Matthew Norman: Blair let me down
That broiling Friday morning 10 years ago, with that massive parliamentary majority and unparalleled public goodwill, he had the most powerful starting hand dealt to any new prime minister in modern history. The one thing he didn’t need to do was bluff. The murderous thing about Tony Blair’s nature, and thus his leadership, is that he never knew how to do anything else.
Posted on May 11th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Olberman on Blair’s utube to Sarkozy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H-DRL3pPwU
One omission from Norman’s list (and indeed from reckonings of Blair generally) is the state in which he’s left the Labour Party. I don’t just mean the haemorrhage of members, I mean the almost entire whittling away of democracy and the consequent flooding into office of people whose sole motivation was ambition and whose sole loyalty was to the Leader.
This doesn’t get much attention because hacks in the Westminster village don’t notice that sort of thing - and insofar as they do notice it, they approve of it. Why should - they think - the Labour Party have any greater democratic function than to provide support for the leader in Westminster?
But the answer is because things like debate and scrutiny and democracy are important and if you do not have them, you have a degraded political system, working entirely through patronage dispensed from the centre, accessible onto to those with power and patronage of their own to dispense. It’s a politics of corporate lobbyists and media magnates - which is Blair all over - and is that really what people want?
I don’t just mean the haemorrhage of members, I mean the almost entire whittling away of democracy and the consequent flooding into office of people whose sole motivation was ambition and whose sole loyalty was to the Leader.
Yes - but that could also explain why Blair wasn’t ditched as soon as the WMD didn’t show up: partly natural loyalty to the incumbent, but more significantly the belief (bolstered by many in the media and exploited by the Dear Leader himself) that Blair was bigger than the party. Of course, it that is true, Labour will lose the next election no matter how good Brown is.