hilsum has observed, the Libyan matter may not end easily or soon and could yet be messy. The rather nicer man, King-Al Kalifa of Bahrain, whom I found Tony Blair taking tea with in Sharmel Sheikh when I went to interview him there on the last day of 2005, has been left alone to bludgeon some of his country’s people and their doctors back into order. The US has this week rewarded him by extending the rental on Bahrain’s bunkering facilities for the US navy until 2016.

We are left with the son of another “very bad man” President Assad of Syria, who continues to kill his people unabated, and unfettered by any misgivings of the west. The nice erstwhile ophthalmologist from Willesden had been seen as infinitely nicer than the father who slaughtered 10,000 of his people in a go. Syria’s continuing bloodshed will bubble up to the top of the page if Libya does begin to settle. But with less oil, and the UK and others suffering defence cuts, the eye specialist is likely to benefit from the west’s blind eye for a time yet.

Follow @jonsnowC4 on Twitter.

The killing in Pakistan of the Governor of Punjab by his own bodyguard on Tuesday, marks a devastating new high water mark both inside and outside that country. It comes in the wake of a year in which Christian communities all over the Middle East and beyond have come under pressure.
Against a backdrop in which Iraq has proved the infernal crucible for religious intolerance in which a thousand more of the country’s Christians have had to flee and in which many have been killed – in one instance amid the bombing of their church – it is important to take stock.

New year saw the attack on a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria in Egypt in which 21 Egyptian Christians died.

Now there is the Pakistan assassination in which pressure on Christians has reportedly again played a part. The Governor, Salman Taseer had been prominent in attempting to defend Asia Bibi. She’s a Christian who was condemned to death last November under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws – laws Mr Taseer had also been more than prominent in attempting to reverse.

Two questions are in the air today. When two of the most openly-declared Christians to lead either Britain or America in recent times – Tony Blair and George W Bush – led the war on Iraq in 2003, what role has it subsequently played in the oppression of Christians in the region? And what role are the Saudis playing in the continued religiously-led radicalisation of of Pakistan?

Saudi Arabia’s embrace of, and dedicated export of Wahibiism, is most clearly identified in Pakistan through the hundreds of Saudi-funded madrassas. One of the central tenets of Wahabiism is the refusal to tolerate rival religious practices. Saudi funding for Iraqi Sunni Islamic groups – banned under Saddam, have been allowed free reign since US led invasion. Saudi funded madrassas, book shops and publishing in Britain are also claimed to be radicalising ethnic British Pakistani Britons.

The roles of messrs Blair, Bush, and the Saudi king, are unlikely to be uppermost in the minds of those see today’s state funeral for the dead Governor of Punjab. In any case many who have studied and reported the region fear that it is already too late to put the radical genie back in the bottle.

From the Office of Tony Blair, a rare and privileged communication received yesterday afternoon.

It promised that if I went to this website I would be treated to advance extracts from his book. Further, they would be published at 11.30pm last night. For me – perhaps for no one else – a broken promise.

When I went to bed at 11.46pm, no extracts. At 6.00am this morning, no extracts. All I could find were some rather eerie photographs of the former premier. I’m indebted to others for supplying me a few quotes from inside the tome.

“Maddening” Gordon made him drink more than he should have. So if there are no extracts on his website (for me at least), at least there are his somewhat gaunt features to prove that this at least may have been true. He was “right” to go to war. No apology for Iraq, but he writes that he will try to remedy the “consequences” until the end of his days. Buy the book and you too can contribute to his efforts.

All “maddening” Gordon seems to have done, in Blair’s book, is to have lost Labour a British general election. Even A Journey doesn’t blame him for Iraq. Although if Gordon had been a bit more “maddening” he might have done many tens of thousands who died, and millions who fled (and have still not returned), a great service.

For some reason, our former dear leader has not seen fit to grant Channel 4 News an interview. This is a loss. I always found him a rewarding interview. He was good at it. I never found the small talk easy - publicly relaxed and personable, he was privately awkward, almost, and unexpectedly gauche. But definitely seemed a nice man.

So how will history judge him? One of his confessions is that he regrets the fox hunting ban - it is close to an apology, not to the fox, but to the country.

“I didn’t understand the issue”, he is reported to have said. So that’s OK, he understood the war on Iraq – it was “right” – but not the attempt to prevent acts of cruelty against our four-footed foes.

Doubtless, A Journey (THE Journey was reportedly pulped as too much) will infect our debate tonight live on Channel 4 News with all five Labour leadership candidates.

On a balmy spring Sunday morning in London yesterday, I walked from my home across three London parks to visit the Richard Hamilton show at the Serpentine Gallery.

