Only the second week of January, and yet it is safe to say that the announcement that President George W. Bush has awarded Tony Blair the Presidential Medal for Services to Freedom must take the prize for the most nauseating single news item of 2009.

Of course, we can understand why Bush in the dying days of his disastrous presidency would want to 'honour' the national leader who took his country into two aggressive wars alongside America, when Blair might actually have prevented them by refusing to join in.

The Medal is really a consolation prize awarded to one rejected warmonger (prematurely retired as Prime Minister in 2007, largely because of Iraq) by another (a President with the lowest poll ratings in history, again because of Iraq).