Doing The Blair Hustle

Robert Harris at The Grauniad’s CiF argues that Brown’s current woes have more to do with the absence of Blair than with Brown himself. He may have a point.

My comment:

I always used to say I voted Labour in spite of Blair, not because of him. Increasingly though it seems as though Blair - even though I've never met anyone who would admit to liking him - won those elections in spite of Labour, not because of them.

It was obvious right from the start that Blair had no interest in Labour and was only of the Left because it was more fashionable, trendier, than being a Tory.

He was never as bright as Brown either, but Blair realised long before Brown (if Brown ever did) that the Left is dead. It choked to death on its own internal contradictions and unintended consequences. However, Blair realised that there still remains a sort of sentimental attachment in certain people’s (of which I was one) minds to what were once perceived as the ‘values’ of the Left: social justice, fairness, equality and… well, you know the tune and the lyrics.

The Labour party was, by the time Blair became leader, so desperate for power that it would ditch any and all of its founding principles and do anything he said to be able to get its revenge on the evil Tories.

Blair was always the con-man, with the con-man's eye for the weaknesses of his mark, who used the Labour party - which was little more than a hollow shell after so many defeats - to further his own individual ambitions.

So, he got the party into power, but once they got there they had no idea what to do, or even how to do it - hence all the money, goodwill and trust wasted over the years on initiatives, consultants, PFI, endless revolution, policy reviews and so on.

Blair realised that as long as Gordon kept the juggling the balls in the air in background the con trick would last, but as soon as one of those balls dropped without him there to bluff his way out of it, then the whole edifice would come tumbling down. I think he was as surprised as most of us that it lasted as long as it did, and that he managed to get out just in the nick of time.

Now Blair sits in the sun admiring his bank statements like every successful con-man in every Sting-like film and TV show and grinning at his own success.

Meanwhile, Gordon sits there bewildered amidst the wreckage around him and like every con-man’s mark, like every one of us who has ever voted Labour, like everyone who used to believe that the Left would bring us a better world, he is slowly coming to realise what a massive con-trick the whole thing was.