Britannia Radio

As originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, June 1996

"You have to remember," says someone who knows him, "that the great

passion in his life is his hatred of the Labour Party"

by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

ON October 3 of last year the world awaited the
verdict from a Los Angeles
courtroom. That Tuesday was also the opening day of the Labour Party's
annual conference at
Brighton, and at 6:00P.M.--10:00 A.M. Pacific Time, when the jury's
decision was due--many of us
covering the conference headed for televisions in bars or hotel rooms.
To our astonishment, the
BBC led off its news program not with the O. J. Simpson verdict but with
the keynote speech that
Tony Blair, the Labour leader, had given earlier that day. Surprise
turned into a mixture of irritation
and amusement when the full story emerged. The television companies had
been badgered by
faxes from Alastair Campbell, Blair's press secretary: "Whilst I fully
understand there is much
interest in the verdict, I would implore you not to lose sight of the
news value and of the importance
to the country of Mr Blair's speech." Nor did they lose sight of it. The
BBC did as it was told. This
went beyond spin-doctoring. It was news management worthy of a none-too-
democratic Balkan
state, or of some Third World country rejoicing in the "new information
order."

The arrogance would have seemed outrageous coming from the Prime
Minister's office. But Blair
was not Prime Minister, only behaving as if he were, after little more
than a year--though a
triumphant year--as leader of the opposition. When he became party
leader, Labour had been out
of office for more than fifteen years; an entire generation has grown up
knowing only Tory rule.
Labour has lost four general elections in succession, a record
unprecedented since well before the
advent of universal suffrage. It managed to lose the last election, in
1992, to what looked like an
enfeebled Tory government in the depths of a recession. Since 1974, when
Harold Wilson last won
a general election for Labour, the party has had five leaders, none of
whom has won a general
election and four of whom have never been Prime Minister. A British
citizen now needs to be over
forty to have voted for a Labour government.

This pattern of failure has seemingly been reversed. Blair became the
Labour leader in July of
1994, at the age of forty-one, projecting glamour, youth, freshness. His
slogan was
"modernization," and he unofficially but definitely renamed his party
"New Labour." It may have
looked more like a marketing strategy than a political philosophy, but
it worked. Within a year
Labour was so far ahead in the polls that if (in the political
commentators' illusory hypothesis) an
election had been held then, the Tories would have suffered the kind of
wipeout their Canadian
counterparts experienced not long ago.

Almost more startling than what Blair did was how he did it. He took
over a party all but terminally
demoralized by endless defeat, presenting himself as the man who could
make the party electable
once more. What wasn't clear at first was that he meant to do so by
utterly transforming the party,
by uprooting its traditions, by effectively destroying Labour as it had
been known since its
beginnings. There had long been struggles between the left and the right
of the party, between
advanced socialists and cautious reformists, and some leaders were more
radical than others. But
Labour had always had a sentimental tradition to which all paid homage,
embodied in totems such
as the state-socialist Clause Four of its old constitution and the
singing of "The Red Flag" at the end
of conferences.

Blair is the first Labour leader who barely pretends to be a socialist.
He determined to ditch Clause
Four, and duly did so. In the process he caused what one writer has
called "the collapse of Labour
as the party of organised labor"--an outcome that, as the oddly
oxymoronic phrase suggests, is as
though the Pope caused the collapse of the Church as the medium of
organized Christianity. Even
more brazenly, Blair has courted figures ranking high in the demonology
of the British left, from the
rulers of the East Asian "tiger" countries to the Prince of Darkness
himself, Rupert Murdoch.

Above all, he did what no leader of the "progressive" side in British
politics had done since the
1840s. Every Tory leader since Sir Robert Peel had implicitly agreed
with his opponents that the
future belonged with their side; that at best a rearguard action could
be fought; that conservatism's
role was to make concessions as slowly, and with as good grace, as
possible. That is, until
Margaret Thatcher. She was the first Tory leader who did not share this
belief.

And Blair agrees with her. He is the first of the Tories' political
opponents ever to concede that they
have largely won the argument. An anthology of Blair's recent
reflections speaks for itself.

"I believe Margaret Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right."

