By 8am, the hardiest of protesters from the Stop the War Coalition had already assembled at the entrance of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster. An unprepossessing building, the centre is almost equidistant between the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the Churchill Museum, sitting atop the old 1939 Cabinet War Rooms, deep buried to ensure that the government could continue, even if the city were scraped off the face of the earth.

The day was raw cold, the sky low and white, the stone city of Westminster near-sepia. The protestors’ placards were identically printed — Blair, with a bloodspot, where the hole of the ‘a’ was — the only colour of the day, courtesy of the redoubtable Socialist Workers Party, which keeps the anti-war movement going. By mid-morning there were about 200 of them. Everyone said that move had been expected, but it is hard to imagine why.

A hearing for a man long gone from power, into a war Britain has now quit, with no real powers to take matters further, and reporting at the end of the year….it was a cold dark day, and it was amazing that as many as 200 had turned up. As with all such British protests, they looked less like a mass of ranked Bolsheviks than a ramble of trainspotters, dressed like Paddington Bear, all anoraks and scarves. Herded around the various nooks and crannies — the centre is in a street called, near unbelievably, Broad Sanctuary — by police who have become expert at controlling protests through the judicious scattering — one man yelled “if we’re going to have a police state, you might at least organise it properly!” Ah, Les Anglais.

Mr Tony had arrived two hours earlier, through a side entrance under cover of dark, and then cooled his heels in a room until the hearing started at 9.30. To say it was going to be a tough day for him was something of an understatement. Among those in the public gallery — the places awarded by ballot — were the families of twenty of the 150 UK soldiers killed in the conflict.

By the account of those inside, Blair looked like death itself when he emerged into the auditorium — your correspondent was watching it outside, on his iPhone — and his hands shook as he reached for the water-glass. Was it the sense that the eyes of not merely the living, but those standing behind, were upon him? Or the simple fear that someone would have smuggled a concealed shiv into the proceedings?

Whatever state he began, by a quarter of an hour into the six-hour session he had got well into his stride. “Most British Prime Ministers in such a situation sound like a bloke running a corner shop,” one comedian noted, “Blair sounded like the President of the United States.” Surrounded by papers and books, he was out of the gate on each question before any of the board could finish, urging them to read speeches he’d given on the topic, and, until explicitly restrained, threatening to read whole sections of them into the minutes.

Much of the subsequent commentary on his appearance there has focused on his refusal to make any statement of regret, towards the end of the hearing, even when giving a few explicit opportunities by the panel. For the British public, this refusal to take the opportunity to empathise was the very opposite of what they’d come to expect from Mr Smiley. Indeed it was practically, an anti-Blair, brusque, physically rigid, never defensive, but never for a moment relaxed. He reminded me of a small claims petitioner, who has taken his own case to heart — live as a wire on his one day in court, determined to show the ways in which he has been wronged, shamed, maltreated.

The man’s adamant refusal to express any disquiet at the mayhem and suffering he helped unleash appears to have soured his reputation with much of the public, creating a mild feeling of disgust in many quarters. But it is the least important part of his testimony, the particular emotions of this or that leader being irrelevant to the moral and political issues. What was most amazing came in the first few hours of his testimony, as he unrolled at great length his whole operational picture of the world and the Middle East at the time.

Piece by piece, he put in place an overarching view of international relations which, while plausible and rational at every part, was, when combined, stark staring mad — a belief that the West, with the US and UK at its core, can continue to define global security wholly in terms set by those nations, who can then project power across any borders at will. Many have suggested that over the course of his premiership, Blair became a US-style neocon.

He did nothing of the sort. He became — or always was — an old fashioned British-first imperialist, seeing the various states of the region as nothing more than the porous, treaty-rigged fiefdoms they had been at the time of their creation after the First World War. As he recounted the various calculi that had gone into his decision to put the UK to war, one was reminded of Lloyd-George’s remark about why he had to sack Churchill: “he kept getting out his maps. Chap wouldn’t stop getting out his maps.”

By Blair’s wide-ranging account, the Americans were almost never in it — no more than the big, dumb guys with the guns one would have to persuade, not merely into wrecking the joint, but remaking it in a new image. Kipling’s White Man’s Burden was the text — his poem at the time of the US invasion of the Philippines, an adventure that sparked a ten year insurgency, the brutal suppression of which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, urging America to take up the imperial adventure under Europe’s tutelage. It was gob-smacking.

The panel took him through the years prior to the invasion, and the manner of his thinking about the overall situation. For Blair, by his own account, the crucial fact of 9/11 was not whether or not there had been any connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda — he accepted that there wasn’t — but that the events of that day made the combination of dictatorial viciousness and an appetite for lethal weapons something that could no longer be ignored, wherever it was. Given these two conditions, nothing but the strongest action could be taken against Saddam.

