forget brown, but remember blair
Gordon Brown may well turn out to be the only Prime Minister in history who became history, and was then completely forgotten by history. While the bloke is currently something of an embarrassment, he is also a tragic personality.
We are all human and multi-faceted, but truly tragic people have only the extremes in their personalities. The Prime Minister is at one and the same time naïf, dangerous anti-l ibertarian, nasty smear merchant, clueless economic twit, mega-bright mathematician, and genuinely supporter of the Poor. In being so psychologically and ethically muddled, he personifies the end of one Age and the gradual start of another.
But jeux de mots aside, Gordon Brown is history. We should forget his obscenely oligarchic rise, and move on with all due consideration.
The man we should remember and judge is Tony Blair. The real villain of this twelve-year piece both got away scot-free, and got himself re-elected three times. So if we want to know how – from here going forward not back - the UK might fall off the edge of the first world, crash down to earth in flames, and become a brutalist State, we need to remind ourselves about the nature of Teflon Tony.
A man who came to power by creating high expectations, he ran the country using low cunning. He left Office needily demanding a positive legacy - despite having saddled the country with a dreadful one. He offered hope to millions, talked of a new beginning, delivered next to nothing - but right to the end insisted he had always done what he thought was ‘the right thing’.
As a former market researcher, I have some time for what people say, but place far more emphasis on what they do.
Let us look initially at the company he kept. Campbell, the arch truth-bender; Mandelson, the original close to the wind risk-taker; Levy, the money-grubber; Berlusconi, the latter-day Mussolini womaniser; and George W Bush, after Warren Harding the most incompetent President in American history. Above all – on his own admission – Blair admitted that he was entranced by the company of famous, stylish and wealthy people. In the age of celebrity, he seemed like an avid reader of Hello.
Now look at his legislative actions. A fey bourgeois, he really believed in naming and shaming, ASBOs, targets and the New Labour ‘gesture’ approach to problems. All the things in severe need of attention – banking excesses, diluted armed forces budgets, aged care meltdown, desperate inner-city dwellers – he either talked a good game about, or ignored completely.
Mendacious on every level, he lied about watching 1950s footballers, educational achievements, Iraq dossiers, crime rates, immigration levels and checks, NHS expenditures, his intentions for Gordon Brown….even what he had previously said in Parliament.
Next, consider the ruthlessness of his disregard for constitutional mores. He went to war illegally, covered up the graft involved in BaE arms contracts, was happy to support privileged protection for Islamics, argued for fines without trial across a dizzying range of offences, told the British voter that ID cards “are just the same as passports”, bullied the BBC – and was at least complicit in the death of an honourable senior civil servant, whose only crime was to tell the truth.
Finally, observe the mind-boggling cynicism of his behaviour since leaving office. Advanced a small fortune to write his memoirs, his irate publishers have yet to see anything beyond an outline. Offered even more to lecture in the US, he has left many an audience pondering on the minimal time and effort put into his speeches. Appointed to partake in clearing up a Middle Eastern mess he helped create, Blair has infuriated other peacemakers with his desultory attitude, skipped meetings and missed deadlines.
Tony Blair has become an extremely wealthy and world-famous multi-millionaire as a result of these meagre efforts. And therein, I suspect, sits the key to the man.
Like so many of his generation – weekend hippies and University radicals – afterwards he slipped easily into what was termed (with frightening accuracy) the Me Generation. I’m Me, and that’s it: there’s only once round the track, and to hell with any Higher Order considerations. Do what you have to do, say what you have to say, but have a ready smile…..and a Get out of Jail Free card. We’ll be in Opposition forever at this rate: to Hell with social justice. I could be waiting years for the top job – to Hell with promises made to Gordon. I want it now! I, me - me me me me me me: the Special One!
Margaret Thatcher dangled the carrot of true wealth, heroic achievement and boundless fame for all, no matter how humble their beginnings. It was all rubbish of course, but along with many others in the media set, she paved the way for the material celebrity obsessions and gross talent contests that scar our national culture today. Tony Blair affirmed the correctness of her vision by acting it out while in the Office of Prime Minister.
This performance ended with the mad hubris of star-struck bankers like Freddie Goodwin, and the Have Fun but Don’t Get Caught ethics of the Parliamentary expense-account troughers. But at last in 2009, it has given us a 20:20 razor-sharp picture of just how illusory, unpleasant and selfishly anti-social all these castles, moats and duck-houses in the air are: for on a planet where eight billion humans reside, there is only one way it can happen on a grand scale – at the expense of others less fortunate than ourselves.
We had to have a Margaret Thatcher and a Tony Blair to end up with a Gordon Brown. But if we’re being fair, the Mad Handbag believed – as indeed does the demented Macbeth who now stands before us with most of his clothes gone. Tony Blair never believed in anything beyond the canonisation of Tony Blair: through power, money, fame and, in the end, Papal approval. Let us all pray to whatever Gods, intelligences and icons we cherish that – if nothing else – Blair has set one standard: how not to behave.