"A strong society should not be confused with a strong state."

"Duty is the cornerstone of a decent society."

"Britain needs more successful people who can become rich by success
through the money they
earn."

"People don't want an overbearing state."

Any of these could have been uttered by a Tory, or by a none-too-liberal
Democrat or, indeed, by
a none-too-liberal Republican. Come to think of it, Patrick Buchanan's
main disagreement with the
Labour leader would be over Blair's uncritical admiration for "wealth
creators" and free trade. It has
been a breathtaking achievement--but a paradoxical one. Political
parties have changed character
before now, and have sometimes been taken over from the outside. This is
a unique and much
stranger case: a party has been captured from the inside, and by a man
who in his heart despises
most of that party's traditions and cherished beliefs.

AS parties go, Labour is quite young, much younger than the Tories and
than both the Democrats
and the Republicans. Its birth isn't easy to pin down. An Independent
Labour Party (independent of
the parties then existing, that is) was born in 1893, shortly after Keir
Hardie became the first man to
be elected to Parliament specifically as a labor representative rather
than as a "lib-lab" loosely
attached to the Liberal Party. But the ILP remained one of many small
bodies in the larger and
looser movement. A Labour Representation Committee was created in 1900,
and formally
christened the national Labour Party in 1906. In those early years any
number of different and
sometimes conflicting forces jostled within this movement. Marxism had
struck its roots in England
through the Social Democratic Federation, but not deep or widespread
ones. The Fabian Essays,
published in 1889 by seven writers, including George Bernard Shaw and
Sidney Webb, offered an
alternative version of nonrevolutionary bureaucratic socialism. Three
radical American writers,
Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and Laurence Gronlund, had perhaps as much
influence in
England as in their own country, but ethical and utopian writers such as
John Ruskin and William
Morris were more influential still.

With all that, Labour remained what its name said: the political and
industrial voice of the organized
working class. Bodies like the ILP and the SDF were socialist but tiny;
the labor or union movement
was large but not socialist. Labour organized unions on the one hand,
and on the other increased
political representation for the masses as the franchise was gradually
extended to them. In 1906,
twenty-nine Labour MPs were elected, almost all of them workingmen by
origin. And their policy
remained what Keir Hardie had set out in 1903: "When acting in the House
of Commons, they
should be neither socialists, Liberals, nor Tories, but a Labour party."

That party waxed as the middle-class Liberals waned, and by the 1920s
Labour had become the
chief party opposed to the Tories (whose own survival and adaptability
over 150 years has been
one of the most extraordinary stories of modern European politics). Not
until around the time Great
Britain finally granted universal franchise did a Labour government come
to power. There were two
Labour governments before the war, in 1924 and 1929-1931, but neither
had a clear majority in
Parliament, and both ended in grief, with recriminations and accusations
of betrayal.

By the time it became a party of government, Labour had also formally
become a socialist party. At
its 1918 conference it adopted a new constitution, including the famous
Clause Four, which laid
down the party's objective:

To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their
industry and the most equitable
distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common
ownership of the means of
production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system
of popular administration
and control of each industry and service.

The sentence was drafted by Webb, a man who personified the dominant
ethos of the Labour
Party, which was Fabian managerialism. With his imperious, terrifying
wife, Beatrice, he believed
that the world could be put to rights by the efficient collection and
application of statistics. The two
of them were lampooned by H. G. Wells in his novel The New Machiavelli,
though a couple who
could spend their honeymoon attending the Trades Union Congress in
Glasgow were in reality
beyond satire.

Like others on the left early in the century, Webb was fascinated by
eugenics, or scientific
breeding. In the 1930s he became fascinated by another socialist
experiment, and with Beatrice
wrote the adulatory Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, which has been
described by one
historian as "despite severe competition, the most preposterous book
ever written about Soviet
Russia." Webb summed up his political philosophy: "The perfect and
fitting development of each
individual is not necessarily the utmost and highest cultivation of his
own personality, but the filling,
in the best possible way, of his humble function in the great social
machine."

