This is not a moment to turn his tormentor into a political martyr

This is not a moment to turn his tormentor into a political martyr. Mr Blair said that he needed more time to reflect on the fate of his former cabinet colleague. For the first time since Downing Street instigated the news conferences, some of the exchanges became mini interviews. Mr Blair stressed his admiration for the intelligence services and his disapproval of the “irresponsible” Ms Short. But even when journalists moved on to Mr Blair’s chosen terrain, the behaviour of Ms Short, he did not have the answers He was asked how he planned to punish Ms Short. As he acknowledged, Ms Short had placed him in an impossible position.

Prime ministers, he insisted, did not comment on intelligence matters.He stressed that this unavoidable evasiveness should not be taken as an admission of guilt, but his inquisitors were restless. This is the sort of activity they tend to engage in a lot of the time But objectivity does not come into it. Ms Short shone some light on a specific operation that she claimed took place, not against a bunch of terrorists, but on the saintly Kofi Annan.This would take some answering, and Mr Blair could not come up with any answers at all. He was well prepared to deal with the collapse of the case against Katharine Gun, the GCHQ worker who had leaked an e-mail about an Anglo-American operation to eavesdrop on the UN Security Council: “There was no political interference … we will obviously reflect on the implications.”On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme a few hours earlier, Ms Short put rockets on the story, to revive a phrase Mr Blair deploys from time to time. Objectively the surprise is that anyone is surprised that intelligence services might have targeted the UN.

But there was always going to be an occasion when his scheduled news conference coincided with the sudden eruption of a potentially big, awkward and embarrassing story Yesterday such a story erupted. Mr Blair looked troubled.
Probably he would have coped stoically if he had faced questions about one difficult story. Usually Tony Blair presides over his monthly news conferences with authoritative aplomb. For more than two years he has never looked remotely troubled during the question-and-answer sessions. On the other hand, once in this realm of literally rendered physical pain, a monstrous degree of prurience creeps in; moral considerations about what Christianity might actually mean, if anyone ever started to practise it, start to take a back seat.On the whole, this sinister-sounding and obscurely-motivated film might not at all be the outward expression of a confident faith; like the Counter-Reformation, it might be the sign of a set of beliefs which feel themselves very much on the back foot, and are starting to reach for some fairly extreme tactics
More from Philip Hensher. Very well: the religious argument will start to take place on the level of physical realities too; with graphic representations of extreme physical states.Beyond this level of gross literal realism, it is hard to see where anyone can go; it is not something anyone can decently argue with. The original Counter-Reformation responded to a new-style spiritual conviction with an insistence on physical realities; on lavish splendour in churches, and, in visual art, a terrifying literalism which dwelt, in a morbid way, on the physical sufferings of martyrs There is something very similar going on here.

What has been threatening religious belief for a century now is an increasing understanding of the physical world, which starts to leave little place for mystery, and no requirement for religion. Every reviewer has commented on how remarkably bloody the film is, as interested in wounds and torture as The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre. Behind the devout intentions, Mr Gibson seems to have devised a film which will delight not only the church parties taking block bookings, but the gross-out teenage market, too.The whole business has the air of the Counter-Reformation about it. That, in my view, is one reason why this whole project is a very bad idea.