‘Mere mortals are still inspired by a certain awe,’ he gushes.

Bill Clinton is ‘an extraordinary mixture of easygoing charm and ferocious intellectual capacity. Probably . . . he is the most formidable politician I ever met.’ President Bush ‘has great intuition.’ And of Barack Obama, he says: ‘The personal character is clear: this is a man with steel in every part of him.’

Stay classy Blair.

Meanwhile he's been pelted with eggs and shoes at a book signing in Ireland:

Skirmishes broke out between protesters and police at the first public signing for Tony Blair's memoirs, with shoes and eggs hurled at the former prime minister.

Protesters shouted … "Hey hey Tony hey, how many kids have you killed today?"

"It really is shameful that somebody can be responsible for the death and destruction that he was responsible for in Iraq and Afghanistan and walk away without any accounting for that and become a very wealthy man off the back of it."

Already the campaign has borne fruit. Outside the Chilcot inquiry a woman called Grace McCann, inspired by the website, tried to apprehend Mr Blair, before she was restrained and removed by the police. She qualifies for the first bounty: one quarter of the total pot at the time of her attempt. She has pledged to give the money to relevant charities. The fund will remain open until Blair is officially prosecuted, and we will keep paying out to those who follow Grace's example.

Paypal has blocked donations to the Arrest Blair campaign, supposedly on the basis that it "encourages illegal activity" (conducting a lawful citizens arrest of a rich and powerful figure apparently being illegal in the eyes of PayPal). It's a blatantly political move - and its not the first time they've done it. Last week, they froze the assets of Wikileaks - a site which encourages and publishes anonymous leaks in the public interest, and is credited with "produc[ing] more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years".

Wood told the inquiry that some ministers and even the then prime minister, Tony Blair, used to privately claim that the Nato bombing of Kosovo in 1999 provided a useful precedent for going to war in Iraq.

The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.

Hindsight is a great temptress. But we needn’t trouble her on the way to a confident conclusion that Mr Blair’s fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power.

Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that “hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right”. But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgment: it is certainly no answer to death.

Asked if he would have gone on had he known there was no WMDs, he replied:

I would still have thought it right to remove [Saddam Hussein]. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.

Two world wars, tens of millions dead, the subsequent entrenchment of international law under the Charter of the United Nations and Tony Blair thinks that the decision to go to war should come down to his own personal beliefs about right and wrong.

Click through to read more and view a video excerpt of the interview.

… are not intended to reach a finding that the public find credible, they exist to provide a smokescreen for a few years to cover the establishment for a few years in the hope everyone forgets about it.