Blair to Brussels? Europe’s Oliver Cromwell

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Blair to Brussels? Europe’s Oliver Cromwell

From the desk of John Laughland on Wed, 2008-01-16

When Karl Kraus tried to express his hatred for Hitler, he began his book, Die dritte Walpurgisnacht, with the startling sentence, “Zu Hitler fällt mir nichts ein” (“I cannot think of anything to say about Hitler.”) He meant that Hitler’s hatefulness was simply inexpressible. One has the same problem when trying to write about Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister who reappeared in the headlines last week after he addressed Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party in what appears to be a bid for the future post of President of Europe, having just signed up to be a consultant for J P Morgan with a salary of £10,000 per week.

Blair had previously delivered a televised address to the French people in the aftermath of the election which brought Sarkozy to power. He spoke in excruciatingly bad French, as can be seen on Youtube, and the broadcast therefore encapsulates the full ghastliness of the man, his devilish combination of meagre talent and boundless self-confidence.

As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently wrote in The Guardian, the key feature about Tony Blair is his love of money. Wheatcroft points out that his whole political career as Prime Minister has been characterised by scandals which have flowed from his readiness to accept money and hospitality from or via very rich people – “Dirty” Desmond, Bernie Ecclestone, Lakshmi Mittal, Lord Levy. Wheatcroft is one of the best analysts of Blair, and his book “Yo, Blair!” – the title is taken from the way George Bush was overheard addressing the British Prime Minister at a summit meeting – accurately captures the ghastliness of the man. But even his brilliant pen could never have foreseen Blair’s truly hallucinatory performance in George Bush’s annual Christmas pantomime in 2007 featuring his dog, Barney. (Blair appears at 5.07 minutes into the video.) By some bizarre trick of the subconscious, Blair evidently so revels in his status as George Bush’s political poodle that he saw nothing wrong with abasing himself and putting himself on the same level as the black Scottie by participating in this deeply embarrassing piece of American infantilism.

It is no doubt his remorseless social climbing that attracted Blair so deeply to George Bush and America. It is indeed a feature of uncultured British people generally that they regard their rich cousins over the water as a role model. For this reason, Marina Hyde compared Tony and Cherie Blair to Britain’s other star couple, David and Victoria Beckham – pushy, trashy and obsessively publicity-seeking.

Blair has recently attracted some publicity for his conversion to Catholicism. However, as many Catholics in Britain have pointed out, Blair’s governments were about the most anti-Catholic one could imagine. He personally voted against reducing the time limit for abortions from 26 weeks to 24 (Britain has some of the most liberal abortion laws in the world); his government took the highly unusual step of using the Parliament Act to force through a reduction in the age of consent for gay sex against opposition from the House of Lords; and of course he was the most vigorous supporter of the war on Iraq, even though that war was condemned by the then Pope, while support for or participation in it was solemnly proclaimed ex cathedra by one American bishop to be a mortal sin.

These double standards go to the very essence of Tony Blair. It has been established beyond doubt that Blair lied in order to force the British Parliament to approve the attack on Iraq, in the face of huge public opposition. Blair knew that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction; he ordered the various dossiers produced about Iraq’s weapons and human rights abuses to be “sexed up”, i.e. for the claims made by the intelligence services to be deliberately exaggerated; he knew that George Bush had already decided to attack Iraq even as he pretended that no decision on the matter had been taken. The existence of plans to attack Iraq well before 2003 was revealed in the memoirs of the then British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, and has also been confirmed by the memoirs of the former Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, who says that it was discussed in cabinet as soon as George Bush took power in 2001.

The consequence of that lie is hundreds of thousands of deaths (some say a million) and vast numbers of refugees. In addition to the terrible personal suffering of Iraqis, the standing of Britain and America in the world has been terribly, probably irreparably, damaged. Huge numbers of people who previously been pro-Western are now anti-Western, and the Islamic hornets’ nest has been horribly stirred up. Yet Blair has a serious chance of bouncing back and starting a new high-profile political career. How is this?

The politician in history who Blair most closely resembles is Oliver Cromwell. Both profoundly religious men, the religion of both men seems to consist mainly in their belief that they are themselves instruments of divine providence. Just as Cromwell leant over the body of the dead King Charles I and muttered “Cruel necessity!” – as if he himself had not strained every fibre to engineer the military coup d’état which created the Rump Parliament and the kangaroo court which tried the king – so Blair, when confronted with his own lies over Iraq, preferred not to reply but to say only that God would be his judge. In the mouth of a hereditary Christian monarch, that would be a laudable reply; but it completely incompatible with the dogmas of democracy to which Blair claims to adhere. According to the rules of democracy, indeed, it is the people who judge politicians, not God.

Countries get the politicians they deserve. Just as the election of the adolescent Nicolas Sarkozy in France betrays the decline of that once great country’s political standards – in the space of a few generations, France has been governed by a grandfather (De Gaulle), an uncle (Mitterrand), an older brother (Chirac) and now by an annoying brattish younger sibling – so Blair’s ten years in power shows the collapse of democratic culture and institutions in England, the Mother of Parliaments. His extraordinary grip over the party machine whose ideology, socialism, he personally hated, and his ability thereby to keep an iron grip on the political institutions of the British state for a decade, stand as a stark illustration of the systemic dysfunctionality of so-called multi-party democracy. Modern “democratic” states are now parodies of democracy, states in which power is in fact kidnapped by political parties led by unscrupulous individuals who, instead of being the vehicle for the expression of public opinion, have in fact become the instrument for its suppression.

The mediatisation of public life – the defining fact about modern politics – means that the electorate has the attention span of a fruit fly. If you don’t like what you see on the political stage, you zap to another channel. Blair understood better than any modern politician that the media is the main key to power, and that is why he employed the brilliant and brutish Alistair Campbell to be his press secretary. He engineered the sacking of the Director-General of the BBC, the Chairman of the Governors of the BBC, and the Editor of the Daily Mirror, because of their opposition to the Iraq war. If one tenth of this happened in an Eastern European or African country, it would immediately be branded a totalitarian dictatorship.

Yet Blair might well succeed in becoming the first president of Europe, and for precisely the same reason as Hitler won power in Germany. The great novelist, Thomas Mann, accurately described the reason why the Germans voted for Hitler: they said to themselves, “We don’t want politics, we want a fairy tale.” The modern electorate does not want to be confronted with the awful truth that it is governed by thieves and liars, because such a truth is too humiliating to bear. Instead, it wants to be governed by a non-stick jaunty man who can make it forget its woes. Politics as escapism – that is the true legacy of Blairism, and no doubt its future too.

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