Emperor Blair's loss of reality is now total

[mc_squared]

Emperor Blair's loss of reality is now total

 

 

 

 

British politics this weekend is defined by one gruesome paradox. Tony Blair is finished. Yet he still commands, or at any rate makes, regular appearances on the stage. There is endless, lively speculation about how much longer he will remain Prime Minister.

Some surmise that he will amaze everyone and announce his resignation at his party conference speech in Manchester next Tuesday.

Those who care for Tony Blair, and want him to preserve his health and in due course regain his sanity, ought to be urging him to take this wholly sensible precaution. It would guarantee him waves of affectionate applause from delegates and save him from some of the dark, personal traumas that otherwise lie ahead.

A much larger group, however, contends that the Prime Minister will cling on through conference, through Christmas, deep into the New Year and forward into the local government elections next spring.

This group maintains that two animating factors have come to dominate the Prime Minister. One, by no means to be underestimated, is vanity. He and his wife desperately wish to stay in Downing Street until the tenth anniversary of their famous landslide victory of May 1997. The other factor, more potent by far, is hatred.

Last week, a senior aide to the Prime Minister revealed Blair's strategy, and illuminated his state of mind, at a Westminster dinner: 'He will stay until the end of May and perhaps by then we will find someone who is capable of beating David Cameron.'

Tony Blair and those close to him are determined to prevent Gordon Brown reaching Downing Street and, in the likely event that they fail, they are determined to ensure that the Brown premiership is a disaster.

Those wishing to understand contemporary politics simply must read the great French novelist Honore de Balzac, who fundamentally understood the primeval brutality of simple, untamed emotion.

Balzac shows again and again how minor resentments, when nursed carefully and accumulated over time, can come to dominate and horribly distort the mental life of a human being. We have reached this monstrous stage at the heart of British politics.

The loss of reality is now total. Although neither Tony Blair nor his entourage can bring themselves to acknowledge as much, the Prime Minister no longer counts in government, except for the admittedly noteworthy and striking reality that he can continue to call himself Prime Minister.

The Tory premier Anthony Eden found himself in the same straitjacket during the short period that elapsed between the British invasion of Egypt on November 5, 1956, and his resignation on January 9,

1957. As Eden learnt, and poor Blair must now be discovering, this impotence is a terrible humiliation, made infinitely worse by the vivid recollection of an earlier period of respect.

There have been two outstanding examples of this total loss of authority over the past fortnight, one involving foreign and the other domestic policy. The first was Tony Blair's curious little visit to the Middle East in an attempt to move forward the 'peace process'. It achieved nothing and could never have done so.

The Prime Minister, with the minutes ticking down to his departure, has become, leaving aside the agreeable prospect of the U.S. lecture circuit, an international nobody. His promises, which were never to be relied on at the best of times, are now wholly without value because he will not be around to account for them.

This demonstration of hopelessness abroad was matched at home last week when Downing Street suddenly announced a series of ten-year strategy groups aimed at giving badly needed direction to domestic policy. None of them could gain any support, and all were shelved within a matter of days.

It is well worth bearing in mind that these humiliating episodes are by no means unique.

Downing Street is snubbed or slighted a hundred times or more a day in minor, unpublicised ways. For some time, civil servants have been asserting privately that British government is in paralysis - a state of affairs that will persist until Blair finally bows to the inevitable and is replaced by a new leader with the mandate and the authority to take a fresh grip on affairs.

When I first became a political reporter in the early 1990s, there was a venerable Conservative MP called Sir Bernard Braine. He retired at the 1992 General Election, but suffered from memory loss or some other disorder and could not comprehend he was no longer an MP. So every day after lunch he would make his way to Parliament, and march confidently into the Members' Lobby.

Only when he got to the actual door of the Commons chamber itself, and was trying to make his way in, did the authorities intervene. I used to watch as the policemen took Sir Bernard aside and led him away. Sometimes, one of his former colleagues would take pity on him and buy him a cup of tea.

There is just the faintest hint of Sir Bernard's bafflement as the Prime Minister gets used to constant rejection around the corridors of power.

And this is the situation as Labour starts to gather for its annual party conference: vacancy at the centre disaffection on the periphery; an undeclared leadership battle; a prime minister who has long since lost sight of the distinction between the national and his private interest; no authority; gathering chaos.

The future trajectory of politics, for the first time in 12 years, is impossible to predict. And yet it would be wholly wrong to feel gloomy. Although the Blair years have seen a disastrous experiment in politics, they are coming to an end.

The New Labour project was built around deceit and manipulation, has systematically undermined the great democratic institutions of the state, and done terrible and lasting damage by destroying trust in politics.

In future columns I will try to show that, although a period of political anarchy now lies ahead of us, this could yet be turned into a creative and memorable period in our national life. Sadly, as I shall also argue in future columns, not one of Blair's putative successors has yet shown that he or she understands the nature of the contemporary political predicament.

Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron have, for undisclosed reasons of their own, chosen to present themselves as the natural successor. Both use Blairite techniques and stratagems. But Britain is crying out for a politician with the vision and the courage to utterly reject Blair's rotten method of government, and start afresh.

[General Smut]

The monster loony raving party is the only one worth voting for.

[mc_squared]

The monster loony raving party is the only one worth voting for.

 

Well you have the perfect "name" to be a MRL candidate!!;)