When Labour finally came to power with a clear parliamentary majority,
in 1945, it acted on
Webb's program and in his spirit. The 1945 government was the apotheosis
of bureaucratic
socialism, founded on the principles of collectivism, central economic
planning, and redistributive
taxation. It created--or, more accurately, completed--the modern British
welfare state, whose core
was the National Health Service and universal benefits, and it also
nationalized the "commanding
heights" of the economy--or at least some of those heights, as they were
then seen. But the timing
was wrong, and the old industries that were nationalized, such as
railroads and coal mines, though
deeply rooted in the emotional memory of the Labour movement, were
already in decline and soon
to be a burden on the nation.

Mid-century saw Labour's high tide. In the 1951 election the party
received more votes than ever
before or ever since, and more votes than the Tories. But owing to the
vagaries of the electoral
system the Tories won the election, and remained in office for thirteen
years. And in the forty-five
years since 1951 Labour has managed to interrupt Tory rule for only two
brief periods: 1964-1970
and 1974-1979. After Labour's defeat in 1992 some of us began to believe
that a secular historical
tide was sweeping the party away forever, as the Liberals were swept
away before. We were
wrong, it seems. For most of 1995 and 1996 Labour has enjoyed a huge
lead in the polls, around
30 percent at last count. A general election must come by next spring
and may well come sooner,
as the Major government's slender parliamentary majority evaporates. It
is almost universally
assumed that Labour will win it, and many Tory politicians are already
making discreet plans for
alternate careers. So reports of the death of Labour were much
exaggerated. Or were they? It
might be that the Labour Party as it has existed for nearly a hundred
years has indeed
disappeared, with only its name left behind, like the grin on the face
of the disappearing Cheshire
cat.

ALL of which is one man's work. Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born in
May of 1953. His
background is partly conventional, partly romantic. His father, Leo, was
the son of Charles
Parsons, a small-time actor, and Celia Ridgeway, a dancer and a dropout
from a rich family.
Because they were unmarried at the time Leo was born, he was adopted by
a couple in Scotland
called Blair. Leo grew up poor and had little education, but his gifts
emerged during the war, which
he began as a private and ended as a major. After the war he qualified
as a barrister, or trial
lawyer, and became a university law teacher at Durham, where his
children grew up. He married a
woman named Hazel Corscaden, the significance of whose background has
gone entirely
unremarked. Her family were poor Protestant farmers from County Donegal,
one of the three
predominantly Catholic counties of the historic province of Ulster,
which went to the Irish Free
State when Ireland was partitioned, and most of whose Protestant
minority subsequently departed.
Blair has already moved Labour sharply away from its former "united
Ireland" policy, and my
hunch is that the cause of Irish nationalism would get no more of a
hearing from a Blair
government than from John Major's.

In the pattern of upward mobility, Leo sent Tony first to Durham
Choristers School (the poet and
journalist James Fenton claims to remember him with avuncular
affection), and then to Fettes, a
public (private) school in Edinburgh. It will be a nice irony if Labour
gives us the first "public-school
man" as Prime Minister since Harold Macmillan retired in 1963--the
subsequent Tory leaders,
Heath, Thatcher, and Major, having all come from backgrounds as humble
as those of their Labour
opponents. More to the point, Leo Blair was a Tory voter for most of his
life (though he now loyally
supports his son), and Tony has no Labour roots at all, either in
intellectual socialism or in the
broader labor movement.

He went on to Oxford, where he was a conventional enough undergraduate.
He belonged to one or
two dining clubs, he dated a few women, and he played for a time in a
rock band called Ugly
Rumours, which he would now rather forget, though his wife sometimes
plays tapes of the band at
parties to tease him. A.C.L. Blair, St. John's College '72 (Oxford dates
classes by the first year),
has learned one lesson from W. J. Clinton, University College '68. He
flatly denies that he ever so
much as touched, let alone inhaled, any form of illicit narcotic. A
cynic might say that this makes
him unique among student rockers of the 1970s, but that's his story, and
it fits the serious and even
priggish picture of young Tony. People who knew him then still tend to
think him a bit of a stick, as
the English say: dour, worthy, maybe a little dull.

