SHARED OPINION
The judge was wrong: Blair's nanny was intruding into the Prime Minister's public life
FRANK JOHNSON
It has been seven days of hard choices for those of us who must weekly choose a topic on which to offer an opinion in print.
The Blairs' nanny? We should pause before accepting authority's line that the issue is the Blairs' privacy. Londoners may not realise this, since London receives the Sunday papers' last editions, and the judge agreed to Mr Blair's injunction against the Mail on Sun- day in the early hours of Sunday morning. I was in London at breakfast time and there- fore was as ignorant as the rest of the capital. But by lunchtime I was in Wiltshire, whose hedgerows, cottages, manor houses and investment analysts' humble weekend dwellings were for once privy to information denied to the more worldly capital. Snatching the Mail on Sunday from a pass- ing peasant, or possible e-commerce paper millionaire, I thus learnt that the nanny's revelations were much more political than personal. Mr Blair, in a statement issued a few hours earlier, had said that his injunc- tion was all about his being a family man; he had to protect his kin from intrusion. He knew that that would win him sympathy. But it looked to me as if the injunction was at least as much to do with his being a politi- cian. For example, the nanny had quoted him as prophesying that 'personalities' would eventually destroy his government, by which be presumably meant Mr Brown's feelings towards him, the feelings of Mr Brown and Mr Mandelson towards one another, Mr Brown's feelings towards Mr Byers at Trade and Industry (a relatively new Brownian feeling, that one), and Mr Prescott's feelings towards nearly everyone. That is a useful intrusion into Mr Blair's public life, not private. The judge was wrong. The injunction was an intrusion into politics. The Livingstone candidacy? A few weeks ago I suggested here that Mr Blair was not frightened of it as such. He was only fright- ened of Mr Livingstone's becoming Labour candidate. He would oppose a Livingstone mayoralty as much as any Conservative and, unlike any Conservative, would be in a posi- tion to pass measures that would actively harm Mr Livingstone. It has now become necessary to revise that judgment. If Mr Liv- ingstone wins, as he looks like doing, it will not be easy for Mr Blair to limit the damage. Labour friends assure me that a Livingstone win could well lead to the formation of an alternative Labour party, perhaps called the Independent Labour party — a grand old name. It would contest by-elections and the general election. Mr Livingstone, if he becomes mayor, could even resign his Brent parliamentary seat, precipitating a by-elec- tion which would be won either by himself, as the new party's candidate, or by the candi- date for whom he campaigned. We could be about to see the formation of the Left's equivalent of the SDP, splitting the non- Tory vote in the early 2000s in the way that the SDP split the non-Tory vote in the early 1980s. That would be good for the Tories, unless Mr Blair responded by forming an alliance with the Liberal-Democrats and introducing proportional representation. The Livingstone mayoralty will be much more important for British politics as a whole than at first thought, while still being fun.
The remaining topic of the week is Stan Collymore. He, it may be remembered, is Leicester City's new striker. But he is also famous for striking in hotels. He is accused of having set off a fire extinguisher in a Spanish one. Last Sunday, the News of the World accused him of causing a tumult in a British hotel because the barman wanted to close the bar at around five o'clock in the morning. Mr Collymore is reported as con- sidering this unreasonably early. Perhaps similar protests are made when the barman wants to close the facilities at a similarly unreasonable hour in White's.
But my purpose in raising Mr Collymore here is to reflect on the immunity of genius to the censure of the respectable. For, on the very day that the News of the World brought word of his nocturnal exuberance, I watched on Sky TV his first home appear- ance for Leicester City. He scored a hat trick against Sunderland. The home crowd thus received him with deep warmth. Doubtless the more appreciative of them went on to wreck a few nearby bars in soli- darity with their hero. Leicester's manager, interviewed on Sky after the match and asked about Mr Collymore's off-field repu- tation, confined himself diplomatically to saying that he hoped that the player's exploits would from now on be reported on the back pages rather than the front. Mr Collymore's private excesses, if true, were thus overlooked. We of the bour- geoisie looked on in horror. But that has ever been our posture in the face of delin- quent genius. You must have nothing to do with that dreadful man Wagner, we would have told Ludwig of Bavaria. He ran off with his patron's wife. He has a most unsuitable attitude to the wife of another man who has treated him well. He was expelled from Dresden for revolutionary activity (similar to that of Mr Livingstone with the old GLC in a later epoch). He does not pay his debts. But the Wagners and the Collymores reply that none of this stops us revelling in their music and their hat tricks. I revelled in Mr Collymore's in that match, forgetting that exhausted bar- man. Life is unjust to us non-artists.
Mr Livingstone is Labour's Collymore. He has spent much time treating the Labour party as some hotel bar in which he cannot get the service he demands — a place to be smashed up. Successive Labour leaders have called in the authorities against him, just as that sorely tried hotel staff reportedly summoned the police to contain Mr Collymore. I am beginning to think that Mr Livingstone might be a genius.
Alast word about Mr Collymore. It has also been alleged that he was responsible for domestic disturbances concerning his former companion, Miss Ulrika Jonsson. She is one of the few Johnsons whose writing has not appeared in this publication, even though it has been edited by Johnsons since the mid- 1990s. True, she is of the dynasty's Scandina- vian branch, but only in the way that there is a French branch of the Rothschilds. I cannot understand why we have overlooked her. But the last time I wrote here about the inci- dence of Spectator Johnsons, the magazine the following week published a letter, com- plaining of being overlooked, from the col- league who compiles the crossword. His name is, of course, Johnson.
Many readers would have been shocked that I allowed him to go missing from my article. There have doubtless been calls for a public inquiry as to how such a thing could have happened. Readers would have accused me of negligence, and demanded that the lost Johnson be compensated for his ordeal. All I can say is that this is a ser- vice which runs thousands of Johnsons a year. Ninety-nine point nine per cent arrive safely. This compares well with Jonsson ser- vice in Ulrika's native Sweden, a country traditionally held up to us as a model of efficiency. It is inevitable that the occasion- al Johnson goes astray. But I shall do my best to ensure that it never happens again.
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