I wondered how long it will be before someone digs up a few streets to create genuine green pedestrian corridors to allow London’s people to walk unmolested by traffic – her parks are an exhibition of their own – green, blossom strewn, pleasant lands.

Upon entering the exhibition past Margaret Thatcher playing on a TV screen above an NHS bed titled ‘treatment room’ one is very quickly struck between the eyes by ‘Shock and Awe’ – an absolutely startling full length gun slinging portrait of Tony Blair. Pistols on the hips.

It would make a terrific cover for his forthcoming memoirs. I see it comes from the artist’s own collection. It certainly ought to enter the public collection. The arresting technicoloured square portrait of Blair’s predecessor Hugh Gaitskell already belongs to us, via the Arts Council.

Hamilton pre-empts the era of photographic manipulation using the shocking images of the killing of students at Kent State University in the US during an anti Vietnam War protest; the ‘dirty’ protest in the Maze jail during the Northern Ireland troubles; and the hand cuffing of the Rolling Stones on suspected drug offences, as emblematic of the turbulent age that his art has spanned. You find yourself leaving the show wanting to see much more.

I pen this as I prepare to go north to interview Gordon Brown – not yet, so far as I know, depicted by Hamilton.

Last night, I tweeted for questions triggering a cascade of answers as vivid as the art show. Controlling the banks, sending post cards to cancer patients, vision, and the opportunity to work are interwoven with Snoopy and a persistent Twitter from a man who has lost his car keys and seems to want me to ask the prime minister where they are.

I am a one week old novice on Twitter. I confess I am intrigued by a platform I had tried very hard to eschew. But if you are a journalist and want a whiff of what people think, very quickly, it works.

On any other day it would have been the lead story.

But yesterday’s news day was no ordinary day. The conviction of 23 CIA operatives by the still independent judiciary in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy was a remarkable first.

The CIA staff who included the Milan station chief (What is a secondary European city doing with a CIA station chief at all?) marked a major step in the struggle to bring to justice those responsible for the rendition and torture of suspects in the aftermath of 9/11.

The case involved the seizure of a Muslim cleric on the streets of Milan and his rendition to a ‘third country’ for interrogation, where he claims he was tortured.

None of the convicted CIA people is ever likely to serve the five years in jail to which they have been sentenced (the station chief got eight years).

But the case itself must be bringing closer the day when the political leaders of the time, particularly in Europe and America, will be questioned and perhaps themselves brought before the International Court in the Haig.

My Paris informant identified fears of such investigations against Tony Blair as another ingredient in President Sarkozi’s ‘deceleration’ of support for Mr Blair’s candidacy for the Presidency of Europe.

This brings me to the presence of a 22-seater Gulfstream jet at Birmingham Airport on October 2nd. N478GS was identified there last month by plane spotters.

This is a plane that, according to a report in the Guardian (November 1st) has previously been seen at Bagram military air base in Afghanistan, Shannon in Ireland, Prestwick in Scotland, and Stuttgart in Germany. There have been persistent allegations that the jet has been used for the ‘movement’ of prisoners.

Can we be assured that rendition is not still being practised? The MOD says of the Birmingham incident that the plane’s visit had nothing to do with ‘past allegations’.

They say it was engaged in ‘routine military liaison between allies’.

Isn’t that exactly what the rendition of suspects for torture in third countries could have been described as?

It’s been the back room project of the coterie of Blair loyalists – Peter Mandelson, Jonathan Powell, and others.

So troubled has Mr Blair’s ‘non-candidacy’ for the Presidency of the EU become that both Gordon Brown and David Miliband were forced to break cover yesterday and, risking further domestic controversy, make a very public case for Mr Blair taking over the new lead role in Europe.

But the socialist group in Europe rejected their pleas, and without so prominent a bloc, Blair’s hopes are all but dead.

You read it here first – it was Snowblog that learned first of Mr Sarkozy’s rapid cooling on the matter.

The personal relationship between Nicolas and Tony remains strong, but Sarkozy is too wily a politician to have failed to spot the tide running against Blair, and with Germany’s Angela Merkel less than lukewarm on the idea, he gave up on his plan to anoint Mr Blair.

Barring ‘a walking on water’ moment, the ‘Blair project’ in Brussels is sunk.

As I blogged last week, the French are now much more excited by the idea of ‘young David (Miliband) taking over the potential more powerful EU Foreign ‘High Representative’ role.

So McDonald’s has pulled out of Iceland.

The ultimate economic indicator of ruin is struck, with the closure of three fast food outlets on the island and an indication from the multinational that they don’t expect to return.