As interesting as what he did at Oxford is what, apart from drugs, he
didn't do. He had no political
interests, never spoke at the Union debating club, joined no left-wing
societies, didn't protest the tail
end of the Vietnam war or Margaret Thatcher's policies as Education
Secretary in the 1970-1974
Tory government, which were a cause of much radical rage at the time.
Other than the law he was
studying, his chief interest was religion. An Australian friend, Peter
Thomson, introduced him to the
works of John Macmurray, whose Persons in Relation, The Self as Agent,
and other books
attempted an amalgam of Christianity with the politics of "community."

Since then Blair has remained a disciple of Macmurray's, an exponent of
"communitarianism," and
a practicing Anglo-Catholic, or "High" Episcopalian. Americans may not
easily realize how unusual
this makes him. We have a Church of England "by law established," and
its services are regularly
attended by about three percent of the population of England, which is
now the most irreligious
country in the West. Only a minority of British Prime Ministers in this
century have been Christians
in any serious sense, and it is possible in British politics for someone
like Thatcher's former
lieutenant Norman (Lord) Tebbit to be both a bareknuckle populist
right-winger and a self-
proclaimed atheist--a combination hard to imagine in America.

After Oxford, Blair became a barrister, and practiced for several years
in industrial and
employment law. At his law chambers he met another young lawyer, Cherie
Booth, who comes
from Liverpool and is the daughter of the actor Tony Booth, best known
for playing the son-in-law
of Alf Garnett, the Cockney bigot in the television comedy Till Death Us
Do Part, which inspired, if
that's the word, All in the Family. Blair and Booth married in 1980, and
have two sons and a
daughter. Cherie did brilliantly on her bar exams, way ahead of Blair.
She is probably a smarter
person than her husband, and certainly a better lawyer. Last year she
"took silk"--the quaint phrase
for when an English barrister joins the Inner Bar, puts "QC," for
Queen's Counsel, after her name,
and trebles her fees.

Part of Blair's public good fortune has been timing. In the early 1980s
the Labour Party was in very
bad shape. The last Labour government had been a sorry affair. Harold
Wilson resigned as Prime
Minister in 1976, abruptly and in a miasma of scandal, and his
successor, James Callaghan,
barely hung on until his government fell apart in 1979. The party was
falling apart also, torn
between the social-democratic right and a new left, markedly different
from the old left.

Most great political parties have been coalitions, often of highly
disparate elements. Think of the
Democrats in their Rooseveltian heyday- -that truly strange alliance of
organized labor, big-city
bosses, intellectual liberals, northern ethnics, and southern
segregationists. Labour was no odder
than that, but it was odd enough. It had always been a "broad church"
(in a hackneyed phrase
beloved of Wilson), bred from the various strains already described and
stretching from
conservative union men, often North Country Methodists or Irish
Catholics, to out- and-out fellow
travelers. By the 1970s this had changed. Stalinism was in eclipse, and
a quasi-Trotskyist new left
was in the ascendant.

After the 1979 debacle in which Margaret Thatcher and the Tories won,
this left, led by Tony Benn,
very nearly captured the Labour Party, and the old right peeled off to
form the Social Democratic
Party. Labour fought the 1983 general election on an ultra-left platform
that included withdrawal
from the European Community and unilateral nuclear disarmament. This
manifesto was nicely
described by the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman as the longest suicide note in
history, and so it
proved. Labour went down to its heaviest defeat (in terms of seats lost)
since 1940.

On the face of it, this was not an auspicious moment to enter Parliament
as a Labour MP, as Tony
Blair did, but it meant that he avoided the worst of the intestine
fighting in the party. He had had
one dry run the year before, following a rite of passage in which
aspiring politicians begin their
careers by fighting for a hopeless seat. For a Tory this might be a
mining constituency in South
Wales or Yorkshire, for a Labour lad or lass a retirement seaside resort
or somewhere in the Home
Counties, the outer suburbs of London. Blair had duly stood for Labour
in 1982 in a by-election in
Beaconsfield, northwest of London.

