At the Edinburgh Festival — making some spondooliks while he can.

His Respect buddies are masters at comedy as well of course.

(Tip to his Bobness for the last link).

Perhaps you like a wee drink. Maybe the odd hand-rolled cigarette. Perhaps you might even take some E or an occasional line of cocaine. Not necessarily very wise, but you know this can be done without finding yourself slumped in a public toilet with a rope tied round your arm and a needle dangling from your vein. Then you’re confronted with someone who did find themselves in this state - before they saw the light and joined Narcotics Anonymous.

You’re confronted, in other words, with a convert. And converts are often pretty annoying. It isn’t so much the stridency of the position they invariably adopt, or the noisy self-congratulatory fashion with which they do so. It’s their evangelism - and it is over this that I want to take issue with Johann Hari.

Not that there isn’t plenty of other sources of irritation in the piece linked above. There’s the repetition, for example, of the falsehood that the Euston Manifesto is a prowar document. I wouldn’t accuse Johann of lying here - merely of being ignorant of the facts.

Then there’s the whole ‘Orwell’s mantle’ dispute between Hari and Cohen. I’ll restrict myself here to pointing out that if Johann Hari was as familiar with the Old Testament as he likes to pretend, he’d understand that citing someone as an inspiration and influence, or even forerunner of one’s own ideas, does not constitute claiming a mantle.

I’m not going to waste my time with an exegesis of p27 in Nick Cohen’s Pretty Straight Guys either. Suffice to say, even if the charge of inconsistency could be sustained, it’s a rather odd one to be coming from someone who has made such a virtue out of changing one’s mind.

No it’s the evangelism I can’t be doing with. For what is evangelism but a demand that others become replicas of yourself? Johann responded with bemusement and affected amusement that Norman Geras had described him as ‘religious’. “Who me? The fearless scourge of theocrats everywhere? Surely not?” Well, he didn’t mean it literally but since you mention it - all this “come hither to the pool of recantation” sounds pretty religious to me. But Johann Hari makes the same assumption as the heroin addict who is saying, in effect, “Repent ye - believe the truth of my words because I too used to be like you“. Here I must decline - one of the reasons being a disagreement over this last point.

Take the issue of oil-supplies, for example. Johann’s new revelation is, apparently, that this is what the war was all about. His lack of nuance here has been dealt with by Norman Geras but a more general point is that his demands for recantation shouldn’t be made on the assumption that everyone is as ignorant of economic history as he is. It’s a bit like when Robert Fisk said he didn’t believe America would be so interested in Iraq if its main export was beetroot. To which one can only respond with the American dismissive: no shit, Sherlock. Is this the sort of breath-taking insight that gets you a column in the Independent?

There’s more in this sort of vein. Sometimes I think it’s unfair to cast up the stuff people have written in the past and no longer agree with. We all say stupid things, ill-considered things, inconsistent things - but most of us are in the fortunate position of not having them in print so that they can be referred to again. But it’s salient in this case to point out that Johann Hari has come along way from advocating not only the invasion of Iraq but North Korea too because some of us were always more circumspect, sceptical, less quick to use the epithet ‘fascist’, and frankly less self-righteous in our support for the war than Johann Hari ever was.

And less confident in our ability to predict the future. In his columns Hari has explicitly stated his support for the war rested on a utilitarian calculation. Given this was so, his moral certitude at the time must have been based on a certainty as to the outcome. But since human beings can’t predict the future and that wars in particular have uncertain outcomes, I can’t see where he got his confidence from in the first place.

In this sense, then, Johann’s reconsideration of his previous views is not entirely unwelcome - it’s just the assumption of sameness that grates. Some of us supported the war, not because of what we thought we could know about the future but because of what we knew about the past. Some of us supported the war without convincing ourselves that Bush and co. were quite nice people, really. Some of us certainly did not impute consistency to the Bush regime. And unlike Johann, some of us supported the war even though we knew the outcome was uncertain; neither did we share his enthusiasm for extending the policy of ‘regime-change’ to North Korea.

I could go on but you’ll have got the point by now. I like a drink, so I do. I even like to get rat-arsed on the odd Friday night. But I won’t be joining Alcoholics Anonymous because thus far I’ve enjoyed these Glaswegian customs without getting to the stage of pouring vodka over my cornflakes in the morning. So I feel disinclined to take advice from someone who has. Recant? Enough of this cant.

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