For once Tony Blair told the truth. With a "wall of sound" from hundreds of anti-war protestors in the background, he told the Westminster Cathedral audience at his lecture on Faith and Globalisation on 3 April, "I make no claims for moral superiority. Quite the reverse."

Blair's boundless hypocrisy and gall was much to the fore in the rest of his speech, in which he called for "people of faith" like himself -- for whom "belief is quintessentially about truth" -- to become "the conscience of the world". No mention of course of the serial lying he told to take Britain into an immoral and illegal war. No mention indeed of Iraq at all, which the United Nations calls the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world today.

Blair claimed his faith guided him "to do good, to think and act beyond the limitations of selfish human desires". Clearly his faith went into hiding over the last few months when he pocketed a five million pound advance for his memoirs, took a part-time advisory role with bankers JP Morgan, said to be worth up to £2.5m a year, and another advisory role with Swiss insurers Zurich worth half a million a year, added to which the £230,000 he got for one speech in China was just small change. (See http://tinyurl.com/2cbhnm)

The Westminster Cathedral lecture was preceded outside by a silent vigil by Catholic anti-war group Pax Christi, members of which then joined Stop the War's noisy protest timed to start as Blair began speaking. For once, an anti-war protest got some media coverage, the Daily Mail report being one of the better examples: http://tinyurl.com/yoctq3

However, the BBC's Today programmed managed to have a long feature on Blair's speech without mentioning the protests outside. Musician and record producer Brian Eno, who participated in the anti-war "wall of "sound", sent this response to the BBC:

"Your 'Today' report about Blair's speech failed to mention the source of the noise in the background: many hundreds of people protesting outside against the absurdity of the man who has presided over Britain's biggest foreign policy disaster since the Crimean War being asked to talk about globalisation. The real democrats were outside last night. Funny you missed them."

Many thanks to Brian and everyone else who made the "wall of sound" protest so memorable. Blair apologised to his audience that we there. "Sorry about the people who follow me around," he said. We intend to keep doing so until he is held to account for his part in war crimes that have destroyed Iraq, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians and turned four million people -- one in seven of the population -- into refugees.