Sometimes in life you find yourself asking one of those tricky, definitive questions. In this job, in fact, a particular inquiry comes up. If you did the decent thing, you would just stand up to kick yourself, then attempt a response. Only this: how bloody stupid am I?

Don't all answer at once. I bring it up only because I remember writing screeds, not so long ago, on the apparent disjunction between the reported earnings of a certain Prime Minister, his wholly brilliant lawyer wife and the costs attached to a portfolio of properties. Not to mention an alleged £5m in mortgage dues.

The text, then current, involved Cherie Blair's eagerness to turn out for anything involving a cheque, a celeb or free leisure wear. Tawdry, one said. They can never pay those bills, one added. This pair could never possibly afford such sums, one asserted, confidently.

So, how stupid am I? Or rather, how stupid are we all? And how many peerages could Mr Blair afford, currently, at the going rate?

The week before last, the former leader of a movement created for the benefit of ordinary working people turned up, in France, at a fan rally for Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the republic. Fluently, Mr Blair said that there is no longer an important difference between right and left. I said to myself: "There is. Move just a bit more to the right, and I'll get a clean shot."

Terrorism, plainly. Or, at the very least, an intent to terrorise. Oops. But what is, these days, the difference between a former British Prime Minister and a reckless lunatic peddling global terrorism? As it turns out, about £40m, over five years, from an assortment of wholly undemocratic corporate interests. Tony is being paid off.

You may have read or heard this elsewhere. You may even have asked yourself why laws do not exist to deal with "this sort of thing". You may then have deplored this week's nonentity Tory claiming allowances on behalf of his absent student sprogs. The best way this topic can be described, nevertheless, is that Blair has begun to make even Bill Clinton's dealings look like chicken-feed. In my book, that's conspicuous. And all of it is legal.

I thought the Blairs were broke. I could not, being a simpleton, work out how all those vast debts could be made to resemble a mere parody of a simple household budget. I also had the deluded notion that even the core Blairites would never be quite so squalid, quite so grasping, quite so blatant. As I may have confessed previously: stupid. Thick.

My indignation is neither here nor there. Blair was dancing with Sarkozy in the pale moonlight because he wants desperately to become the first semi-permanent president of the European Union. And all of that, equally, in the context of a dismal deal he rammed through in his very last days in office. If you get no whiff of rat from that, you may have lost your sense of smell. But still: why?

Can't be the money. As best as anyone can calculate, £2.5m for advising J P Morgan, the people who gave us the Great War, and £2m a year from Zurich, the nice gnomes who insure things, is generally superior and preferable to the mere £200,000 you get for representing 380 million ordinary European citizens. Mr Blair is fond, I'm told, of public service.

You can grow fond of many things, unless you are representing all those huddling European suckers in Washington, where (it so happens) your personal Congressional Medal of Honor still awaits collection, and until all the droplets of blood have settled in the hot Iraqi dust. If settle they ever do.

Did I mention that our Mr Blair is, by all the readings of all the very dull books I can muster - and he affects to have read a couple - a war criminal? True. It is, in fact, and by international convention, the law. No biggie, not to the spiritual heirs of the pirate Morgan, and certainly not to very reputable insurers with a noble Swiss heritage who might buy up a former Prime Minister for his "advice".

Did I also forget to say that selling baubles became an offence almost a century ago? And did we even get around to discussing treason, and market-sensitive information hawked around by erstwhile heads of government? Never mind. Life is tough, as always, when the mortgage bill presses. Mr Blair, beyond question, shares our pain.

I share his. I could even contribute to his quota, if the Blair household is running short. Twiddling your thumbs, Tony, you could, meanwhile, be hard at work, even now, on one of those "Middle East peace deals". That's a career move, if Israel and Washington allow, and if you dare. Still, perhaps I missed the meeting, and the vote, and the press conference: but how did the very nice new man from J P Morgan become my "envoy" in the Middle East?

Never mind. The starving and brutalised children of Gaza will not, with luck, ever hear or recognise your name. I come from a different world. That would be the one in which you, all people, can be allowed legally to steal a political movement, commit flagrant deceits and war crimes, flog off the memoir later (Murdoch, £5m), and go unpunished.

In a conventional column, I would now be assailing Prime Minster Brown for allowing former Prime Minister Blair to "get away with it". Not significant. What Blair is doing, currently, ought to be illegal, but it is not: a fact. What Mr Blair wrought in our foreign affairs ought to have been illegal thrice over - a war crime is not a small thing, I think - but was not. The word I employed previously was stupid.

They believe that we are. From the latest paltry expenses scams to the expeditionary nonsense that gets kids maimed in an Afghan desert, they believe that you are as deeply thick as I, unquestionably, am. Let Blair away with his "post-premiership career" and you prove them right. The abysmal little man should have been locked up for the peerages panto, never mind for the rest of the abuses of power, and the for many dead. But it didn't happen. That's also strange.

So we happy campers just press on. It is no small thing, as Mr Brown has yet to appreciate, to continue to accuse the august former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of war crimes, and of self-enrichment. You had best imagine yourself capable of proving it, most days.

I'll do it, though, if no-one else can be bothered. Two very small reasons: it happens to be true, and because, in fact, we cannot lecture anyone in any part of the world until we part Blair from his corporate money, and render his selfish carcass to some form of justice. I am, actually, serious.

Or try it this way. Myself and my invariably-wicked offspring tried to talk it through, very briefly, on a wet afternoon. I said: "What do you think? Kill Blair, Vols I and II." He didn't laugh.

Instead he offered, Tony Blair: My Part in His Downfall.

I promised to use my best efforts.