The Tragedy of Tony Blair

[struggle4progress]

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A double-barreled threat was posed by a critical vote in the House of Commons, on the seemingly esoteric but emblematic subject of university fees, and by the imminent publication of Lord Hutton's report on the events surrounding the death last summer of David Kelly, part of a ferocious quarrel between Downing Street (and particularly Blair's disreputable former press officer Alastair Campbell, who picked the quarrel and then adroitly resigned) and the BBC, all because of Iraq. If that critical vote had been lost, and if the government had been censured by the Hutton report, it is hard to see how Blair could have remained in office. In the event, he did survive, but after two Pyrrhic victories. He won in the Commons, but his usual majority of more than 150 fell to a cliffhanging five, with seventy-three Labour MPs voting against him. Although the rebels disliked the measure in itself, they were also paying Blair back more generally for what he had done to their party—for that, and for bringing Britain into the war with Iraq. The previous March he had won another crucial parliamentary vote, directly on the war, but enjoyed the support of the Conservative opposition, with 139 of his own MPs voting against. This was the largest such parliamentary rebellion since the Home Rule controversy of 1886—much larger than that which forced Neville Chamberlain's resignation, in May of 1940—and it was a decisive rupture between Blair and the party he technically leads, even if in spirit he has never really belonged to it.

Then Hutton's report cleared Blair, but it was greeted with general derision, in which—for once in a way—journalists were joined by the public. Campbell repellently sneered at the BBC after what he thought was a great victory over it; days later polls found that three times as many British people continued to believe the BBC as believed the government. The whole bitter episode seemed to encapsulate the worst characteristics of Blair's rule: the obsession with process rather than policy, the cynical media manipulation, the ruthless brutality—and, with all that, a notable lack of success in achieving his objectives. Blair's intimates admit, and bemoan the fact, that the priceless commodity of trust has gone. That was true as early as last summer, when in one poll 64 percent of voters said they didn't believe the Prime Minister.
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Blair evinces strong morality in principle but a tendency toward notably amoral behavior in practice. "Far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain," said Roy Jenkins, a co-founder of the Social Democrats, not long before he died, with a touch of genial patronization (and of self-parody). "He is a little too Manichaean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white." But Blair is not only Manichaean, he is Antinomian. The quaint sixteenth-century heretics who took that name believed that "to the pure all things are pure," so if you were of the elect, you could eat, drink, and merrily fornicate in the certainty of salvation.
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There might have been good reasons for invading Iraq, but the reasons Blair gave could not have been good, because they weren't true. And he was tactically unable to tell the truth. By now some kind of consensus presumably exists about how and why the war began. Almost since the end of the inconclusive Gulf War of 1991 a politically and intellectually formidable group of Americans had wanted a war in order to destroy Saddam Hussein. They might have been right. Some of them had been publicly advocating it—to their credit; there are no dark secrets here—for seven years. When they came to power, with George W. Bush, the story heated up. Planning for the war was under way starting with Bush's inauguration, in January of 2001, and 9/11 provided a pretext, rather than a genuine casus belli.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/06/wheatcroft.htm