From the moment when the former Prime Minister was introduced to American TV viewers with a penis joke, to the moment when Jon Stewart cut him short by saying that “this is going to take us all night, and it’s not pleasant”, Tony Blair’s appearance on The Daily Show was never anything short of excruciating.

Blair looked profoundly uncomfortable. Perhaps Stewart’s introductory joke about spotted dick (“my recipe involves a magic marker, and my dick”) had made him wonder if the whole thing had been a terrible idea. It had.

Stewart challenged Blair’s claim that two democracies have never gone to war with each other, and cited the Falklands conflict as an example. Blair explained that, in fact, Argentina was then under the antidemocratic rule of Leopoldo Galtieri - he of the junta. It was his only victory, however.

After an awkward back-and-forth over Catholicism and the unlikely Bush friendship, Stewart finally went for his guest on Iraq. Blair responded by dropping a Sincerity Bomb. “In the end you have to come down on one side or another,” he said, fixing Stewart with a stare that seemed at odds with his hot pink tie. “These are things you then live with for the rest of your life, and so you should.”

I wondered if Mr Blair might burst into tears. Stewart stammered: “So, so, d’you think? Strategically - like, so, strategically - you would still say, that [invading] was the smart move?” Blair fudged in response. Stewart’s confidence now rising, he asked, in reference to 9/11, how any kind of military action could help to prevent 19 psychopaths from hijacking four aeroplanes. The studio audience whooped and cheered.

Blair just gave an anguished grin.

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