Vol. 29 No. 10 · 24 May 2007
pages 30-31 | 3660 words
Diary
W.G. Runciman
Now that Tony Blair has almost stopped hanging around the office poisoning the chalice for his inevitable successor, the season for political obituaries is wide open. Not that it hadn’t already started, with a raft of more and less uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his committed admirers or his committed detractors will be led to change their views. To his admirers, his ten-year tenure as prime minister is evidence in itself of his success in satisfying the expectations and wishes of the British electorate. To his detractors, this success has been achieved through a systematic betrayal of the ideals for which the Labour Party was once thought to stand. But if there is one characteristic which in the verdict of history will distinguish him from any of his predecessors, it must surely be his own remarkable brand of naivety – a term which in his case can be stretched to encompass an unwavering air of innocence, combined with an evident capacity for self-delusion and, when it suited him, ruthlessness. Naivety is neither good nor bad in itself, and many famous politicians have had their share of it. But unless Blair, far from being the regular guy as which he likes to project himself, is a hypocrite of astonishing mendacity, the most plausible explanation of both the style and the substance of his prime ministership is that he has remained wilfully blind to how the world outside Parliament and the Labour Party actually works.
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 11 · 7 June 2007
From Brian Lynch
W.G. Runciman suggests that Tony Blair’s greatest crime – the crime from which all the others stem – has been his unprecedented ‘naivety’ (LRB, 24 May). Blair should be so lucky, to be thought of thus. Naivety is charming, schoolboyish, winning. What Runciman doesn’t seem to accept is that Blair’s naivety is the product of painstaking political engineering. ‘Well’, ‘you know’, the fake glottal stop the mimics have had, like him, to swallow: every phrase, every mannerism, has been designed to make voters know his ordinariness, to feel that he’s an ordinary man facing ‘difficult choices’, just like them. He was naive, he wanted people to think, but who isn’t? It’s a tough world out there, and that means tough decisions. He didn’t know what he was letting himself in for – but who would, given the keys to Number Ten?
But Blair knew exactly what he wanted to do once in power, and he knew how to do it. ‘Reform’ – of health, education, transport – meant getting private money in on the act, which private money was very happy to do; and it meant removing public services from government and local government control so that Downing Street could no longer be blamed for their failings. Runciman claims that Blair had next to no knowledge of the ‘central institutions of British society’. That is the way he had to make it seem. Since he knew ‘nothing’, he could try anything on, and solicit the kind of ‘blue skies thinking’ that is used in management as a blind to disguise the very purposeful thinking that has already been done – generally with the aim of paying fewer people money. Naive it isn’t.
Brian Lynch
Newcastle
Vol. 29 No. 12 · 21 June 2007
From Andrew Sugden
W.G. Runciman’s backbench source for the image of Blair as a water spider is a couple of consonants and a whole zoological phylum adrift (LRB, 24 May). Water spiders don’t run about on the surface: they live underwater, where they spin a bell-shaped web among submerged vegetation. They stock it with bubbles of air carefully collected from the surface, enabling them to bide their time in wait for prey. So the metaphor actually suits Brown better than Blair. The creature that skits here and there on the surface is the water strider (an insect not an arachnid), but this is a name that might be misconstrued as a compliment. Luckily, water striders are also commonly known as pond skaters, and even Jesus bugs.
Andrew Sugden
Cambridge
