Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, has announced that he will be donating his £4.6 million advance and all royalties from his memoir to a charity for injured British servicemen.

In response to this news, many of of our British cousins seem to be blowing a gasket. They howl in the tabloids and on social media about grievances real (underfunding and underequipping the troops) and imagined (the “lied us into” an “illegal” war canard) and everything in between. It’s as if they are opposed to this donation as a matter of principle—as if it were inseparable from everything they hated about his premiership, and because of that malum in se.

These are probably some of the same people who always insisted that Mother Teresa should have refused donations from the likes of Zaïre’s Mobutu…presumably she ought to have insisted that the money remain in his Swiss bank accounts, or be used to buy another armored Mercedes, instead. I am quite comfortable taking Blessed Teresa’s side of that argument. Similarly, in this context I don’t really care how much people may hate Tony Blair, or even how good their reasons may be for doing so. The man is giving a pile of money, which he earned and would be perfectly free to keep, to a good cause. Applaud that today; resume the Two Minutes Hate tomorrow.

Unless, of course, it just drives you too crazy to see someone whom you find repulsive turn around and do something good. If a bad man doing good (assuming arguendo that Blair is bad to the core) is such a grave violation of your categories that it outweighs the good the donation will do, then by all means continue to blow and rage and howl. You might just help keep something like it from happening in future…and then won’t you be so proud?