President Bush’s decision to go for broke in Iraq may look like a losing gambler’s last throw of the dice, but its origins are more prosaic: simple necessity.

The reason for the new US policy is that the old one had failed. Faced with that maddening but stubborn reality, George Bush could do one of two things. He could accept defeat and begin the painful process of disengaging. Or he could try harder to win and begin the painful process of committing more forces. The stakes are too high and it is still too early for the US to surrender, so a surge, in the euphemistic military terminology, or an escalation as its opponents call it in Vietnam-era language, was inevitable.

Of course, whatever the latest shift in policy does for Iraq, the US and its President, it is evidently way too late for it to do anything to salvage the reputation and legacy of that other member of the world’s most hated duumvirate, Tony Blair.

It is unlikely, despite what that famous memo may have said a few months back, that the Prime Minister ever really thought his last months in office would be a garlanded procession through a grateful nation. He need not, to be sure, have made matters worse by acting like a pre-Magna Carta monarch in matters of honours and Arabian military contracts. But he could have spent his final months behaving like Solon or Nelson Mandela for all it mattered — the swollen ranks of bile-spewing Blair-haters would not be placated by anything less than his ritual public condemnation and humiliation.

A casual look through the news only days into Mr Blair’s last calendar year in office shows how eagerly the modern Establishment is lining up to hurl one last gob of phlegm at the door of No 10. From all sides they come — from university chairs and legal chambers, television studios and newspaper offices.

Writing in the Financial Times this week, Lord Patten of Barnes, Chancellor of Oxford University, derided Mr Blair as a Walter Mitty figure for believing that his slavish support of Mr Bush might change the status quo in the Middle East. Though I did my bit to try to prevent it, there’s something beautifully apt about Chris Patten — undistinguished Cabinet minister, defeated Member of Parliament, failed Governor of Hong Kong, otiose European Commissioner — now finding himself enthroned as king in Oxford, the home of lost causes.

But his criticism of Mr Blair is especially hard to swallow given that the Patten formula for global strategy is, and has always been, slavish support for everything the European Union does. If we’re going to follow the US or the EU, I’d take clumsy America any time.

But being savaged by Lord Patten is like a warm cosseting compared with the treatment Mr Blair gets from the rest of the intelligentsia. It’s not Walter Mitty they see in Downing Street, but Josef Goebbels.

Next week, you’ll be able to watch the latest — I’m sure carefully researched — television drama about the Blair years from Channel 4. Called The Trial of Tony Blair it imagines the last days in No 10. Robert Lindsay stars as Mr Blair and gives a hint of the challenges he must have faced assuming the character role: “I was angry with the decision to go to war,” he said at a press screening this week. “It was a big, big mistake. I think it was illegal and the situation can only get worse.”

Meanwhile, over at the Tricycle Theatre in radical Kilburn, they’re preparing a similar project — Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq — a Hearing. The Prime Minister, it seems, is to be indicted in absentia for war crimes before an audience (a wholly objective one, I’ve no doubt) and prosecuted by Philippe Sands, the barrister.

And on it goes. These are not minority views, of course, but the near-universal consensus of the educated opinion-formers of our times. It’s hardly even controversial these days to talk of the Prime Minister in this way. People used to shout “fascist” at Margaret Thatcher but I don’t really ever think their heart was in it. With Mr Blair it’s deadly serious. Imagine the raucous, triumphant, mocking Shia at Saddam Hussein’s execution — minus the beards — and you have a sense of what most of these people feel about the Prime Minister.

So at the risk of finding myself in the dock with him when the modern elites have their Nuremberg, let me take issue. His critics excoriate Mr Blair for a decision made in the most excruciating of circumstances. And this from people whose idea of a difficult decision is whether to go The Ivy or Soho House for dinner.

In 2003 the British Government was faced with a selection of unpalatable choices. Leave Saddam Hussein in place despite his record; watch as sanctions and limited military action against him killed his people but left him politically strengthened; or move to enforce the repeated reasonable demands of the international community at the risk of a bloody war. Most difficult of all for a British prime minister, he was faced with a US administration that was determined on military action to remove Saddam. No British leader wants to find himself aligned with a French and Russian president against an American one.

This is the defensive, passive case for Mr Blair. But, yes, there is still another one. His decision helped to remove one of the most murderous figures of the 20th century. It helped to allow benighted Iraqis to choose their own path. Thus far they have chosen sectarian warfare — that’s regrettable. Above all Mr Blair helped to offer all the people of the Middle East the glimpse of a revolutionary future, a route out of the medievalist tyranny. That’s an objective that is still worth fighting for.

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