There was a time when Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair seemed to possess an infallible knack for divining the public mood, for finding just the right words to say at times of national and international drama. Following the death of Princess Diana in 1997, Blair gave plangent voice to the nation’s sense of loss. Similarly, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the New Labour leader was quick to articulate the profound sympathy Britons felt for Americans in their traumatized state.
Now, however, Blair’s fabled sureness of touch seems to be deserting him. His disinclination to abandon his family holiday in Egypt and return to Britain at a time when his fellow countrymen, along with the rest of the world, have been grieving over the victims of the Asian tsunami, is widely felt to have been a presentational error he would not have made in previous times. As such, it created a public relations headache for Blair’s colleague, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Entrusted with the awkward task of explaining why the prime minister had not returned to London, Straw worked hard at reassuring the British people that their leader was taking the closest possible interest in developments. The trouble was that the more Straw held forth, the more he appeared to be engaged in a faintly demeaning damage limitation exercise.
That Blair’s stock has fallen still further in the eyes of much of the British public can hardly be doubted. Media pundits have been comparing his inertia during the present crisis to the speed with which he moved to identify himself with outpourings of mass emotion on earlier occasions. It may be that eight grueling years in power — during which Blair has endlessly jetted from country to country, often at the behest of the administration of US President George W. Bush — have sapped Blair’s energy and clouded his judgment. Nevertheless, it is perhaps worth asking whether, jaded though he may be, the prime minister would have persisted with his Egyptian vacation if the catastrophe in the Far East had worn a more specifically British or American aspect. Given what the world has learned about his priorities, it seems more than a little unlikely.
For Blair’s enemies, the PR fix he has got himself into could not be more gratifying. With a general election expected to take place in the first half of 2005, his questionable conduct has furnished them with an excellent opportunity to portray him as a leader whose chief characteristics are cynicism and insensitivity. Last week, anti-Blair newspapers were highlighting the possibly compromising fact that Jack Straw kept trying to play down the extent of the British loss of life in the Far East. The Daily Mail alleged that he was adopting this approach out of fear that a rising casualty rate would compound the embarrassment the prime minister was already suffering by virtue of his absence. It is true that Staw’s reluctance to be precise about British casualties contrasted with the readiness to be precise of other governments. It has to be said, too, that it stood in sharp contrast to the British government’s line in the aftermath of Sept. 11, which was if anything to give the impression that more Britons had lost their lives in the World Trade Center than was actually the case.
Tony Blair used to be much given to lecturing the Labour Party on the need to live in the real world. Yet his own grip on reality seems ever more tenuous. Consider the extraordinary article he recently published in The Economist foreshadowing his chairmanship this year of the G-8 countries and outlining his grandiose plans for rescuing Africa from poverty and disease and for combating climate change.
What he had to say was reminiscent of the plausible idealist who came to power in 1997, the Tony Blair who presented himself as a progressive leader dedicated to making the world a better place. You could hardly have guessed from reading his fervently humanitarian words that this was the same prime minister who took Britain into a war against Iraq which was has cost thousands upon thousands of innocent lives and plunged that country into turmoil. Iraq, perhaps needless to say, is not an issue on which Blair or his colleagues appear in any hurry to comment. And for the moment at least — thanks to events in the Far East — they find themselves with no great need to do so.
And yet despite all this — and despite the highly public internecine war he is fighting with his personal and ideological rival, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown — Blair is expected to win the next general election comfortably. The truth is that Blair and his sometime Home Secretary David Blunkett have so monopolized the right of British politics with their authoritarian pronouncements and repressive legislation that they have left their main opponents, the Conservatives, led by the impeccably right-wing Michael Howard, with scarcely any room to move. As for Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, now the standard bearers of progressive politics in Britain, they stand to gain many votes from those who opposed the war in Iraq and who cannot bring themselves to vote for a Labour Party led by Tony Blair. However, the Lib Dems start from far too small an electoral base to pose a major threat to Blair in their own right. The result is that the Blair seems certain to make history as the first “Labour” leader to win three consecutive terms of office.
During the 1980s, when Britain was ruled by the despotic Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, there was much talk of Britain having become an “elective dictatorship”. Blair promised to breath fresh life into the British democratic system. Yet under his rule Britain’s parliamentary democracy has looked even more gimcrack than it did under Thatcher and Blair’s own style of leadership has been every bit as presidential as that of the so-called “Iron Lady”. Many wish that British leaders, following the example of US presidents, were allowed no more than two terms of office. As it happens, Blair himself has vowed to stand down of his own accord before fighting a fourth election.
This explains why he is currently taking conspicuous steps to secure his legacy by promoting a new generation of “Blairites”, keepers of the New Labour faith who share their leader’s commitment to a political project which has increasingly seemed to have a lot more in common with US neoconservatism than with the Labour Party’s socialist traditions. What makes the next election highly consequential is that if Blair wins it convincingly he will be able to ensure that his ideology survives his physical departure from office. If he fails to do so, however, the way might be open for the somewhat less right-wing Gordon Brown to save the Labour Party’s old traditions from complete extinction.
It was Blair’s declared ambition in the late 1990s to preside over a great reforming administration. One of the things he pledged to do was enact a new Freedom of Information Bill designed to put an end to the official obfuscation that has long been the British establishment’s forte. As a result of modified legislation, official disclosure became obligatory from the beginning of this year — albeit with the proviso that the government retains the right to withhold “sensitive” material when it is deemed not to be in the public interest to divulge it.
It remains to be seen whether the government will be prepared to divulge the nature of the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s ruling on the Iraq war. Under existing legislation, it has been difficult enough to gain access to even relatively innocuous information. It took the Liberal Democratic MP Norman Lamb nearly two years to extract from the government details about the prime minister’s dinner guests. Because of his tireless efforts, the British public now knows that their leader has a penchant for socializing with the likes of the comedian, Des O’Connor, a pensionable entertainer whose blandness and implausibly youthful image have become practically proverbial.
Not that the discovery that Blair is at home in the company of Des O’Connor is without interest. It hints at the sorry possibility that in this vacuous showbiz veteran Britain’s prime minister sees a mirror image of himself.
