By MAX HASTINGS Tony Blair could be President of Europe Whenever life has looked bleak lately - and what with recession, bankers' bonuses, Afghanistan and Question Time, this has scarcely been a golden autumn - there has been a notable consolation. We are no longer obliged to turn on breakfast TV to be greeted by the vacuous grin of Tony Blair as prime minister. He is gone, finished, suffering death by a thousand cuts, or rather life imprisonment without remission in a ten-bedroom Home Counties mansion with Cherie, paroled only to address chicken dinners in U.S. cities for enormous cheques, but surely little fun. There have been moments when you could almost pity the man. Whatever his follies and failures as steward of Britain's fortunes for a decade, now that his career is over, it seems possible to feel sorry for anyone who might live another 20 or 30 years with no brighter prospect from dawn to sunset than lectures on human rights from his wife, interspersed with visits from her latest lifestyle counsellor and holidays with Cliff Richard or Silvio Berlusconi. But this is where the jokes hit the barrier. Suddenly, we discover that the political career of Tony Blair may not be ended. Even if Britain has done with him, Europe has not. The discredited former prime minister is front-runner to become first president of the EU. This is a post created by the Lisbon Treaty, which seems close to ratification. The appointment of such a figurehead will not be decided by anything as tiresome as a popular election, of course. Instead, it will rest in the hands of the 27 leaders of the EU nations. In the weeks ahead, they will decide in backstairs discussion among themselves whom to back. The views of the big states will carry most weight. President Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Berlusconi of Italy may cut sorry figures on the world stage, but their enthusiasm for Blair is important in deciding this outcome. Chancellor Merkel of Germany is said to have reservations, but the European press, and continental political gossip, suggest these may be overcome. The problem for the Europeans is that, having willed the creation of a grand panjandrum to inflate the Union's power and importance, they must identify someone to do the job. A glance at the list of rival candidates makes it possible to understand why Blair is being encouraged to leap out of his political coffin. The Dutch are offering their prime minister, the devout Calvinist Jan Peter Balkenende, once derided by a Belgian politician as 'a mix of Harry Potter and typical bourgeois rigidity'. Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende is a candidate for first president of the EU There is a 68-year-old Finn, Paavo Lipponen, a former prime minister, whose only real claim to fame is that his country makes good mobile telephones. Then there is Felipe Gonzales, an Eighties Spanish socialist prime minister, who bequeathed to his country the highest unemployment rate on Europe. The trouble with all these worthy figures is that no one outside their own countries would recognise them in an identity parade. Imagine Paavo Lipponen turning up in Washington and trying to get himself on TV's Good Morning America, never mind past the security guards at the White House. The rivals all lack what Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in an act of egregious indulgence to Blair's vanity, has called 'the motorcade factor'. Tony Blair alone, say the EU politicians and officials, can be considered a star on the world stage, instantly recognised wherever he goes. If he has appeared ridiculous as the alleged Middle East peacemaker since 2007, he is hailed as the architect of the Northern Ireland peace settlement, a superb speechmaker and familiar figure at the world's top tables. Since the purpose of creating a president is to strengthen the EU's power and influence, a mounting clamour across Europe urges that only Blair might achieve this. The irony, of course, is that the one country where he could not win an elective catfight, never mind return to high office, is the one that knows him best - Britain. We lived with Blair as tenant of Downing Street for ten years. We learned to see him for what he is, and it is not a pretty sight. Back in 1997, when New Labour was elected to power, Blair seemed to offer national renewal. He appeared to be a different kind of politician. I was among those fooled by him. In private conversation as well as on the platform, he was deeply impressive. The truth is that he is one of the most effective speakers of his time. On his day, he could charm an audience of two or 2,000. He seemed sincere, courageous, committed to making Britain an effective society to compete in the 21st century. His objectives - improved public services, better health care and education, peace in Northern Ireland, a reformed welfare state matched by economic and taxation policies not much different from those of Margaret Thatcher - were shared by millions. Newly elected British prime minister Tony Blair waves to his supporters as he arrives at No. 10 Unfortunately, however, there was a huge flaw in Blair and New Labour. He talked a great game, but he and his government did not have the slightest idea how to get things done; they did not know how to translate vision into reality. As the New Labour era unfolded, we began to understand that Blair - and Gordon Brown - had a great gift for spending our money, but no notion of how to reform creaking state institutions, deliver better services or make things work. In the boom years, their failure was masked by awesome sums of tax money rolling into the Treasury without much effort from the Chancellor. But as Blair's second term was succeeded by his third, suddenly people began to notice: tens of billions had been squandered, while Labour's stealth taxes, such as the pension fund smashand-grab, drained ever more cash from private purses. But nothing much had got better. Blair and Brown sidestepped the hard