It would have been a lost cause at any time; while Thatcher basked in
the glory of the Falklands
war, it was utterly doomed. I covered that by-election fourteen years
ago, and recently turned to
my clippings hoping to find some percipient intimation that one of the
candidates might be a future
Prime Minister. Alas, I seem to have been struck mostly by the sameness
of the three candidates,
all professional, middle-class Oxford men, with Anthony Blair (as he was
before he chummily
Tonified himself) plausible but not electrifying.

He subsequently became the Labour candidate for the safe seat of
Sedgefield, in Durham, but not
painlessly. There was a left-wing rival for the nomination, Les
Huckfield, and the way Blair talked
his way into being chosen by the local Labour Party less than three
weeks before the general
election involved a mixture of charm, cajolery, mild misrepresentation,
and shameless exploitation
of the show-business background of his wife, who, he said in an
unfeminist way, would make a
new career in the northeast of England if her husband became an MP
there. (She didn't.)

Shortly after he was elected, there was a Labour rally in Sedgefield, at
which Blair began to outline
what was to be his great project. Labour had lost touch with the people
it was meant to represent,
he said. It should come to terms with its defeat and Thatcher's crushing
victory. The party must
grow out of its old tribal traditions and modernize itself. He was
followed by another speaker,
Dennis Skinner, one of the firebrands of the Labour left, who has for
more than a quarter century
bitterly, and sometimes wittily, insulted Tories in the House of
Commons--though he has just as
often insulted his party colleagues.

At that meeting Skinner denounced the new MP alongside him for his
betrayal of the socialist
cause and then, in a moment of pre-arranged theater, pointed to
Huckfield, who had just strolled
into the back of the hall, and shouted that he was the man who should
have been chosen instead of
Blair. The left-wingers in the audience cheered to the echo. Blair
suffered his public humiliation in
silence. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that his life since has
been calculated revenge for that
moment.

In a parliamentary Labour Party that was not then bursting with talent,
Blair soon shone. He was an
official opposition spokesman within a year of becoming an MP. Following
the Labour rout of 1983
the amiable but hopeless Michael Foot had been succeeded as Labour
leader by Neil Kinnock,
also amiable and, as it turned out, not much less hopeless, who duly
went on to lose not one but
two elections: in 1987, when everyone expected the Tories to win again
under Thatcher, and in
1992, when many people, including Kinnock, were amazed that the Tories
won under Major.

After that defeat Kinnock resigned and was replaced by yet another
amiable man, John Smith, who
was more capable than either of his predecessors and had made some quiet
political headway
before he suddenly died of a heart attack in May of 1994. Blair had
bided his time but now went
into action with ruthless effect. He leaned on his contemporary,
colleague, and, until then, close
political friend Gordon Brown to stand aside, and won the leadership
election against John
Prescott, "old Labour" par excellence, a man of working-class
background, generous emotion, and
incoherent eloquence.

Just quite what Blair had in mind was not obvious that summer of 1994,
but there were audible
signals in his speeches during the leadership race: "The new right had
struck a chord. There was a
perception that there was too much collective power, too much
bureaucracy, too much state
intervention, and too many vested interests created around it." Too
much, in other words, of what
the Labour Party had always stood for. Now it was time, Blair said, to
move "from the politics of
protest to the politics of government."

THE ruthlessness he had shown in becoming leader was even clearer after
July of 1994. He gave a
barnstorming performance at his first party conference, the following
October, replete with
indistinct but minatory rhetoric of modernization. And he arranged a
special conference to be held
in the spring, to put to rest the hallowed Clause Four. It was duly
scrapped, and replaced by
something quite lacking the lucidity of the original, a lengthy, obscure
list of "Aims and Values" that
might have been the mission statement of a large corporation keen to
display its social awareness.

Even Blair could not break the party's links with the union movement
overnight, but they have been
steadily chipped away. Blair has made it plain that the unions will
enjoy no special favors when he
reaches Downing Street: "Unions should do the job of trade unions. The
Labour Party must do the
job of government. The British people expect Labour to govern for the
whole country, and we will."
This spring Blair moved to end the arrangement, existing since Keir
Hardie's day, by which unions
"sponsor" individual Labour MPs.

