Blair & Brown - An enigma wrapped in a mystery
Comment at end
14th November, 2007
A catching up post. I’ve been abroad with the beautiful, revolting, smoking people. (I will write on this later, if I get the chance.)
This page contents (you can jump to each section):
3. Brown’s Mansion House Speech - Internationalism, of a sort
4. Blair Video interview on CNN on Middle East
6. Contact site - for Tony Blair to speak to your organisation
UNDERSTANDING THE ENIGMA WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY
It makes me smile how the British ferals … sorry, press, can’t yet get a handle on our former prime minister. There’s something rather glorious about his being probably the most photographed, quoted and written about politician of the modern age - and yet, they really can’t work him out.
They also do not quite understand GB/PM - the present prime minister.
It must have been truly sickening for the Press & the Labour Left to discover that for years - as many as FOUR whole years, from 1994 to 1998 - he had been in deep and serious discussions with Paddy Ashdown, the then leader of the Liberal Democrats (Britain’s third party) on their “project” of coalition, if not merger, from around 1994 - 1998. No less than a re-alignment of the Left to assign the Tories to where they would have been for much of the 20th century, if the larger Left had not been constantly split.
AMAZING vision!
And, for much of the time, Brown, though absolutely against the whole idea, KNEW of these talks.
This interests me greatly.
In June this year a prime minister took over the reins of power, (unhindered by such troublesome details as asking the electorate), of one of the greatest and most powerful nations on earth. He promised to be different from the previous incumbent. Open, honest, transparent; all the watchwords people in their carefully press-honed naivity are told are important in politics.
WHEN are we going to grow up?
John Rentoul too, in his biography of Blair - Tony Blair, Prime Minister - gives us some insight into the Blair/Brown relationship and what forces guided Blair.
But I was particularly fascinated by this reference of Naughtie’s:
“This Prime Minister, elected in 1997 with a bigger majority than any one-party government since the Batlle of Waterloo, and re-elected four years later with one that was nearly as great, was tormented by the thought that he had so far failed to construct a Cabinet in his own image. Blair was racked at the turn of the century by the thought that he might not have done enough to bed his ideas down.”
[Page 120, The Rivals, by James Naughtie.]
(Note: The Battle of Waterloo was in 1815, that’s 182 years before 1997!)
THE GREAT REFORMER
This fact in itself, and how little weight it gave to the party to climb on board Blair’s instincts for reform, shows us how far behind the man who led them was this New Labour party. And, equally, how much space there really was between the Brothers B, rooted as Brown was in Labour’s 20th century past.
When it comes to the question of vision versus expediency … which of these two men has a true claim to which?
I know what I think, and I DO wish I had noticed the Blair vision earlier, but I was off politics at that time - disillusioned by the voters. Think I still am, largely (disillusioned, that is.) It was then, according to Ashdown, THE project which Tony Blair hoped would be his most important political legacy, if completed successfully. And all of this at a time when he had already started work on the long road to peace in Northern Ireland.
So what of the Liberal Democrats now?
FORGET IT, LIB-DEMS. YOUR BEST CHANCE HAS PASSED YOU BY … AGAIN!
It’s been an interesting existence for the Liberal Democrats since their formation from the merger of the Liberals and the SDP (largely the pro-Europe & pro-devolution breakaway from Labour). But it is becoming increasingly unlikely that they will EVER make the longed-for breakthrough. Without proportional representation - and which of the other two parties is going to agree to that now? - they have NO CHANCE of overtaking either Labour or the Conservatives. Even with a new leader at the helm at the next election they will be pushing it to get 23% of the vote, in my humble opinion, giving them roughly 70 seats.
At the UK Elect website the projection is for Labour to lose 22 seats, winning the next election with a much smaller majority - 21 only, 44 fewer than Blair’s 2005 result. The Tories will gain 30 seats and the Liberal Democrats will have dropped back 10, to 52 seats.
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Party |
Seats |
Change from 2005 election |
| Labour | 333 | -22 |
| Conservative | 228 | +30 |
| Liberal Democrat | 52 | -10 |
| DUP | 9 | - |
| Scottish National Party | 7 | +1 |
| Sinn Fein | 5 | - |
| Plaid Cymru | 4 | +1 |
| SDLP | 3 | - |
| UUP | 1 | - |
| Others | 3 | - |
| Speaker | 1 | - |
| Labour Majority | 21 | -44 |
I’m not sure when this site was updated, but its poll, presumably of recent participants, shows something different:
| Lab, Maj 100 | 59 | 3.0% |
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| Lab, Maj 75 - 99 | 135 | 6.8% |
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| Lab, Maj 1 - 49 | 336 | 16.9% |
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| Hung, Lab largest | 393 | 19.7% |
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| Hung, Con Largest | 397 | 19.9% |
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| Con, Maj 1 - 49 | 498 | 25.0% |
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| Cons, Maj 50 - 99 | 106 | 5.3% |
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| Con, Maj 100 | 33 | 1.7% |
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| Other | 34 | 1.7% |
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Total Votes : 1991 |
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Here, the largest percentage of the almost 2000 clicks, at 25%, is for the Conservatives to win. The second largest, at 19.9% is for a Conservative/hung parliament, and at 0.2% behind them a Labour/hung position. Only 1.7% think that there will be an “other” result, which presumably means the Liberal Democrats winning. And if the votes across the various combinations are added (not exactly scientific, but a useful guide), the Conservatives could come out 5%-age points ahead of Labour.
