Posted on 04/29/2005 5:28:27 PM PDT by proxy_user
I HAD A DREAM. It was the morning after the general election. I was late for a television interview. Running for a train I fumbled for an explanation for what had just happened.
Tony Blair had lost. A Labour Government had been defeated. By whom, the dream did not say. There was nothing in it about a Conservative victory: even in dreams there are limits to the imaginable.
I have a vague recollection of fretting that we knew who had lost without really knowing who had won. My immediate problem, however, was with Labour’s defeat: how could this be reconciled with all the polling evidence we had confidently cited as proof that Mr Blair was heading for a comfortable victory?
As in my dream I ran through the ticket barriers at White City Tube station, the explanation hit me. The polls had been bogus — all of them. It was part of a fiendish Blairite plot to cheat fate by saturating the media with propaganda suggesting that his victory was certain. Yet he had been losing all along.
This explained everything: those ghastly television performances; the palpable implausibility of his every answer; his obvious slipperiness; the boos of audiences; the reaction one felt to every new Blairite confection or evasion: “Are my countrymen mad? Nobody I know believes this stuff. How can people support him?” Now we knew they never had. Those “how will you vote?” polls had been invented. In my dream everything fell into place and the world looked sane again.
But (said the dream) the faking of opinion polls had been a brilliant ruse: win-win for Blair. His first line of attack — plan A — had been to create an impression of unstoppable momentum, so people would vote for him just because he looked like a winner. If that failed, it would buy time for Plan B: Divine Rescue. A bird-flu pandemic, or something, would turn up.
If nothing did and he lost, Plan C was to claim, on the basis of all those pre-election polls, that it was the general election result that was wrong. He would say the counting had been “flawed”, ignore it, and carry on. This (my dream said) was what he would now do.
After that I woke up. The dream had been nonsensical. But the riddle it posed had been what has tormented me through waking hours too. How is it that there should be a near-universal rejection of Tony Blair — ranging from cynical disbelief to apoplectic detestation — while all the polls say he is cruising to comfortable victory? Nobody believes a word he says, yet pollsters report that the nation is about to re-elect him. The dream pointed to two apparently contradictory truths.
I can reconcile them differently from the dream. To do so we must face a third truth, and it is bleak indeed. Yes, the British people do know that Tony Blair is a cheat. Yes, the British people do intend to re-elect him. And no — you’re right; your logic has leapt ahead of me — the British people do not mind being led by a cheat.
Some of us have been missing the point. Here we’ve been, we columnists on the Right and Left, jumping up and down, frenziedly impatient to prove that Mr Blair really does twist the truth. But prove to whom? The public? They never doubted it. They reached that conclusion years ago. Reached it, and decided to live with it.
There they’ve been, those Dimblebys, Paxmans and Humphryses, furiously firing quotations at Mr Blair — on November 7, 2003, speaking on Newsnight, you said this Prime Minister, and I quote “. . .”, while on April 3, 2004, this was what you told the House of Commons “. . .” — each of them in the hope of finally skewering Mr Blair.
And there they’ve been — those Howards and Kennedys, Ancrams and Salmonds, Cooks and Menzies Campbells — peppering us with erudite columns, indignant press releases and open letters to 10 Downing Street, demanding to know how Mr Blair reconciles (a) with (b) given what he said about (c) when answering a question from the Rt Hon X on the subject of Y in 199Z. And what do we get by way of response? Two cheeks of Mr Blair’s bottom pressed impertinently to the inside rear window of his departing bus.
Mr Blair does not answer inquisitors: he moons them. The key phrases are unspoken but they underlie every answer: “So what?”, “See if I care?” and “sucks to you”. As the football chant might have it, “I’m here because I’m here because I’m here”, followed by “what are you gonna do about it, pipsqueak?”
It is at the same time a shockingly confident and strangely desperate strategy. A frantic mix of effrontery and panic characterises Mr Blair’s whole career, as they must with any confidence trickster. He’s been found out and he knows it but he won’t confess and you won’t pin him down.
Making his entrance again with his usual flair/Sure of his lines . . . And maybe he’ll stumble — losing his timing this late/in his career. But he’ll pick himself up again.
Isn’t it rich? Isn’t it queer? Where are the clowns, then, for this election circus? Perhaps it is we who are the clowns, we Blairosceptics. Perhaps it is for us that the men in white coats will have to call next weekend, firmly removing the aerosol spray-guns from our hands as we daub the walls with obscenities about Alastair Campbell, and leading us kindly to a place of safety, as we mutter “But on October 17, 1999, Prime Minister, you most assuredly said . . .”
For what did we expect? That all at once Mr Blair was going to say to Jonathan Dimbleby on ITV “Ouch! You’ve got me there, Jono. Banged to rights, Guv. Guess I’d better put my hands up. I lied about Iraq. I lied about top-up fees. I lied about leaking David Kelly’s name. Come to think of it, I even lied six years ago when I promised everyone that they could see an NHS dentist ‘just by ringing NHS Direct’. Thought you lot wouldn’t notice. Thought you’d forgotten. I shall go straight from your studio to Buckingham Palace and tender my resignation to the Queen”?
Cheats don’t confess. They sweat, and stick to their story. Every bead on Mr Blair’s brow on Question Time on Thursday proclaimed it.
Forget Forward not Back; the Prime Minister’s real campaign slogan shouts from every white space between the printed words of his manifesto. That’s My Story And I’m Sticking To It. And in five days the electorate will solemnly place their pencilled cross beside a pair of mooning buttocks on the ballot paper. Ooh, you are awful, Tony, but we’ll vote for you.
You know what? Those of us with an allergic reaction to Mr B’s kind of politics are just going to have to lump it. We’ll never get him now. He’ll slither out of office soon, still claiming that he was right all along. We shall never quite prove him a fraud. The killer quote, the devastating witness, the smoking gun, will elude us.
Only after he has gone, in the steady, gentle downgrading by historians of Mr Blair’s preposterous claims on destiny, will his critics’ vindication lie. Only in the faint hiss of escaping wind as, in the slowest of leaks, his reputation deflates — will justice be done. One day we’ll wake up and the tyre will be flat: but there’ll never be a blowout.
We overlooked what democratic politics is all about: that bleak truth betrayed on a million doorsteps. “And what”, the voter asks the canvasser, “are you going to do for me?” The big Me in Britain 2005 says I am a little richer, a little securer, and my house worth a lot more, than ten years ago. The big Me says: “Sod Iraq; what has Blair done to hurt me?” So not yet for Blair the big E.
Kenneth Clarke put it best this week. The Government will run out of money, he said. We might as well save our breaths until then.
Political junkies are continually surprised at this, but the world is not ruled by those who are tuned in to every little pronouncement. That is why the Democrats don't lose as badly as they should. It is also why they don't make the necessary reforms, and thus their continued weakness. But they have not have been as lucky in their opponents as Blair has. Even John Kerry could rout today's hapless Tories.
But even Bubba never mooned the voters....
What a ridiculous comment. Sweating under lights or even while in a simple interview that will determine one's political fate doesn't make one a liar.
This article reminds me of how I felt during the Clinton administration. The man was obviously a treasonous liar and deeply corrupt. Did the public care one whit? Nope. They knew he was a grifter when they elected him and were happy to reelect and support him as a grifter.
I don't care what this man says. Matthew Parris opposed the liberation of Iraq on political grounds, because he thought that position would help his party. Not because he thought it was wrong.
He's a CINO - Conservative in name only.
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