Iceland hopes to make good by swallowing something even more indigestible than a reindeer burger – membership of the EU. And it is not the presidency of the European Union that excites them, but the prospect that the island with a ‘c’ in its name can mimic the economic rescue the EU has extended to the member island with an ‘r’ in its name – Ireland.

Speaking of the presidency, I’m told by my Parisian informant that France continues to “decelerate” rapidly on backing Tony Blair for the job. But the problem remains “if not Tony, who?”

The Lisbon Treaty specifically outlaws any candidate from Reykjavik. The candidate for the presidency has to have held high office in a member state.

The race is on therefore – not for Icelandic membership, but to sign the treaty into law and immediately appoint the European Union’s first president.

The Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, says Tony Blair will be appointed “over my dead body”.

Downing Street is already denying that Gordon Brown has tapped up a couple of civil servants to lobby for Blair’s candidacy. One certainly wonders whether if is this had happened, it would represent an acceptable use of tax payers’ money.

In any case, as I blogged here last week, Blair is NOT a candidate.

He has merely let it be known that he will have to be asked, and if asked has indicated he would serve.

Even as we speak, Blair must be weighing up whether to leave matters quite like this. How many lectures could be launched upon a reputation as the man who was rejected from becoming Europe’s first ever president in a contest in which there was no known opponent?

If I am wrong, and Blair gets the job, there will be no more high earning lectures anyway, for a bit.

But then we don’t yet know quite what sort of an expenses and “outside earnings” regime the new president is expected to enjoy.

Wow… that lit the blue touch paper! Or was it red? What on earth has Tony Blair done to ignite such bile? The party he led was handsomely re-elected in a campaign he led, he did not shy away from the issues, the country reportedly expressed confidence in him. How can the worm turn so fast?

Snowblog reveals the simple truth that the European presidency is slipping away from Mr Blair, and invective cascades – indeed I think I’m right in saying that the reaction to the blog is proving more numerous, and angrier, than any that I have posted. I notice Martin entering a small plea for the former prime minister, but for the rest there is an intriguing unison.

What has Tony Blair done? And given the treatment to which Gordon Brown has been subjected – some of which he has encouraged, some of which has been inflicted – why has there been no call for Blair to come back?

Is it the reported £15m (a figure that beggars my belief) that others have claimed he has made since stepping down? Is it something those close to him have done? Is it his performance as “Middle East envoy“?

And how is it that this reaction charted here is at such odds with the regard Mr Blair is held in the United States and elsewhere (until recently in France, Spain and other European countries)?

Somehow, despite being re-elected whilst British troops were still holed up in an airbase in Basra, is it simply that the enormity of Iraq has come back to haunt Tony Blair?

I regret that this Snowblog represents a cascade of questions, but how is it that one of the most popular and most elected prime ministers of our age is, within just four years, reduced to this?

And what will history say of him?

The presidency of Europe is slipping rapidly from Tony Blair’s hands.

My sources in Brussels and elsewhere report a rapid sea change in the former prime minister’s fortunes as ratification of the Lisbon treaty creeps closer (the Czech president could reluctantly sign it within a week).

Those sources tell me that Blair’s candidacy has been hit heavily by the opening of the Iraq inquiry.

European leaders are now horrified at the thought that the EU’s first president could find himself almost immediately under very heavy public scrutiny at a formal inquiry into the Iraq war.

The “blood on your hands” incident at the St Paul’s cathedral memorial service last week added to the misgivings. The idea that assorted families might continue to accuse Europe’s president of having blood on his hands does not appeal to those who have to make the decision as to who should become the European Union’s figurehead.

But the message has also been heard loud and clear in the European Council that for Mr Blair to become president will have no positive effect on Britain’s attitude to the union. Indeed, diplomats are warning them that the effect might even be dramatically negative.

Coupled with the belief that a Conservative government may take power in Britain next year, the thought of a Tory euro sceptic prime minister at loggerheads with an erstwhile Labour prime minister does not attract.

I am told that Mr Blair’s candidacy, which once looked a shoe-in at 90-10, has slipped this month to well under 50 “and still on the slide”.

At the same time, there is increasing talk that the best candidate for the other job on offer, that of high representative for foreign affairs – a potentially more important job than the presidency itself – could be offered to Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, whose ratings in Europe have been in the ascendancy for the past six months.

Mr Blair, on the other hand, does have one fervent supporter: the man whose house guest he was on several occasions during his premiership, Silvio Berlusconi. And with friends like Berlusconi…

In fairness to Mr Blair, as far as he is concerned he has never been a candidate. The understanding he has left with the European Council is that if they want him, they must ask him – and he will probably accept.

My information is that he is increasingly unlikely to be asked.