Posted on 03/19/2003 3:55:48 PM PST by Lando Lincoln
March 19, 2003
Blair plays not to the gallery but to the heart
TONY BLAIR has never made a more difficult speech, or a more important one, or a better one. Its power lay not in oratorical flourish, or wit, or calculated emotional appeal; it was not smooth, or clever, or contemptuous. It did not hammer home the history and histrionics, or invoke the cadence of the pulpit. The shrugs, the headshakes and the sneer had gone.
Instead it was raw, simple, dignified, and bleak: a promise, a plea, and a warning. It was made by a man armed with words of war, in the certain knowledge that once deployed, they could not be pulled back.
It was a speech quite unlike any that Blair has made before.
The Prime Minister is not, by instinct, a gambler, but yesterday he gravely totted up the stakes, the highest he has ever played for. “We have the Government with its most serious test, its majority at risk, the first Cabinet resignation over an issue of policy.” The outcome, he said, would “determine the pattern of international politics for the next generation”. And the fate of Tony Blair.
Like Robin Cook on Monday, and other more junior members of the Government yesterday, Blair explicitly nailed his political fate to personal principle. If the House voted to withdraw troops from the coming conflict, he said, they would also remove him. “I will not be party to such a course.”
The warning rippled around the utterly packed, utterly silent chamber.
High in the gallery, Cherie Blair’s face was a mask of tension and concentration. In the far back benches sat Cook, conducting some intense internal dialogue, deep inside his own beard. Clare Short felt her neck; perhaps the sudden changes of direction have caused whiplash. And Margaret Beckett, toughest of Cabinet ministers, held back tears.
“Who will celebrate and who will weep, if we take our troops back from the Gulf now?” wondered Blair, hands trembling, voice steady. This was no mere rhetorical device, but a question posed to, and answered by, himself: “I believe passionately that we must hold firm.”
Winston Churchill was there, as he has been at every debate, but discreetly. In 1941 Churchill declared: “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire.” Blair’s echo was subtle: “This is not the time to falter . . . If we do act, we should do so with a clear conscience and a strong heart.”
Shock and awe. Having awed, by invoking the possibility of his own political demise, Blair now sought to shock, describing how someone who slandered Saddam was tied to a lamppost, his tongue cut out, and then left to bleed to death.
The implication was that here, in the midst of the most emotive parliamentary debate, all may speak their conscience. And they did, rising one after the other, to rebel or support, with passionate courtesy, without slander or invective.
“September 11 changed the psychology of America,” said Blair, but looming war has also changed the psychology of Parliament.
Whatever conflict may do to Blair, Iraq or the international community, it has transformed the quality of political debate.
As Blair approached his finale, he thrust aside his printed text.
“This is the time for this House, not just this Government or this Prime Minister, to give a lead, to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right, to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships that put our lives at risk, to show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to do the right thing.”
For the second time in two days there was applause and cheering, Tories among the loudest. It was then that I noticed Margaret Beckett was crying. Unlike other Cabinet members, who have wrung their hands in public, her feelings were not for effect. The turmoil was internal, and private. She wept as far from view as possible, shielded by the Speaker’s chair.
How much the war has changed already. A Blair without plastic wrapping. Politicians speaking from the heart, voting from conviction and treating rival opinions with deference, doing the right thing by their different lights, without faltering or tiring.
This was the most closely scrutinised debate for decades, but one in which each participant, from the Prime Minister down, looked not to the cameras or the gallery, but inside.
The allied relationship between the US and the UK is a true blessing in this perilous world.
Please, could someone post a link to the text of the speech? Thank you!
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