YOU couldn’t say it took wild horses. Not quite – unless a parliamentary select committee, usually a plodding beast, can be considered “wild”.

For it required a summons from one of those, charged with scrutinising Northern Ireland, to bring Tony Blair back to the Palace of Westminster, to face questions about the controversial “comfort” letters sent to more than 200 suspected IRA terrorists following the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.

Undisclosed at the time, the existence of the letters, linked to almost 300 murders, emerged only by accident last year when a trial collapsed on the production of one of the letters, which promised freedom from prosecution.

Mr Blair told the committee the issue of dealing with the suspects, known as OTRs, or On The Runs, was “absolutely critical to the peace process and at certain points fundamental to it”. He left little doubt the IRA would have withdrawn without the letters. Yet the public was left in ignorance of this key element of the peace process. Why?

Mr Blair had a curious answer: “It evolved. It’s not that we decided not to tell people. It’s just that it wasn’t the focus.”

Perhaps here’s an insight into Mr Blair’s mind. The people, the voters, the electorate, were “not the focus”. So much for democracy. Maybe that also explains why it took nine months to get Mr Blair in front of the select committee, to which he graciously allotted an hour of his invaluable time.

But his appearance at least confirmed something else about the “peace process”. “It is fragile still,” he warned the committee. Indeed – with “peace walls” still threading Belfast and parades and the flying of flags still able to set communities virtually at each other’s throats, the peace process often looks very like a papering over, or at best plastering over, of cracks. Seventeen years in duration already, how long should a peace process run before it is reasonable to expect it to have matured into proper peace?

SUNDAY brings the 50th anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill. I have a book – Sir Winston Churchill: A Memorial - largely recording his last days and his great state funeral. The most affecting photographs are not of the lying in state in Westminster Hall, the funeral procession or the service in St Paul’s. They are of tearful people outside his home, the snowed-on serpentine queue of people waiting, up to three hours, to file past his coffin, and the crane jibs dipped in his honour as the funeral barge sails up the Thames.

On learning of Sir Winston’s death, the French President, General Charles de Gaulle, remarked: “Now Britain is no longer a great power.” But if Churchill’s passing marked the end of an era, how much more so will that be when the Queen dies? Head of a still-global Empire on her accession, her remit now struggles beyond Northumberland.

Incidentally, the final photo in my memorial book shows Churchill’s coffin being ceremonially carried up a ramp into the humble Southern Railway parcel van now newly refurbished at Shildon.

A poll suggests almost half of British people - 45 per cent - hold at least one anti-Semitic view. Well, I’m going to assume that doesn’t include you.