POLITICS
The only thing Tony Blair has to fear is fear itself and by God he's scared
BRUCE ANDERSON
Robin Oakley was treated shabbily, but the BBC did at least send him off with a decent party: plenty of champagne and front-benchers. There was only one draw- back: a speech by some Birtian clone — I believe that he is the assistant director of paperclips — who banged on for about 35 minutes and sounded like a speak-your- weight machine reading extracts from a telephone directory.
Once he had finished, the politicians resumed their animated conversations, and there was a noteworthy development. The atmosphere would have been very different if the party had been held a year ago. Despite their competing partisanships, politicians have much more in common with one another than they do with the rest of the human race. They share so many experiences and obsessions: ministers and ex-ministers from different parties can understand one another in a way that few outsiders could rival. Any sensible minister also knows that political opponent or not, a predecessor's advice is always worth having.
For the first half of this Parliament, how- ever, things were different. Largely because there had been such a change in the com- position of the House, with so many new Labour MPs arriving all at once, many of the normal courtesies and conventions of Commons life seemed to have broken down. Though there were exceptions, such as George Robertson and his defence team, it was hard to fmd a Labour minister who would admit that he had anything to learn from a Tory ex-minister. The new lot were not interested in listening to the Tories; they only wanted to gloat over them.
That may have been foolish, but it was understandable, given that Tony Blair appeared to have repealed the law of politi- cal gravity. But that is no longer the case; these days, the PM merely seems weight- less. This may explain why so many Labour front-benchers were happily chatting away to Tory ones on Tuesday evening; they now meet on much more equal terms.
William Hague believes that the Tory revival began back at the last party confer- ence, but was delayed by various distrac- tions: Lords Archer and Ashcroft, Shaun Woodward et al. It then gained renewed momentum from the Dome, a project con- ceived in meretriciousness, launched in fiasco, now stumbling towards bankruptcy and oblivion. Ministers had hoped that the Dome would be the first chapter of Labour's next election manifesto: a symbol of the government's achievements. They now fear that this might indeed be the case, especially in view of Lord Falconer's ineffa- ble apology. Charlie Falconer may be a good lawyer but he is a cloth-eared politi- cian. After the chaos of the Dome's first night, he announced that he wished to apol- ogise to the VIPs and to everybody else. That is going to be quoted back at the gov- ernment, often.
But the Dome was only the beginning of the government's misfortunes. There fol- lowed an extraordinary period; it was as if Tony Blair had set out to prove that Roy Jenkins was wrong. Apropos of the PM, Lord Jenkins had cited Walter Lippmann's description of Franklin D. Roosevelt: a second-class intellect but a first-class tem- perament. That always seemed a flattering assessment, as it was intended, but we now have overwhelming evidence that it is sim- ply untrue. This Prime Minister has nothing like a first-class temperament. Over the past few months, he has repeatedly tripped over his own feet and been frightened by his own shadow. He panics at the slightest problem and has a remarkable gift for turn- ing minor setbacks into crises. 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,' declared FDR in his first inaugural, and that is even more true of Tony Blair now than it was of the USA in 1933. But the Prime Minister cannot help himself. He is mired in his fears.
At the Oakley party, a former Labour minister helped to explain why this should be so. A strong supporter of Mr Blair but also a perceptive fellow, he diagnosed a chronic lack of intellectual self-confidence. In Tony Blair's case, this manifests itself in a fashion that is characteristic of a certain brand of insecurity. We have all met people who feel so threatened by anything which they do not know or understand that they respond by writing it off. Only able to cope with a narrow world view and a blinkered horizon, they thus deny themselves one of life's most -enduring pleasures, intellectual curiosity. This is the position with Tony Blair, who is desperate to convince himself that what he does not know is not knowl- edge — and he knows a great deal less than Professor Jowett did.
Above all, this applies to the Prime Min- ister's view of history. Knowing nothing, he has persuaded himself that nothing is worth knowing. But inasmuch as history is an intellectual discipline, it should give its practitioners one advantage denied to Mr Blair. Anyone with an historical training ought to be aware that there is a distinction between appearance and reality. That is not a difference which Tony Blair can recog- nise. When he wondered how it was that anyone could think that a government run by him might be anti-family, he proved that he does not understand the nature of gov- ernment. He cannot grasp that there is a distinction between a picture of Baby Leo and a tax regime. For him, the medium will always be the message.
A man with no intellectual roots is con- demned to invent himself as he goes along. This is a stressful business and the strain is not only well documented in Tony Blair's leaked memo. It is increasingly apparent in his public demeanour. He neither trusts his intellect nor his political instincts, hence the dependence on focus groups and on Philip Gould. It is as if the PM still cannot believe in the reality of his premiership. He behaves as if he were a burglar who had broken into a house but was then mistaken for a guest and conducted to a place of honour at the dining-table. He cannot real- ly enjoy the meal, because he fears that at any moment the house's owners will rumble him and send for the police.
For all his flaws, Tony Blair is still his party's principal political asset, but for how long, now that the public have started to laugh at him? As Margaret Thatcher dis- covered, 'Let them hate me, so long as they fear me' is not a worthless political maxim. During elections, hate and fear can both be transmuted into respect and votes. Not so with ridicule and contempt, as John Major discovered. All his worthy decency could not prevent him from being mocked out of office.
Tony Blair is not yet in such peril, but there are many millions of fickle voters out there. They may not feel threatened or impoverished by this government, but they are beginning to feel irritated by it. After the dramas of the mid-Nineties, when a governing party committed slow suicide in public, much of the electorate was happy to take a three-year holiday from politics. But the holiday is over, the election approaches. Weakly held political allegiances are up for reassessment.
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