choices. Healthcare was improved, but at a frightful cost. Educational standards slumped. The rail track system was expensively renationalised. Scotland and Wales were given devolved government, at heavy cost to the Union as well as the public purse. Perhaps worst of all, the open door policy opened the floodgates to an influx of immigrants, which has not merely created a drastic population increase, but changed the face of Britain against the wishes of most of its citizens. We grew to understand that Blair and his acolytes, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, were indifferent to how things really were, if only they could be made to look politically acceptable. Their cynicism was breathtaking. Whether the issue was hospital waiting lists, A-level devaluation, migration or crime figures, all that mattered was to present facts in a fashion that would get the government through the next week or the next General Election. Some of us had supposed that Blair was as honest as he proclaimed himself. We learned better. Labour's fundraising operations, starting with Bernie Ecclestone and the Formula One scandal, gave way to cash for peerages and free prime ministerial holidays with some of the planet's shadier inhabitants. We began to understand that Mrs Blair was a strange person, as well as a formidably influential one. Her enthusiasms for screwball gurus with criminal connections, foreign shopping binges, property empire-building and New Age philosophy did not seem to trouble her husband - which, in turn, troubled the rest of us. It became increasingly apparent that Blair's notion of integrity and truth meant peddling versions of reality that he found acceptable. If he said this or that was so, then it was. OK? His peculiar brand of conceit was fortified by his proclaimed Christian convictions. Even if critics, opinion polls and facts said Blair was deceiving the nation, he chose to believe that as long as he and God understood each other, everything was fine. The prime minister's cosy pact with the Almighty conferred freedom to do exactly what he chose, because he had squared it with the only power that mattered. There were a number of reasons why Blair was able to get away with all this, to fool most of the people most of the time. The Tory opposition was pathetically weak; he and his team were brilliant image-makers, spin doctors, masters of illusion; and, because as long as the economic good times persisted - which they did until he had skipped the scene - the public was happy to gobble Big Macs, watch their houses soar in value and not ask hard questions. For two parliaments at least, Blair's Britain seemed a pretty comfortable place. The turning point was Iraq. In 2002, Blair made the decisive, catastrophic error of his premiership. Long before gaining the consent of Parliament, he promised George Bush the support of British troops for the U.S. invasion, then set about finding 'evidence' to justify this to the British people. The claim, boned and rolled by Blair's personal butcher Alastair Campbell, that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, will haunt his premiership in the eyes of history, and should damn his reputation when the Iraq Inquiry eventually reports. It is hard to imagine a more devastating indictment of a leader than that he took his country to war under false pretences. By the time Blair left Downing Street in 2007, he had been rumbled by the British people. They understood the scale of his failure and betrayal. If his successor Gordon Brown has proved a poor prime minister, many of the problems and disasters that have engulfed him were Blair's creations. John Major was an ineffectual premier, but no national disaster occurred on his watch. Blair, by contrast, can be held responsible for social, economic and strategic misjudgments whose consequences will dog this country for decades. John Major and Tony Blair in 1998 It is extraordinary, indeed grotesque, that a leader whose standing in his own country is at rock bottom should be deemed a worthy first president of Europe. He is the favoured candidate for a role that most British people believe should not exist. Labour denied the electorate a vote on the Lisbon Treaty on the spurious basis that it is merely a 'tidying up' of existing legislation, yet can scarcely disguise its glee that one of its own may soon be enthroned to rule over an entire continent. The whole sorry episode is serving only to debase the democratic process yet further in the eyes of the British people, and worse is to come. For if David Cameron becomes prime minister next year, obliged to do business with Blair as Europe's president, a host of difficulties and embarrassments must follow. The collapsing Labour Government knows this and, of course, welcomes it. David Miliband urges that a Blair presidency would be 'very good for Britain as well as very good for Europe'. He means that from the political graveyard to which the Labour Party is headed, it might snatch a last chance of making mayhem for its Tory successor through the agency of Labour's fallen leader. It is a cynical, dirty business. If Blair gets the job, the British people will become even more disenchanted with Europe than they are already. The danger of a showdown between London and Brussels will be increased. Blair has been a remarkable politician with a supreme talent for gaining power. But he failed calamitously as a statesman and national leader. Before the EU chooses him as its first president, its leaders should acknowledge that for all his fame, he is a bird of ill omen. He has proved an albatross, injuring almost every cause that he has espoused - as he will surely injure the EU if its members are foolish enough to give him this job.Blair's social, economic and military errors will curse Britain for decades
Last updated at 7:32 AM on 27th October 2009
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Wednesday, 28 October 2009
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