At the beginning of Chilcot Week, Britain was treated to a lecture by Tony Blair. If you think that a trifle shameless, you must remember that Blair is a stranger to self-awareness as much as to self-doubt. Nobody in all the global elite is more intuitively and viscerally appalled by even a bat-squeak of public opinion making itself heard than Tony Blair.
His utterances are rambling, his vocabulary purposely opaque, but his demand is clear: the impertinent articulation of the popular will in a referendum can be sidelined and the EU, with all its bureaucratic bumbledom and network of gravy trains, preserved to rule over us. Immigration? Of course he is sensible that people’s concerns are real and those concerns must be addressed, reassured with weasel verbiage and then ignored so that the influx can continue unchecked.
Listening to the well-remembered faux-statecraft, evasive giggling and monumental insincerity at the weekend was like hearing one of those old gramophone records of some personality from the past (“Hey, look… I mean… Come on… I’m a pretty straight kind of guy…”) Clearly, the advance notice that he will not face investigation over his part in the Iraq War – though the poor bloody infantry may do so – has emboldened the most discredited politician in modern British history to seek to recover the limelight without which his existence is unbearable, if luxurious.
Perversely, and for the first and last time ever, Britain owes Blair a debt of gratitude. For, due to his pathologically irrepressible ego overcoming any vestige of political judgement, he has tainted the dying Remain cause with the most toxic brand in politics, the Blair label. Nothing could have been more calculated to identify the EU cause with everything that is most resented in public life than its championship by the one figure guaranteed to unite most opinion, left and right, old and young, north and south in knee-jerk revulsion. Thank you, Tony.
His barely disguised canvassing of himself as the individual to mastermind Brexit negotiations – we could not do worse with Guy Verhofstadt – illustrates how Blair’s tenuous grip on reality has finally deserted him. We should recognise, however, that though Blair is the most advanced case of Brexit delusion there are many others in whom the malady is almost as far developed.
There are reportedly 100 Conservative MPs who think it a good idea to appoint – preferably without recourse to the Tory rank and file – a Remainer as prime minister to negotiate Brexit. Enter Theresa Clinton, the tired establishment hack whose fierce conviction politics motivated her to spend the referendum campaign hiding in a stationery cupboard, a woman whose effortless anti-charisma alienates many of her colleagues, let alone the British public.
This is the woman who inaugurated the auto-destruction of the Conservative Party, even before David Cameron, when she strutted around the stage at the party conference in 2005 – the notorious kitten-heeled harangue – and told a roomful of dedicated supporters: “There is no room for you in our [sic] party” if they harboured any vestigial Conservative principles. That launched the “modernising” campaign that drove the Conservative core vote into the arms of UKIP.
By common consent, the main referendum issue was immigration. On this Home Secretary’s watch 3 million people have migrated into Britain, though the more reassuring ‘net’ migration statistics acknowledge only 1.3 million in that period. The Cameron term is “tens of thousands” which technically is true – 130 tens of thousands over five years, to be precise.
Ironically, there is one candidate for the Conservative leadership who might – just – divert the party from plunging into the abyss: Andrea Leadsom. But she campaigned for Brexit, so supporting her would amount to endorsing the despised ‘populism’ – formerly known as democracy – that has dared to challenge the elite, so embittered Remainders are unlikely to contemplate such a concession to the Great Unwashed.
The notion that the public will tolerate a Remain campaigner (however muted) being installed to succeed David Cameron, who had to resign because of his Remain stance, illustrates how deluded Tory MPs remain. The call for an early election, however, has died away as the turkeys have reconsidered the wisdom of voting for an early Christmas.
The initial appeal of an early poll was dual: the vague hope of reversing the referendum verdict and the terminal state of Labour persuaded Conservative MPs that this was an opportunity to slaughter Labour and harvest its seats. The idea that the northern and seaside constituencies deserting Labour in droves will vote Conservative reflects the obsolete thinking of Tories who failed to realise it is UKIP that will hoover up Labour seats – and a good few Tory ones as well, if Theresa May becomes prime minister.
Both the legacy parties seem beyond re-education; they are mired in the purblind presumptions of the past. We are witnessing the destruction of a political culture. And what more appropriate voice of vapid entitlement to proclaim its invincible state of delusion than Tony Blair.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.