All of which may have been understandable enough. It is plainly the case
that by the 1970s the
unions had become an arrogant and destructive force, and that their
connection with Labour was
politically damaging for the party. When the Thatcher government curbed
the unions' power by
removing their privileged status outside the law (originally conferred
by Disraeli, of all people), the
step was welcomed by almost everyone except the union bosses. Any Labour
leader who wants to
become Prime Minister must accept that.

He must also accept that heavy taxation is unpopular, that rainbow
coalitions of ethnic and sexual
minorities arouse little enthusiasm among ordinary voters, and that the
kind of liberalism that
appears better disposed toward criminals than toward their victims
doesn't win many votes either.
Hence Blair's insistence that there will be no return to the taxation
rates of the last Labour
government, hence his fulsome tribute to a policeman murdered on duty
and his almost-too-neat
promise to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime."

There is also a growing consensus, way beyond neo- or paleo-
conservatism, that "Dan Quayle
was right": that the hedonistic individualism of the 1960s and 1970s was
socially destructive, and
that its ultimate victims have been not the well-to-do bohemians who
first propagated it but the poor.
Hence also Blair's language of responsibility, duty, and
self-discipline. This was shrewd as well as
sincere.

There was, finally, the need to recognize in intellectual honesty that
traditional command-economy
socialism has had its day, and that in every Western country the
traditional industrial proletariat
that was the labor movement's original constituency has dwindled to a
minority. All of that was
necessary. But Blair has gone much further--beyond the call of duty or
even ambition, one might
say.

Despite his political triumphs, Blair, and the Blairs, have been much
mocked, with obvious
comparisons made between Tony and Cherie and Bill and Hillary. They have
the same flavor of
radical chic, the same affinity with what we call the chattering
classes, or liberal media folk, and the
luvvies, or self-regarding, mildly progressive show-biz and media folk,
and the same cronyism.
Blair's inner court is not at all the same as the official shadow
cabinet. His principal courtiers are
Alastair Campbell, a former political journalist, witnessed earlier
twisting the BBC's arm, and Peter
Mandelson, a Labour MP who has earned his spin-doctor's M.D. cum laude
and has just written a
hero-worshipping account, The Blair Revolution.

This book does not really explain what form the revolution is going to
take when Blair has to rule the
country, as distinct from lecturing it. To the extent that there is a
Blairite political philosophy, its
language is either vague--"community," "solidarity," "cohesion"--or
opaque. "Stakeholding" has an
impressive ring but has yet to be satisfactorily defined. Of course
there is territory to be exploited
by Blair. Everyone knows that the years since Margaret Thatcher was
first elected (and Ronald
Reagan) have seen a widening of the gap between rich and poor, though
most British people are
now better off than they were in 1979, an assertion that isn't true of
most Americans. There is a
perception that the social fabric has frayed, with beggars on the
streets and increasing violent
crime. Many people claim to have disliked some aspects of "Thatcherism,"
even if the claim is a
little hypocritical, since they often went on voting for it. Blair's
strategy is to appropriate the
economic gains of the 1980s but to mitigate the worst side effects,
differentiating himself from the
Tories by shifts of emphasis, by a rhetoric of community and civic
virtue, and by simply playing on
the undoubted disenchantment or weary boredom of the electorate after
seventeen years of Tory
rule.

He has not explained in detail what his government would do. Instead he
has conducted a brilliant
marketing operation for a product no one quite understands, known as New
Labour--or Labour
Lite, as someone has unkindly called it. And in the process he has
lorded it over the party he now
leads, and rubbed his colleagues' noses in it. It was right to recognize
(as the chattering classes
are still reluctant to do) that the Tories have some genuine
achievements to their credit in these
past seventeen years. It is another thing to say so in the way Blair
does: to insist that "the
Thatcher-Reagan leadership" of the 1980s "got certain things right. A
greater emphasis on
enterprise. Rewarding, not penalizing, success. Breaking up vested
interests."

