Two details that I've heard of Tony Blair's memoir feel like they make lots of sense of his predicament now - the loving turned to loathing. First, that his relationship with Gordon Brown was like that between lovers. Second, that he was like Diana: instinctively, emotionally manipulative.

I imagine that all Blair's intimate relationships are a bit like those between lovers, and he conjured such intimacy between us, the voters, and himself. So the feeling now is like that between former lovers: we know him too well. Couple that to the manipulativeness, and I reckon the problem is not so much that he span, not that he lied, but it's something more psychological. He was the dominant partner in the relationship, as the political heavyweight of a generation. Now, we feel abused by his force of will. I feel it still, every time I hear the phrase, 'It's the right thing to do.'

I have to say that I didn't before, but I want to read the book now, to see for sure what went wrong between us.

The anxiety about the effects of the internet upon our social lives is fascinating. Almost every day, there's a new story - generally, like Eric Schmidt earlier in the week fearing the end of privacy - deepening the worry.

The truth must be that we don't know the changes that social networking and the like will wrought - if any. Though I fear they'll make our worlds less subtle, more black and white, as online relationships collapse to the click; as online tools play back to us only what we've shown we enjoy already; as online media encumber us with a past we can't forget.

Nietzsche had a brilliant thought on that: 'Forgetting is not simply a kind of inertia, as superficial minds tend to believe, but rather the active faculty to... provide some silence, a "clean slate" for the unconscious, to make place for the new... those are the uses for what I have called an active forgetting.' If you can't actively forget your past, you can't actively move into a new future.

Monday's news is of the horrors of war, what with the leaks of atrocities in Afghanistan and the trial of a Khmer Rouge leader. Afghanistan is live, with us, too close. There is, though, a little distance between us and Cambodia's horror, a function of geographical and historical distance. And that makes for the different feel of the reporting today.

I only visited Cambodia as a tourist, but our guide had experienced the Khmer Rouge years. He’d argued that justice was not possible because of the scale of what’d happened: you’d have to haul a significant percentage of the population into the courts, and society would be destroyed in the process. He also remarked that people prefer to forget - only they don’t, of course. And maybe something else is possible.

That struck me, when the journalist who'd tracked down the Khmer prison chief Duch, talked of a quest not so much for Duch himself, as understanding. The great lesson, Nic Dunlop said, is that at the end of the trail you find a wizened old man who appears to be contrite about his role in some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. ‘As long as he remains a human being, and that’s what I found, there is hope.’

When there's no practical justice that can do justice to what's happened, it's as if an alternative imperative comes through: can we see what's happened in a place beyond good and evil, as it were, and with seeing, hold the horror - to comprehend a little, to punish in small part - but mostly to live on, with more awareness of the past. That’s valuable too because, as has been learnt from other atrocities, not least the European holocaust, the present carries what happened; it returns and can haunt successive generations. But what I heard Dunlop saying is that hope can return too, when individuals involved in the horror manage to commit to life still - even when perpetrators.

I see that Facebook has just signed up its half billionth user. Phew. But what's this saying, doing to friendship?

I suspect that the internet tends to exaggerate our virtues and vices. So it's easy to find examples of kindness online, and just as easy to find examples of abuse. Hence, it's both good and bad, and commentators tend to be either utopians or dystopians. But the truth is more subtle.

For example, Facebook must encourage the need for distractions - flitting from one thing to the next - and as we become what we are, it might be that deeper relationships, which take attention and time, might become harder to achieve. Related to that is the fact that the Facebook interface is pretty monodimensional, compared with all sorts of other ways you can interact online, let alone interact in real life: Facebook assumes you have one identity when, in reality, you have many that change according to who you're with. And Facebook arguably forces certain encounters that in the real world would be handled more humanely. This is the 'ignore' button phenomenon, when you're asked to be a friend, and have to say no. Causal callousness, you might say. You can also point to the fact that screens screen, so it can be unclear who you're interacting with.

But probably people get pretty smart pretty fast with this kind of technology. So, there's evidence that people use it both to stay in touch with close friends - to be virtually present to them - and to keep others at an appropriate distance, and not allow them to get too close. And remember the neologisms of Facebook - 'friending', 'defriending', 'unfriending'. They suggest users are aware that something different is going on compared with real world befriending, which is an altogether richer experience.

All in all, because of these ambivalences, I can't but help wonder whether Facebook will go the way it's come: our relationship with it is shallow, and as it's so speedily come to loom so large in people's lives, so it'll fade relatively suddenly too.

