Tony Blair came to Johannesburg last week. He was part of the Discovery Leadership Summit, hosted by Discovery Invest, and as you might expect he was the headline act. Tony Blair on leadership: now that would be an interesting lecture, if you could afford the high fee to attend (just over a quarter of the monthly take-home pay of your average South African academic).

As it happens in South Africa’s thickly political society, Archbishop Tutu, scheduled to appear at the summit as well, pulled out dramatically and at the last minute. He was unable to share a platform, he said, with the former UK Prime Minister given his ‘morally indefensible’ invasion of Iraq. Tutu’s moral stand also had the strategic political objective of refocusing attention on a war that many in South Africa have forgotten in our parochial obsession with our tangled society.

On the day of Blair’s speech, protestors demonstrated outside the Sandton Convention Centre and grabbed headlines to the chagrin of the conference organisers (who, it must be said, remained graceful throughout). Some of those protestors hoped to make a citizen’s arrest of Blair on the grounds that he was a war criminal. They did not get close, as security was amped up. And although I sat two feet behind Blair at the taping of a BBC debate on poverty, I did not feel moved to put my hand on his shoulder as the viral email explaining how to effect a citizen’s arrest advised; see http://www.arrestblair.org/. Neither the bounty of over 500 GBP, nor the reassurance that my motives for the arrest did not matter, tempted me. I like the politics of outrage as much as the next leftist, but I prefer thoughtful debate, when all is said and done.

I agree with Tutu that Blair’s war was based on slender evidence, driven by misinformation and an almost blind obsession with “following through” on his conviction (not to mention his commitment to President Bush) that the war should proceed. I would even confess to a visceral dislike . . .

Read more: Archbishop Tutu v. Tony Blair