From: Andrew Johnson
Date: 2006-08-09 12:17:42
www.theherald.co.uk/… Points of View Your Letters August 07 2006 The Prime Minister’s mental stateAs we are dragged into the opening skirmishes in Lebanon of the Third World War over oil, Iain A D Mann, may not be far off the mark that Tony Blair “is not just a devious megalomaniac . . . but that he may even be mentally deranged” (August 5). He is not the first to question Blair’s mental state. In his excellent book, Tony Blair: The Man Who Lost his Smile, the former Labour MP, lawyer and scholar of psychoanalysis, Leo Abse speculates on his probable narcissistic personality disorder/borderline psychopathy.Abse is not alone. In the July 2003 issue of Prospect magazine, Paul Broks, who trained in clinical psychology at Oxford University and is currently senior clinical lecturer in neuropsychology at Plymouth University, wrote as follows: “So what’s Blair’s pathology? Some of my colleagues (and some of his) diagnose narcissism. Others see delusions of grandeur. But there are other possibilities. Early days, but suppose it turns out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Suppose that the Prime Minister was, indeed, party to the ramping-up of what flimsy evidence there might have been for such weapons in order to keep us on a pre-set course for war. Imagine, in other words, that he has been lying through his smiling teeth. Set this against his affiliative personal style and the profile that begins to emerge is that of the plausible psychopath charming, intelligent, emotionally manipulative, ruthlessly ambitious and self-serving.”So far as I am aware, Dr Broks hasn’t written on this subject since his prescient observations of three years ago: as we now know all too well, Mr Blair was, indeed, “party to the ramping-up of what flimsy evidence there might have been for such weapons in order to keep us on a pre-set course for war.” If we are, indeed, being dragged into a much more dangerous war by a “plausible psychopath” it really is time Blair were removed, forcibly if necessary (perhaps using the Mental Health Acts), for it is now clearly, as Thomas McLaughlin points out, “a matter of national security” and perhaps survival.Dr John O’Dowd, 3 Downfield Gardens, Bothwell.