I notice that the Archbishop of York cited our Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis report during his presidential address to the General Synod, to launch an apparently blanket criticism of contemporary journalism as careless with truth, deploying spin and propaganda, and resorting 'to misleading opinions paraded as fact' - particularly in relation to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He failed to mention that the report was actually published by a newspaper and edited by two journalists, myself and Madeleine Bunting. Surely he wasn't using it to deploy his own spin and propaganda?

Jeffrey John has come to represent the shadow for conservative evangelical Christians. That's the only way I can understand the extraordinary comparison Anglican Mainstream's Chris Sugden made on the Today programme this morning. He likened John's unsuitability to be bishop of Southwark because of his same-sex relationship, to an expenses fiddling politician who is unsuitable to be an MP.

Expenses fiddling is wholly unlike a stable, faithful, lifelong relationship of love, as you'd think a self-styled advocate of the Christian gospel would realise. But expenses fiddling has also become totemic of all that's going wrong in contemporary public life - corruption, loss of values, shameless self-interest.

That's what Sugden thinks of gay relationships, though that what he's talking about is actually a manifestation of human love is why I can only put his comparison down to that repressed part of the psyche - individual or collective - referred to as the shadow. The shadow is that which is viewed as the enemy, though is actually a friend, because befriended it allows you see the truth of things more clearly, and thus makes you more whole. In particular, you would no longer confuse committed love with corruption.

If the church had any capacity for maturity, which it does, it would welcome John as a bishop.

There's another secular row running, this time in Leicester. The new Lord Mayor is a humanist, appointed a humanist chaplain, and then refused to take part in the cathedral Civic Service. It seems a simple case of principle resisting establishment, as Theo Hobson argues. But it's actually more complex.

Leicester has been celebrated as a city where pluralism works, particularly religious pluralism. But those large populations of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and others don't just happen to get on. It takes work, and the cathedral, and its services, play a role in that.

The secularist stand occurs against the backdrop of other changes too. For example, the new editor of the local newspaper has been told to boost the circulation. The fear is that means carrying inflammatory, interracial stories on the front page - something the previous editor had a deliberate policy against.

Little wonder religious leaders of all persuasions in the city are up in arms about the Lord Mayor and his stance. He, in turn, is apparently receiving lessons in having a public role. (It's not the same as personal politics.)

As people begin to look for a cause of the hideous killings yesterday in Cumbria, the most sensible, though unpalatable, comment I heard came from a criminal psychologist who pointed out that the biggest mass killer in history, Harold Shipman, killed coolly and under a veneer of compassion. Which is to say that it seems likely there will be no adequate explanation. In that, it'd be like other horrors that human beings inflict on others. 'Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of the human mind in ruins,' wrote Scrope Davies.

It's the verb of the weekend, in the UK. Is Nick going to get into bed with Dave? Or is Gordon going to entice Nick to get into bed with him?

It's a fascinating construction, harking back, I suspect, to a time when bedfellows, and lords and ladies of the bedchamber, had political access to the ruler; they had countenance, as Francis Bacon puts it, or honour; we might say they had political capital. People, then, lived in much closer proximity and many of the functions that we assume to be strictly private, like sleeping, were more public. Hence the vast medieval beds you can see in stately homes.

William Laud, the 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, recorded that he dreamt of sharing his bed once more with the Duke of Buckingham. They were not lovers, but allies and friends. And that clarification, necessary now, highlights why the phrase is so arresting.

We live in an age in which physical proximity between people of the same sex, particularly men, has become suspect. 'To be bedfellows' now means something else entirely. It's why the papers this morning are having such fun with whether Dave will bed Nick, or Nick will get into bed with Gordon. He-he. But it's a shame really, the loss of a kind of intimacy, physical and social; a thinning out of our lives.

It's election day in the UK, and yet it's not entirely obvious why you, as an individual, should vote.

Many will say it’s your duty, only duties usually carry direct ramifications, and voting doesn’t. Why? Because if you don’t vote, it’ll make so little difference as to be undetectable, and most probably no difference at all. That’s the first past the post system for you. Of course, if many people decided not to vote, as they probably will, a difference is felt. But you’re not responsible for them, only for yourself. So why bother?

Here’s a better reason. It seals your status as a citizen; it’s what citizens do. Politics is about shaping society so that the people within it can flourish. If you want a part in that, and it’s definitely in your interests to have one, then voting is your moment to say ‘I do’. So do vote, I’d say.