Just as there are ways and ways of saying something, there are places
and places to say it. When
Blair accepted an invitation to go to Australia last summer and address
Rupert Murdoch's corporate
gathering, it was almost a calculated insult to his party. Murdoch has
been a bitter enemy of
Labour, and his gutter tabloid the Sun has boasted that it won the last
election for the Tories;
indeed, its coverage was fantastically tendentious and biased. Murdoch's
minions were a
remarkable audience for a Labour leader to address, as he did in even
more remarkable words:

"During the sixties and seventies the left developed, almost in
substitution for its economic
prescriptions, which by then were failing, a type of social
individualism that confused, at points at
least, liberation from prejudice with a disregard for moral structures.
It fought for racial and sexual
equality, which was entirely right. It appeared indifferent to the
family and individual responsibility,
which was wrong.

"There was a real danger, occasionally realized, that single-issue
pressure groups moved into the
vacuum. Women's groups wrote the women's policy. Environmental groups
wrote the environmental
policy, and so on. This was the same elsewhere. I remember a telling
intervention of a speaker at
the Republican Convention of 1984 in the U.S. asking rhetorically, `When
was the last time you
heard a Democrat say no?' It was too close to the truth for comfort."

When the leader of a party of "the left" approvingly quotes Republicans,
something very funny is
going on.

On top of this came a row about the education of the Blairs' son, who is
being sent to an
educationally superior Roman Catholic school (Cherie is a Catholic)
across London, rather than to
his nearest high school, as the spirit of party policy, if not its
letter, demands. And all the while Blair
has imperiously kept his colleagues in their places, stifling any voices
of dissent. He has appointed
a "shadow team" of more than a hundred parliamentary spokesmen--a
ridiculous number
considering that there are only 271 Labour MPs in all.

These shadows are expected to voice no independent opinions. When one of
them, Clare Short,
thought out loud about the possibility of legalizing cannabis, and
another, Ron Davies, did the same
about the Prince of Wales's fitness to rule (neither topic unknown in
public debate), they were
silenced and made to recant in tones worthy of a Stalinist show trial.
All in all, there has scarcely
been a moment in the past two years when Blair, given a choice between
his party's doctrines and
conciliating what he thinks is public opinion, has not chosen the latter.

It is no wonder (though fascinating enough) that he is deeply admired by
newspaper columnists on
the soft right, like Bernard Levin, or even on the hard right, like Paul
Johnson, both of whom
formerly adored Thatcher. No wonder either that another Tory columnist,
William Rees- Mogg, of
The Times, writes with approval of the way that the Blair leadership can
now "accept right-wing
policies which Margaret Thatcher did not even contemplate in the 1979
manifesto."

And it is no wonder that Blair's relations with his party are what they
are. Alan Watkins, the doyen
of London political journalists, has been writing weekly since Harold
Macmillan was Prime Minister
and John Kennedy President. He observed not long ago that although
Labour MPs have gone
along with Blair, the truth is that most of them hate what he is doing
to their party. But, then, the
feeling is mutual. Someone who knows him says, "You have to remember
that the great passion in
Tony's life is his hatred of the Labour Party."

You also have to remember our old friend English irony as you read that,
but it is not just a joke.
Tony Blair's career has been a freak of political nature. When he was
chosen leader, two years
ago, the Labour Party was punch-drunk, demoralized by its miserable run
of lost elections,
desperate for any chance of returning to office. The puritanical
"culture of defeat" might have
permeated sections of the movement, but the brighter and more ambitious
in the party had not
gone into politics to spend a lifetime in opposition. They wanted their
ministerial red boxes and
secretaries; they were fed up with waiting in line for cabs and craved
black limos. That meant that
they wanted a leader who could win, and in the process they struck a
Faustian bargain.

Except that Faust knew what he was doing. Labour had not truly reckoned
with Blair. The party did
not realize just how deep was his contempt for its traditions, and
certainly didn't guess that its first
Prime Minister in a generation will be further to the right not only
than any previous Labour premier
but than several postwar Tory premiers. It is an extraordinary
performance, and a political triumph
of sorts--but for whom? The life, times, and government of Tony Blair
may yet be seen as Margaret
Thatcher's greatest victory.

----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 1996 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly;
June 1996; The Paradoxical Case of Tony Blair; Volume 277, No. 6; pages
22-40.