Posted on 05/29/2006 11:43:14 PM PDT by RWR8189
Gordon Brown must surely have had what senior ministers call "one of his little moments" last Thursday when George W Bush was asked about Tony Blair's departure date. "My attitude is," Mr Bush said, gazing fondly at the Prime Minister, "I want him to be here so long as I'm the President."
That would give Mr Blair till noon on January 20, 2009 (teatime in Downing Street, allowing for the time difference). "Well, what more can I say?" said the Prime Minister, with one of his 1,000-watt grins. To which the Chancellor doubtless growled inwardly: "Say you're going tomorrow, you idiot!"
The President, meanwhile, could only beam satisfaction. It is just possible that he is the one true Blairite left, the last politician who will say publicly that he, for one, wishes the Prime Minister could go on, and on, and on. Who is this Scotch guy, anyway, and what's with all these girly-man "deals"? Where Mr Bush comes from, Granita is the name of the Mexican housekeeper.
It is hard to exaggerate the affinity that has arisen between the President and Prime Minister. I do not think Mr Blair is dissembling when he says in private that he finds Mr Bush easier to deal with than Bill Clinton. The Prime Minister and Mr Clinton are as close politically as it is possible to be, both obsessed by what the former President calls "the future business": and I would not be surprised if they end up in business together in the future (they have certainly discussed it).
Mr Bush is, of course, hugely unpopular in the Labour Party, which is one of the reasons that, yet again, the Prime Minister did not collect the US Congressional gold medal he was awarded in 2003. I am assured with absolute authority that the issue of collection has now been - in Labour language - "permanently remitted".
But, whatever the party or, indeed, the British public think of him, the President has a straightforward, self-deprecating manner that goes down well with the Prime Minister and his intimates. On one visit to Downing Street, Mr Blair's team complimented the President on his outfit. "The Lord made me wear it," said Mr Bush with a straight face. When they realised he was teasing them, everyone in the room cracked up.
Last week, Mr Blair cashed in his chips with his friend. He has long been urging the President to speak of global challenges, and Iraq in particular, "in English, not Texan". On Thursday, the Prime Minister's wish was granted, as Mr Bush displayed more contrition over the Iraq conflict than ever before, and even staged a brief display of self-analysis. He lamented the horrors of Abu Ghraib - or "Aboo Gah-reb" - and regretted his tough talk in the past.
Some have commented on the Prime Minister's apparent weariness at the press conference, and the extent to which Mr Bush seemed to come to Mr Blair's aid in answering questions. But the choreography of this event was unmistakably Blairite: the carefully-defined admission of specific errors to justify the whole. You could see how grateful Mr Bush was at the end. "Mr Prime Minister, can I buy you dinner?" he said, as if asking the First Friend out on a date.
Having got the apologies out of the way - we're sorry, OK? - Mr Blair was ready to move on the next day to the bigger picture. His speech at Georgetown University, the third and last in a series of addresses on foreign policy, fizzed with familiar Blair themes. "The rulebook of international politics has been torn up," he declared. Pre-emptive action would sometimes be necessary: "we have to act on the basis of precaution." Domestic security is inextricably linked to democratisation overseas: "to protect our future, we need to help them to theirs". All of which, Mr Blair concluded, meant a radical overhaul of the world's multilateral institutions, especially the United Nations.
That the Prime Minister has been saying all this since his Chicago speech in April 1999 is a measure both of intellectual consistency and practical frustration. If the UN was to renew itself, it should have done so at last year's 60th anniversary summit: an opportunity that was conspicuously squandered.
Its authority is in tatters after the oil-for-food scandal, and it is difficult to detect any focused campaign to implement the kind of reform of which Mr Blair spoke on Friday. "The problem is the lack of take-up," one of his closest allies admitted to me. For all the mistakes that the American neo-conservatives have made, the UN has yet to prove wrong their central thesis that this tired institution is intrinsically unreformable.
In a rhetorical flourish that was almost Panglossian, Mr Blair said that international cooperation over Iraq's democratisation might heal the international divisions spawned by that country's liberation from Saddam. He envisaged "a new concord to displace the old contention". Well, maybe. In private, his allies rage that the international community is still not putting its shoulder to the wheel to assist Iraq in its reconstruction, and they have a point.
But geo-politics is no less petty than Westminster politics. The attitude of many countries to the Iraqi conflict is: it's your mess, George and Tony, you fix it. Not so, of course: Iraq is everyone's mess, in the sense that the outcome of the struggle in Baghdad and Basra between democracy and terrorist insurgency will reverberate around the planet for decades to come. If Iraq can become, in time, a relatively stable, prosperous democracy, terrorists in every country will have suffered a grave setback. But the reverse is also true. Liberated Iraq is the laboratory of the global future.
The high-flown language in Washington was, it must be said, far removed from the talk on the ground during the Prime Minister's trip to Iraq earlier in the week. He had long discussions with senior officers and intelligence officials. There were grumblings on the American side that the new Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has 100 days to establish some sort of control.
The vigour with which Messrs Bush and Blair deny that they have a timetable for departure shows only how much they would like to set one. Both politicians know that posterity will judge them by this war and its aftermath.
Still: as taxing as these great global issues are, it must be pleasant for the Prime Minister to leave the home front for a while, and spend quality time with an unswerving ally. He returned this weekend to a ghastly domestic landscape: David Cameron six points ahead in a Daily Telegraph poll; John Reid already under ferocious fire as Home Secretary; Cabinet colleagues openly lobbying for John Prescott's job; police sealing off Ford open prison to stop foreign inmates absconding.
The Prime Minister must have been tempted to turn the plane round and head back to Washington. At least George likes him, his toothpaste, and his ties: these days, you have to go abroad to find a true Blairite.
More Limey whining. I am not impressed.
'More Limey whining. I am not impressed.'
What would you expect a Conservative paper like the torygraph to write about Blair? Personally I'm not impressed with how far your president seems to be in love with socialist Blair, but as he can't have a third term it will inevitably end sooner or later. . . .
A small point perhaps, but Cameron actually refers to 'compassionate Conservatism' not 'compassionate conservatism.'
The capital 'C' indicates he means the compassionate side of the Conservative Partys politics, not of conservatism in general, the US version of which is quite different in many areas to US conservatism.
I really have no love for Tony Blair, I know he's a Socialist. It's just good to see family (because we, Yanks, Limeys, Kiwis, Aussies, Canooks are all cousins) come together and denounce the evil that is in this world.
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