That came up against two major problems mid-morning: firstly that the UK’s infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ — which had said Saddam had WMDs “45 minutes from use” — was ridiculed at the time as a farrago, and secondly, Blair had already told an interviewer in 2009 that he would have gone after Saddam anyway. Faced with the former, Blair simply quibbled about the meaning of the phrase “beyond doubt” attached to the dossier, insisting entirely falsely that no-one had seriously questioned its veracity. In the incriminating interview, he simply sidestepped by referring to the persuasive techniques of the interviewer Fern Brittan — a woman who, were she any fluffier, could be used for cleaning flues.

She was a lot more forensic than the inquiry which time and again let Blair get away with blue murder, raising questions as to what exactly the inquiry was. Was it meant to have a genuinely forensic quality, to play people’s contradictions back to them? Or would that be an abrogation of the authority of parliament? But if not, what was the point of it in the first place?

Take Blair’s slightly angered defense of the options open to Saddam to avoid a full-scale invasion — a vital point if he was to avoid the charge that he had engaged the whole nation in a years long con: “…look if Saddam had done a Gaddafi, if he’d said ‘look here’s our weapons, here’s our programmes talk to our scientists, taken them out of the country…’ etc etc. Yes, all very reasonable , if only Iraq had given up its WMD programme, until you remember that IRAQ DIDN’T HAVE A WMD PROGRAMME! So they were being asked to prove what they didn’t have.

Furthermore, Gaddafi’s Libya has no immediate enemies on its doorstep, whereas Iraq could rightly say that an exposure of all its facilities (which it gave up anyway) was a tip of the hat to Iran, with whom it had had, erm, some issues in the past. For Blair, the post 9.11 doctrine was that you couldn’t just go around regime-changing because people were dictators – there had to be a security threat – but that such a threat could be far more liberally interpreted when a country happened to be run by a dictator.

What few seemed to have picked up – in all the stuff about Blair’s lack of emoting – was that this doctrine is like an Escher picture, the different parts connecting together in impossible ways. On the one hand it seems to present the Westphalia idea id the integrity of nation-states as a guiding principle, the security of which must be guaranteed by the ability of some to reach into states they don’t like and completely re-arrange them. By lunchtime, Blair was talking about how the failure of the post-invasion effort had made it necessary to consider whether Iran would not be next in the sites.

By afternoon tea, Yemen was enrolled as a future target for invasion – “you see the thing is other people see these as separate” Blair noted, “whereas I’m afraid I don’t.”

You can say that again. As he rolled out the maps, metaphorically speaking, the magical thinking turned it into a magical carpet, a delusional space bearing no relation to the real place. In Blair’s Middle East, the post-invasion insurgency produced by its brutality, and rewarding fanatics “was the very people we’d gone into fight.” Casually speaking of Muqtaddar Al-Sadr, Blair spoke of discussions as to whether to legitimise him or arrest him – the imperial attitude in a nutshell.

The legitimacy of any local institution is reduced to zero, and any recognition of it is purely tactical, which is no recognition at all. Simultaneously boring yet riveting, predictable yet deeply disquieting, Blair’s evidence was that of a man for whom the plan was everything, the actual people subject to it nothing at all. Saddam was a monster because he killed thousands of civilians, whereas the Coalition’s killing of similar or greater numbers was “doing what had to be done.”

In the end, it was all ultimately dissatisfying. Blair held his own intellectually, even though he could have been held to account on half a dozen major points, and the one heckle, at his lack of regrets — “what not even one” — had a feeble, defeated air about it. He was asked if he had anything he wanted to add, he said no, and then he was gone, impatient to be out of the country whose shitty little island status offends his deep-seated imperial desires.

Off back to his pointless, embarrassing non-role as ‘middle east peace envoy’, to dodging an international war crimes writ, and to his insane and vaulting ambition, now focused on glittering unobtainable prizes — UN Sec-Gen, EU President. He is fleeing of course neither guilt, nor shame, but the simple emptiness that attends him, and will take him in the darkness, should he ever stop moving forward. He would cave in like an abandoned church.

The only leader to take Labour to three consecutive victories, he is nevertheless a pariah in his own party, a reminded of its wasted promise and missed opportunity, a mood that will only have deepened with this performance, its contempt for party and voters, and their doubts, and their failure to see the brilliance of the plan, barely concealed.

By day’s end, the protestors, of whom only 50 or so remained, had managed to surround several entrances, but they never found the one he came out of. A woman who had lost a son had broken down in the public gallery and had to be helped out. It was a grey day, useful for an insight into Blair’s thought processes, but yielding nothing new.

Deeply unpleasant without being in any way formidable, it was an unwelcome return by a man we thought we’d seen the back of. I hope to hell I don’t have to sit through the arrogant, unctuous death’s head rictus of his very ordinary madness for many years to come, unless it is to answer charges rather than questions. The world is wide, but it may prove no broad sanctuary for him in the long run.