LONDON, 5 January 2004 — Looking haggard and tense, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair faces a crucial month in his political career. For January will see the publication of the Hutton report into the circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of the British scientist and weapons inspector David Kelly.
It was Kelly who became identified last summer as the source of the BBC’s allegation that the British government deliberately manipulated raw intelligence in order to strengthen its case for going to war against Iraq. Essentially, Lord Hutton has been charged with delivering a verdict on who bore responsibility for undermining Kelly — was it the BBC, Tony Blair’s government, or both? Or did still other factors contribute to the scientist’s death?
For all practical purposes Lord Hutton’s verdict will be taken as an authoritative ruling on the integrity of the BBC and the prime minister alike. Seasoned political observers doubt that Hutton will say anything greatly prejudicial to the prime minister — who, when first informed of David Kelly’s death, insisted that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the fatal naming of Dr. Kelly. But if his report explicitly or implicitly links the prime minister with the chain of events leading to Kelly’s death, Blair’s position as Britain’s leader will scarcely be tenable; he will have to go, and he will be leaving office in ignominy. On top of being widely seen as having involved Britain in a war of doubtful legitimacy, the prime minister will in effect have been convicted of precipitating the death of a respected public servant.
Yet even if Blair emerges comparatively unscathed from the Hutton report, his reputation has been permanently hurt by his handling of the Iraq war. He compromised himself not least by his stubborn, not to say belligerent, refusal to concede what now appears irrefutable: That for all his talk last year of the “clear and present” threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, there is no evidence that such weapons existed at the time when the US and Britain declared war on Iraq. The former British Minister Robin Cook, who resigned over the war, is far from alone in considering it “undignified” for the prime minister himself, and “worrying” for the British people, that Tony Blair seems determined to go on believing in a threat which “everyone else can see was a fantasy.”
In his New Year message, Tony Blair spoke of a “job half done,” hinting that he would like to lead Britain beyond the next general election until 2010. But few — especially following two recent scares over his health — would wager on Blair’s surviving another four-year term of office, or that he will even begin a further term.
It is true that the Labour Party is still polling relatively well for a government in its seventh year of office, but Blair himself is nothing like the asset to the party he was in 1997 when, as the architect of “New Labour,” he sold himself to the British public as a messiah, the charismatic champion of a fresh inclusivist style of politics. Indeed, by this stage he has forfeited not only the huge amount of public goodwill he then enjoyed but much of the goodwill of his own party: For many Labour MPs, Blair’s determination to allow top universities to charge more for their services than the rest has been the last straw, the final proof that he never had more than a token commitment to social justice.
Shortly before his untimely death in 2003, the high-minded Guardian columnist Hugo Young recorded his poignant sense of regret about the great opportunities Blair squandered. A touch generously perhaps, Young portrayed the New Labour leader as a “tragic figure”, a politician who, despite the massive parliamentary majority he commanded in 1997, persistently erred on the side of extreme caution where domestic politics were concerned, ultimately achieving pathetically little.
Especially dismaying for people of Young’s persuasion has been Blair’s readiness to betray Britain’s status as a sovereign nation, to preside over a country which, in the eyes of the rest of the world, looks increasingly like a US client state.
Unlike Hugo Young, some on the Left never had much faith in Blair in the first place. One of them, the former Labour MP Leo Abse, published a book on Blair in 1996 entitled “The Man behind the Smile: Tony Blair and the Politics of Perversion”. A socialist firebrand of the old school, now 86, Abse had parliamentary dealings with the young Tony Blair and quickly concluded that there was a sinister quality about this coming politician with his telegenic smile and disarming habit of assuming that those who disagreed with politics so manifestly sensible as his own could hardly be in their right minds.
The book’s argument was that Blair went into politics above all to resolve psychic conflicts rooted in his traumatized and alienated upbringing, and that his peculiar brand of “consensus politics” masked much pent-up anger and aggression, tormented feelings that might one day break loose with disastrous consequences.
When it first appeared Abse’s book did not receive a hugely respectful press. Yet in the light of the mounting evidence of Blair’s fundamental bellicosity, who these days would want to dismiss Abse’s claims as far-fetched? In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Abse surely deserves praise for his sage insight and intuition.
Now revised and republished under the title “Tony Blair: The Man who lost his Smile”, Abse’s book includes a new chapter on the contrasting motivations of Blair and George Bush for attacking Iraq. In resolving to bomb Baghdad, he maintains, Bush, however inappropriately, was responding to the emotional needs of a nation which had experienced the destruction of the Twin Towers as a kind of psycho-social castration. But Blair, he maintains, was responding to nobody’s emotional needs save his own, and he wrings his hands over the baleful consequences for the rule of international law and world order of granting power to such an unbalanced individual. “We do not,” expostulates Abse, “place a drug addict in charge of a pharmacy or an arsonist in charge of a fuse box.”
Leo Abse nurses the hope that the hijacking of the British Labour Party by New Labour, with is incestuous relationship with big business, will prove an ephemeral episode, and it is a hope many share.
The man who came to power in 1997 pledging to expunge the public cynicism and disillusionment bred by years of harsh Tory government has left British people more cynical and disillusioned than ever. It is, in a way, a remarkable achievement.
