Here is a tweet I posted recently, after watching the documentary Once Upon a Time in Iraq:

Dear Mr. Blair, I don’t care what you believe. I don’t care if you believe you did the right thing. What you believe does not matter. It does not matter if you believe you did the right thing. You are a war criminal. You were a war criminal then and you are a war criminal now.

I could quite easily have written that I’m as angry now as I was angry then. And that now, as then, I still don’t know what to do with my rage.

I wasn’t brutalised by the Iraq war; I wasn’t killed or maimed; I didn’t lose someone close to me. What did happen was that I lived through events I knew were wrong but felt powerless to stop. No amount of political activism could stop the invasion, so what then could I do? (As Tolstoy asked: what then must we do?)

I’m a writer. My response to the world is to write. It has been this way since my late teens and it will be this way for as long as I’m here on the planet. It’s what is happening here, right now: my only response to watching the documentary is to sit down and write out my thoughts, because what else can I do?

Better writers than me have tackled the great events of the day – and to better effect too. Keith Ridgway, for example in Hawthorn and Child, describes Blair as ‘the chooser of death. He has chosen death and he has chosen to visit it on others when no such choice was necessary. He is the progenitor of the crushed skulls of baby girls. He is the father of the dead bodies of children and the raped mothers and the bludgeoned fathers.’

I write primarily for myself and my book Dancing to the End of Love was written in response to the invasion of Iraq and its continuing legacy. At that time, it felt to me that the only narrative worth telling was from the viewpoint of a prisoner held without trial. More than this, I wanted my narrator to be a hapless victim of the stupidity at play in this world, a man so brutalised in his personal life he believes the political can’t touch him. But of course it does and he, in turn, inflicts his pain on to others. In a series of doomed relationships, he tries and fails to find some peace with this world.

And on it goes, this cycle of needless harm in a world of plenty:

‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past . . .’