The Golden Strawberry

I have never known any other Prime Minister than Tony Blair. I was eleven years old when he came into office in 1997. Of his first landslide victory I can only recall a vague sense of delirious happiness from my mum (a lifelong Labour supporter) and some grudging relief on the part of my dad (a small ‘c’ conservative, but a Lib Dem voter in 1997 because he was so sick of the Tories). Everyone was so happy to kick the Tories out and Tony seemed like such a perfect replacement – one of the best accounts of the national Tony fever is given in the fifth Adrian Mole book – the Cappuccino Years:

‘Do you know Mr Blair?’ she asked, looking impressed.   

I watched in the driving mirror as my expression changed from confident to enigmatic. ‘Does anybody really   know Tony?’ I said. ‘I think even Cherie would say she doesn’t really know Tony.’

Mr Clough disciplined her children, who were fiddling with the pine air-freshener, and, with a touch of irritation in her voice, said, ‘But have you met him and spoken to him? Does he know your name?’

I was forced to admit that, no I had never spoken to him; and that, no, Tony Blair did not know my name. We passed the rest of the journey in silence.

Maybe not strictly relevant, but it does convey the hope people had for Tony when he first came into power. He was everyone’s pal. Dim as my awareness of it was, I knew there was something special in the air in 1997.

I grew up under Tony Blair; people of my age have only ever known him as their leader. Striding the world stage, rubbing shoulders with everyone and looking calm and composed whilst doing it – we have come to expect a leader that the rest of the world respects and listens to. Blair was a statesman of the first rank, of that there can be no doubt – he took tough decisions and stuck to his guns – I admire him for that. People forget that statesman navigate blindly; with no hindsight to light their way and their every decision effected by opinion polls and 24-hour media, their job is almost impossible.

Of course, his major decision, the one he shall be remembered best for, is Iraq . What was he to do? He could either refuse to back the US, break the transatlantic alliance and watch the US invade anyway with no international support at all, or he could lend a hand and be despised by his own party and much of the British population. The Party he obviously didn’t care about – he has always defined himself against the Labour PLP and especially its left wing. His defiance of the peace-marchers and the appeasers I respect and applaud – they never represented more than a vocal minority of the public anyway. When the war was launched, a majority of the public supported it.

More than anything, Blair’s support for Iraq was due to his own principles, which he laid out in depth in his famous Chicago speech in 1999. A quick scan of this speech reveals it to be truly internationalist in the best Socialist sense. Money quote:

This speech has been dedicated to the cause of internationalism and against isolationism. On Sunday, along with other nation's leaders, including President Clinton, I shall take part in a discussion of political ideas. It is loosely based around the notion of the  Third Way, an attempt by centre and centre-left Governments to re-define a political programme that is neither old left nor 1980s right. In the field of politics, too, ideas are becoming globalised. As problems become global - competitivity, changes in technology, crime, drugs, family breakdown - so the search for solutions becomes global too. What amazes me, talking to other countries' leaders, is not the differences but the points in common. We are all coping with the same issues: achieving prosperity in a world of rapid economic and technological change; social stability in the face of changing family and community mores; a role for Government in an era where we have learnt Big Government doesn't work, but no Government works even less.

I feel comfortable with the ideas of Globalization – it strikes me as a Good Thing in that it breaks down national barriers and puts on the path to being a Human community, rather than a British or French of Iranian one. Blair, I think, was a genuine Internationalist and he deserves credit for sticking to his principles on Iraq , when they were tested to their limits.

Of course, Blair made a catastrophic mistake, one that he shall have to live with for the rest of his life. He shall have to live with the fact that he played a major role in launching a war that killed over half a million people, created a breeding ground for Islamist terrorism and wrecked a major Middle Eastern country. Other supporters of the war, me included, will have to live with this as well, but for such a well-meaning man as Blair, this knowledge must (it must) disturb him deeply. The fools in Washington (which I am now doing my dissertation on – they really had no idea what they were doing at all.) fucked things up so badly that they doomed the whole enterprise before it had even begun. Did you know that the first meeting Bush and his buddies had about post-war Iraq was on March 10 2003? This was a week before the war began. Blair put his trust in the worst possible people. You can see the dilemma – Blair should have suspended his principles over Iraq and recognized the kind of men he was dealing with in Washington , but everything we know about the man tells us this is exactly what he was incapable of doing. A less principled and idealistic man would have avoided the war.

I wrote in my apology:

I was wrong. I turned into an idealist, perhaps even an ideologue. A better appreciation of the limits of my own judgement and of the ability of government to effect change in such a drastic way in a part of the world we little understood would have resulted in a more reality-based position.

This is pure conservatism. Looking at the world as it is, rather than as we hope it will become as a result of our actions. Blair had his eyes so set on a glittering future that he forgot (or ignored) the gritty reality of the present. He thought he could count upon messianic transcendence that carried him to Number 10 to effect real change in the Middle East – he was utterly wrong.

Perhaps Blair now thinks he can redeem himself by becoming a Middle East envoy and making peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. I think he is displaying exactly the same sort of foolish trust in his own abilities here as he did over Iraq . Any solution to that conflict will have to come domestically. There is only so much foreign envoys can do and Blair will not be trusted by any Arab ever again for what he has done.

-posted by Adam