HOW IT REALLY IS

Tony Blair never learned one of the basic laws of politics: how it looks is more important than how it is. He imagined that the constant use of the techniques of spin-doctors would make everything right. But the proportion of the electorate that swallows the doctored medicine is not large enough for the gambit to be worth it. Most of us see these nostrums for what they are. (Incidentally, surprise has been widely expressed that doctors and other health workers have appeared to be the moving forces behind the recent bomb attacks in Glasgow and London. I don’t know why. Doctors have always been rogues and vagabonds. Among the most disreputable characters in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers is a pair of young general practitioners to whom you would hesitate to entrust a scratch on a finger).

Blair never got his head round the problem that the invasion of Iraq and its lamentable consequences couldn’t possibly be made to look desirable, successful, wise, necessary or even a fairly honourable failure. To most impartial observers, it came across only as repellent, vain, dumb, misguided and a craven catastrophe. It made no difference how many times Blair assured us that it was “the right thing to do”. That was never going to be how it looked. He could argue until he was blue in the face. Iraq will be written on his heart just as Calais was written on Queen Mary’s.

The case that, whatever the final outcome, is going to go down in the annals of the Blair years as The Cash for Honours Scandal was also one that could never be made to look other than fishy. It is his misfortune (and Blair’s) that, no matter what high degree of probity he evidently brought to the task of raising money for Labour’s coffers, Lord Levy strikes you as oleaginous, ingratiating and insincere. You want to lock him in a cupboard with Daniel Corbett, David Dickinson and Michael Winner. I have no doubt that the Daily Mail singled Levy out for grotesquely biased treatment, underwritten by a subtext of anti-Semitism. That’s about The Mail’s level (I aver, without actually reading the paper) and I hope Levy sues them and makes off with a healthy cheque for damages. But that doesn’t mean I have to want to cosy up with him myself. If Blair couldn’t see that Levy would not come across to the public as someone you would rush to trust, he certainly wasn’t able to get his head round the notion of how it looks.

It will be hard for the voters to walk away from this saga without suspecting at some level that there can’t be smoke without fire. The director of public prosecutions may have concluded that there is “not enough evidence” to proceed but the public requires no such rigorous examination of the prospects to form its conclusions. Blair is, across a broad range of matters, a busted flush. Gordon Brown has been shrewd to make it his priority to put as much discernible space between his style and method and those of his predecessor as possible. The handy side effect is that, the further Blair slips into history, the more irrelevant is made to seem his true stylistic and spiritual heir, David Cameron. The voters of Southall and Sedgefield seem to have thought so. In a perverse and roundabout way, the tarnishing of Blair’s golden image may have done Labour a favour after all.

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Late last evening, we strolled down to the local shops. My partner reads the Harry Potter books (I had had my fill with two) and had ordered the final volume. At my prompting, we decided to join a ritual that will surely never be repeated in our lifetimes: the midnight massing of children and adults outside a bookshop.

There must have been a hundred people there, a far cry from the 6,000 or so apparently queuing outside Waterstone’s biggest store on Piccadilly but astonishing enough for a small town. The mood was festive and friendly, only briefly compromised by passing teenaged drunks. The two kids who had made the most effort in their appropriate costumes were rewarded with a free copy each. Then the rest of us filtered into the shop to pick up our copies. (I bought The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins).

Had I been JK Rowling, I would have supplied independent book sellers with free or at least heavily discounted copies so that they could undercut the supermarkets and chain stores that can sell at a discount through their bulk and preferential deals. But perhaps Bloomsbury would have vetoed such a gesture. It’s a pity, however, that a brand that has made so much money could not have done more to help the dwindling independent sector. The individual shops like our local one could not but open at midnight in order to avoid surrendering important territory to the big guys that only stock the bestselling titles.

I don’t subscribe to the view that the phenomenon of the Potter books (along with the vast successes of Josephine Wilson and Philip Pullman) indicates a new golden age of kids getting their noses into books. Unless kids read stuff that isn’t relentlessly marketed at them through the large and small screens that occupy their eyes for most of the time, all they are doing is obeying Big Brother. When I see a child reading Robinson Crusoe and Kidnapped, Billy Bunter and Just William, I’ll believe that junior fiction is still alive and well.