Tony Blair may be best remembered for treating objective reality with contempt. On any credible reckoning, Britain’s outgoing prime minister has played a substantial part in reducing Iraq to a state of bloody chaos while contributing more than a little to destabilizing the Middle East at large. Yet this is not remotely how Blair himself sees things. Poised by all accounts to convert to Roman Catholicism, he is said to be eager to continue his efforts to improve understanding between the Christian and Muslim worlds. And now it transpires that he is set to carry on working for a resolution of the Palestine-Israel conflict in the role of a sort of Western superenvoy to the Middle East.
In Blair’s own mind there is plainly no limit to the benefits the Middle East may yet derive from his ministrations. The fact that he is a terminally discredited figure in the Arab and Muslim worlds evidently lies outside Blair’s comprehension. In the eyes of many of his own countrymen he is associated above all with a war in Iraq that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and the most dreadful British foreign policy blunder of modern times. Still behaving as though he has nothing whatever to apologize for, Blair insists that his dwindling popularity in Britain has nothing to do with the war but is simply the inevitable result of the British public becoming overfamiliar with a leader who was in power for ten whole years.
But then, for the architect of New Labour “denial” has been an article of faith. What is amazing is how far Blair has made a career out of being a fantasist, how successful he has been in getting himself taken seriously as an international statesman with a mission to transform the fortunes of the whole world. Blair’s speeches have never been less than grandiose and have often strayed into the realms of the wholly fantastical yet they have routinely been accorded the greatest respect.
Consider his extraordinary address to the Labour Party conference in 2001 when he indicated the global dimensions of the New Labour cause, how it embraced the “starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan”. Such overblown rhetoric might have been expected to invite a degree of incredulity, if not outright derision. Instead, Labour Party delegates responded with delirious applause. And this was just one of many occasions when not only the party faithful but much of the British media appeared to have been totally mesmerized by Blair’s messianism.
That he possesses to an exceptional degree the gift of the gab, together with a rare capacity for projecting himself as a charismatic leader, not even Blair’s hardest critics would deny. He is a born performer, a natural role player. Indeed, it may that he is a great actor manque, one who might have been a star of stage or screen, even if there is perhaps only one part at which Blair could ever really have excelled: That of “himself”. Jean Cocteau memorably remarked of the French novelist Victor Hugo that he was a “madman who believed that he was Victor Hugo”. It could be said of Tony Blair that he is a madman who believes that he is Tony Blair.
The British financial journalists Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson argue that words are now one of the few commodities that Britain, a post-industrial society with a drastically diminished manufacturing base, has to offer the world. Given this, it seems fitting that, in Blair, the country should have spawned a politician whose rise to prominence was inseparable from his glib tongue and mastery of the soundbite. Their mordant new book, “Fantasy Island”, includes a chapter on that great British speciality, humbug, which details how, under Blair, Britain developed a virtual economy, in which intangible phenomena such as information, brand names and logos came to count far more than actual manufactured goods. On the tenth anniversary of his arrival in Downing Street, they point out, Britain was a place whose characteristic means of sustaining itself was talk, the turning to advantage in one way or another of the English language. The Germans may have engineers, the Japanese may know how to organize a production line, but the British have legions of more or less plausible talkers and wordsmiths, be they lawyers, spin doctors, admen or those who are variously employed in the media and the worlds of marketing and finance. It is no accident that Blair himself — in common with a great many of his New Labour colleagues — trained as a lawyer. It’s no accident, either, that before entering politics, his successor, the new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a television journalist, or that Brown’s chief political adversary, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, worked for a television company in Public Relations.
One New Labour ideologue declared, in all seriousness, that Britain is now in the “thin air business”. The Blairite boast is that thin air can indeed be profitable and that today’s Britons, in contrast to their laboring forebears, may look forward to earning their livings through “creativity, ingenuity and imagination”. Blair and his New Labour colleagues have assiduously promoted the belief that while it may no longer be a great industrial power — the so-called “workshop of the world” as it was once known — Britain, with its burgeoning “knowledge economy”, its great literary tradition and its world-class achievements in the fields of popular music and television, can still be the world’s “creative hub”. What does it matter that Germany has retained its factories when Britain is able to lay claim not just to offices but to “The Office”, the celebrated television satire on the contemporary work place that has been sold all over the world and that has earned millions for the BBC and its star and co-author Ricky Gervais?
The trouble is that the background to Britain’s vaunted creative economy has been massive public and private borrowing. Elliot and Atkinson warn that dark clouds are gathering and that before long the British are likely to make the painful discovery that the Blair era has been a gigantic piece of collective self-delusion.
It is odd that Elliot and Atkinson make no mention of Salman Rushdie who has so much in common with Blair. What especially unites the two is their fixation with celebrity and money, not to mention with the United States, where Rushdie has lived for several years and where Blair could end up living as well. What they also have in common is that they are both verbose fantasists who became icons of Western freedom by asserting their right to address the Muslim world on their own unapologetic terms and who, for all their talk of building bridges between East and West, have managed only to generate mutual enmity and misunderstanding. In short, the “fantasy island” laid bare by Elliot and Atkinson is no joke. It is a country which may have lost its status as a great world power but not its capacity for nurturing imperialist personalities with dangerously swollen egos.
