Did somebody say something? No?

Sorry, it's just that this column thought it had been suffering problems with its hearing of late. A kind of all-encompassing deafness followed by an annoying ringing in the ears that builds up to intolerable levels.

Then it realised that it was just the sound of blatant self-censorship by the bold members of the fourth estate quickly followed by the usual execrably hagiographic revisionism and the sound of thousands of eyes being nonchalantly averted from the glaring truth.

Yes, this week was something of a red letter affair in terms of craven toadying and capitulation, with Israeli war criminal Ariel Sharon suddenly being posthumously transmogrified into a fully beatified saint by the majority of the world's media.

The death, after eight years in a coma, of the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila was met with a deluge of nauseating outpourings of sycophantic hyperbole on a scale not seen since, well, Thatcher a few months ago actually.

He was "a man of peace" and a "statesman" we were repeatedly told despite a mountain of corpses and a string of derailed peace talks proving the polar opposite.

About the only vaguely critical comment regarding Sharon that most of the pusillanimous press dared utter was that he, like Thatcher before him, was somewhat "divisive."

Well, that's one way of describing his annexation of large swathes of the West Bank and his key role in the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese, I suppose.

As euphemisms go, describing Sharon as "divisive" is akin to calling contracting bubonic plague "awkward."

Curiously, and no doubt entirely coincidentally, his death also seemed to trigger a dawning of the realisation in that warped construct that is Tony Blair's mind that he has some sort of job involving the Middle East.

The only time you see him these days is when he sees an opportunity to meddle in the country's affairs and further tarnish the Labour Party, or when someone has died - so just like the old days really.

He loves a good funeral doesn't he, Blair?

Can't get enough of them. I've lost count of how many he's been to in the last 12 months.

He's like one of those professional mourners who turn up at the interment of people they've never met pretending to be a long-lost relative in the hope of getting free egg sandwiches.

Or, in his case, five minutes of self-aggrandising and pious pontificating in front of the cameras.

If the prosecutors at the Hague ever get round to deciding they need to find him all they'd have to do is read the obits.

In fact the only thing he likes better than state funerals is cosying up to dictators and despots and on this occasion he got to kill two birds with one stone.

Speaking at the state memorial service in the southern Negev desert, Blair paid tribute to Sharon's "idea that the Jewish people, so often victims of injustice and persecution, should have a state where they could be independent and free.

"Think good or ill of Ariel Sharon, agree or disagree with him, but that calling - a noble one - was plain and unalloyed," he said.

As were his genocidal tendencies, but then Blair was never one to let the truth get in the way of a good soundbite.

And then, just when you thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, he added that the old fascist was "a warrior to create his country, yet wise enough to know that war alone could not secure his future."

Blair was probably sincere in his admiration of Sharon, as he most certainly was in his praise of Thatcher. Although it's difficult to tell because as usual he spent most of the time talking about himself.

It must really irk him that he's not the centre of attention on such occasions and for once I'm tempted to agree with him.