In the end the Liberal Democrats invariably do better than projected, so there will be somewhere between 18% - 25% for them, I’d guess. Their dream of a hung parliament, where they hold the balance of power, is the highest they might hope for, as it always has been since their conception.
But think how it all might have been if Blair & Ashdown’s “project” - the love that dare not speak its name” - had actually come to fruition!
I have recently read Paddy Ashdown’s Diaries where it is clear that he believed that Tony Blair WAS firmly committed to the cause of a major re-alignment of the Left, inspired by his mentor Roy Jenkins (founder of the SDP and former Labour Chancellor). Blair was constantly irritated by the dominance of the Conservatives for much of the 20th century.
This was at the time that Blair could walk on water, 1994 - 1997. And yet, because of his party’s traditionalists, he did not feel free to push this through. That water started to cover his head within his party, and even withing his cabinet, after he had secured their landslide victory in 1997, and another in 2001. His own party, particularly John Prescott and Gordon Brown (yes, GB/PM the great Lib-Dem seducer) would have none of this talk!
James Naughtie confirms Ashdown’s version of this in his “Rivals” book where he explains in great detail just how exactly Blair & Brown ran government as a duopoly. With hindsight, I have little doubt, Blair knows he should have resisted this two-headed arrangement.
It was largely his undoing in the end. It was NOT Iraq, but the unfulfilled, ambition of the Chancellor and his merry men.
Men such as Ed Balls, in from the beginning with Brown, and the one whose verbal assaults in recent years made Blair feel like an abused and bullied wife.
RIGHT AT THE TIME
But hindsight’s 20/20. At the beginning it seemed a sensible arrangement to both starry-eyed Blair & Brown. Brown was the economics man, and Blair was the front man overseeing foreign policy, health and education departments.
If Blair had had the courage of his convictions and challenged Brown to a contest for the party leadership in 1994, Brown would have been relegated and at Blair’s mercy, instead of the opposite position, which seems to have happened. He didn’t and in the end we have had a Prime minister for ten years whose every move has been monitored by the “bloke next door”.
Blair was too trusting of his old friend.
Strangely, I imagine they still have a certain fondness for each other, if that’s the right word.
Yesterday’s Guardian leader concludes that Gordon Brown’s Mansion House speech and his angle on “hard-headed internationalism”, is no different from that of Mr Blair. Well, fancy that! Didn’t we know that anyway?
Though Mr Blair and Mr Brown give a very different level of priority to foreign as opposed to domestic affairs, and though they each have very different ways of expressing their views, the reality is that they share the same overall view of the world - that global challenges can only be overcome by effective global partnerships and that Britain must never be forced to choose between its transatlantic and its European alliances.
And some silly blogger’s, so SO Christian sentiments, throws a cat amongst the pigeons on Mr Blair’s religious hopes. Nothing about whether or not he should become a catholic - this one thinks the Anglican church should excommunicate him. Although it’s generous of him to say that Mr Blair should not “be shot”!
[What is it with the violence brooding inside some of these people?!]
“Because Parliament supported the Iraq war it refuses to comprehensively investigate the truth of how it occurred. I would therefore suggest that an ecclesiastical court might examine Mr Blair’s specific role. He is a member of the Church of England. But should he be? There is good reason to believe that Mr Blair knowingly promoted an aggressive war behind various pretences. At the very least, he sought only evidence that would support his prior decision for such a war. The sheer scale of the disaster that Mr Blair enthusiastically colluded in unleashing demands examination of his motives. If an ecclesiastical court should be satisfied that his actions were gravely unchristian, he ought to be ex-communicated.
I am not suggesting that Mr Blair should be shot, blown to pieces, dismembered, immolated, starved, made a refugee, that his front door should be kicked in, his family raped or shot, his house blown up or any of the other injuries that he visited on the Iraqi people and on our own soldiers. I am suggesting that he might be refused the bread and wine of the Eucharist.”
‘Remember, remember … the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.’
Tony Blair Video - interview for CNN on 5th November.
While we Brits were burning effigies of various hate figures on our bonfires celebrating the failure of the attempt of the catholic Guy Fawkes to burn down the Houses of Parliament, over 400 years ago, the ubiquitous Tony Blair was in a much safer place … the USA!
[Aside: We are supposed to be celebrating this treacherous failure, yet strangely we like to put democratically elected politicians' effigies on our bonfires and not those who would destroy our democracy. In fact, you can imagine the ructions if we DID try to put today's anti-democratic effigies on a bonfire. The politically correct would be ringing the local council, the police, Liberty, or whoever else ... to complain! What an upside-down world.]
And don’t start! Mr Blair’s long expected conversion to catholicism does NOT mean he has a hidden agenda. As if! (Just making mischief here. Apologies.)
Having said that, the day we know he has converted, will be the day I hang up this blog and its anachronistic url. He has enough to do over the coming years without attempting to modernise this silly, ancient rule, and from outside parliament. So that DEFINITELY means he is out of British politics forever if and when he converts.
Excerpt, Telegraph
Some lawyers believe the 1829 Emancipation Act, which gave Roman Catholics full civil rights, may still prevent a Catholic from becoming prime minister.
Clauses in the Act state that no Catholic adviser to the monarch can hold civil or military office.
WANT TONY BLAIR TO SPEAK?If you think you’d like to have Mr Blair speak to your organisation he can be contacted through the Washington Speakers’ Bureau.
You can tell them I sent you.
Tags: ashdown, blair, brown, coalition, election, liberal democrats, merger
