BLAIR: REST in PURGATORY

The prime minister is expected to announce his resignation in a day or two. I don’t imagine that there will be actual dancing in the streets. After all, we’ve been awaiting this day for an awfully long time and we got bored months ago. Rather than throwing popular celebrations, I think a criminal trial would be more in order. Blair, along with Bush, should be found guilty of war crimes and publicly executed. That would be a fitting end.

You may get the impression that I won’t miss him. It’s true that there was a moment when I thought he might turn out to be quite a good thing. It was when he was shadow energy spokesman during Margaret Thatcher’s last government. By the time he was opposition leader, junking Clause IV and proclaiming “New Labour” (i.e. non-Socialist Labour), I feared he was going to be a disaster. It wasn’t – but it might as well have been – the Labour emblem of which Blake wrote: “O Rose, thou art sick!/The invisible worm,/That flies in the night/In the howling storm,/Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy;/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy” [The Sick Rose]. Blair has been an all too visible worm and the Labour Party, as anyone aged over 20 knew it, has been deadheaded.

But there was a bright morning just over ten years ago when all things looked possible, even with Blair and his ghastly wife in Downing Street. His first Cabinet had more women in it than ever before, plus one out gay man and four (four!) men with beards. There were many more women in the House (“Blair’s babes”, god help us), among whom was a profoundly disabled member. It all looked like a quiet revolution, like the government might actually represent us.

Not for long. It was Tam Dalyell, the Labour backbencher and Father of the House up to the 2005 election, who described Blair as the worst prime minister during his 43 years in parliament. A mere voter, I wouldn’t dissent from that. As I wrote in my book Common Sense (freely downloadable from the link to right of screen), I didn’t vote Labour in 2001 because I thought Blair had already taken us to war too often – and this was before both Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq that overthrew Saddam Hussein.

Blair has acknowledged his admiration of Thatcher whose own record in office is hardly more neo-conservative than his own. Reportedly, Blair volunteered a list of ten great British prime ministers from which his four Labour predecessors were conspicuously absent. He has some nerve. Clement Attlee’s government implemented the Butler Education Act and carried through the creation of the NHS that had been proposed under Churchill, as well as nationalizing the mines, railways, iron and steel and the Bank of England to the benefit of all. Harold Wilson’s lasting achievements may all have been in the narrow area of social justice – the same could be said for Blair – but at least Wilson kept this country out of the Vietnam War and never became Lyndon Johnson’s or Richard Nixon’s poodle. Wilson, James Callaghan, Ramsay MacDonald and Attlee, the last at great cost in replenishing the defences after World War II, kept this nation at peace throughout their terms. Blair has taken us to war on five separate occasions. On that ground alone, he is the most morally bankrupt prime minister of my lifetime.

It is as Labour supporters that we have most to begrudge him. Apart from George W Bush, his closest allies on the world stage have been Silvio Berlusconi, Angela Merkel and José Maria Aznar, all of them far to the right of – to pluck a name at random – David Cameron. He has had precious little time for Romano Prodi, Gerhard Schroder or José Luis Zapatero, the leaders whose terms abut those of his friends. Even Jacques Chirac, that Conservative opportunist, has been too idiosyncratic for Blair’s taste and the PM’s office made no secret of his hope that it would be Nicholas Sarkozy rather than Ségolène Royal with whom he would do French business in his last weeks of power, never mind that Mlle Royal is a left-centrist and Sarkozy a deep-dyed neo-con radical. It is an extraordinary thing to be able to say of a Labour prime minister that the only party that could succeed his in government and pursue more reactionary policies and more reactionary allies than his would be the BNP.

And what is left for his successor? The current Private Eye cover, showing Blair peering through a magnifying glass and crying “Oh look – it’s my legacy!”, gets it just right. The words ‘chalice’ and ‘poisoned’ spring to mind. Labour’s support is in free fall, not just in opinion polls but in votes actually cast in the local authority and the Scottish and Welsh assembly elections. Gordon Brown has a hideous situation in Scotland where Alex Salmond, hating Labour as only a natural ally can hate, has nothing to lose from doing Brown a power of no good. Tam Dalyell’s famous “West Lothian question” about Scottish MPs voting on matters that only concern England and Wales is not a question that concerns the SNP which doesn’t aim to send members to London. A national Tory revival makes no never mind in Scotland; indeed, it would only take votes from the SNP’s rivals. If a Tory government arrives in Westminster, Salmond will have a more natural springboard from which to prepare for Scottish independence. He’s in a win-win position.

Prime Minister Brown needs comprehensively to repudiate the Blair programme if he is to creep out from under the dead weight of ten years of disillusionment, even if it means him having to deploy rather frequently his deprecating mirthless smile and claiming that it seemed better to stay at the Exchequer for a decade and fight (in vain) for what he believed in. No one will believe him for the first few months so he will have to demonstrate the will to follow new policies. An early task will be the extrication from Iraq and Afghanistan with the most honour he can finagle. The fact that, unlike Blair, he has cultivated numerous contacts in the Democratic Party in the States (beyond any no-brainer pals’ act with Bill Clinton) ought to help him to build a different kind of transatlantic understanding. But his hardest task of all will be the long-term shrugging off of his share of blame for ten years of deepening dismay. I don’t envy him.