Long may Piers Morgan and Tony Blair enjoy their celebrity culture
Landing a job, at an early age, which enabled him to hobnob whenever he liked with Piers Morgan, seemed to go to Mr Tony Blair’s head. That is the real message of the Morgan diaries. Enjoyable though they are, many of us can hardly wait for Mr Blair to leave office and publish his. Then we will know even more about what Mr Morgan is really like, what it was like to be an insider in Mr Morgan’s Britain.
‘Monday: Piers summoned me for a drink. As usual, the first subject he wanted to talk about was Jordan. I told him yet again that the Middle East wasn’t my subject. (It was before September 11.) But he banged on about Jordan. “I tell you, Tony, it’s true, she really is huge.” I was surprised to hear him say that. I said I remembered, from the atlas in Fettes library, that it was quite a small country, squeezed up against Iraq. But he just laughed and said I was being right rude, and that he bet there were plenty of Iraqis who’d like to be squeezed up against Jordan, eh? Then he said something about how he wouldn’t mind joining a Baath party with her. He seems to get around, does our Piers. Of course, it doesn’t mean I’m going slavishly to support all his policies. I just don’t think Jordan is as strategically important as he does. He said that lots of stuff in the paper about Jordan was good for circulation. I must tell Alastair that. The next piece he puts in the Mirror or the Sun by me must be about Jordan. Anyway, this talk with Piers taught me not to look down on tabloid readers.
‘Tuesday: I told Cherie that Piers had made me keen on Jordan. She said he was a disgusting youth and that I should have nothing to do with him. She also said most women disapproved of Jordan. I told her that even I knew that the women there didn’t have to wear that black gear that makes them look like upturned Guinness bottles, and that she was confusing Jordan with Afghanistan. At that point Alastair arrived with the article by me that he’d written for the Mirror about Jordan. But it was all about some model girl built from plastic, and how I was building a new Britain just as she’d built a new Jordan. Cherie said Alastair had a dirty mind. I said that that was why I was Prime Minister. Reluctantly, she agreed.’ Mr Morgan and Mr Blair emerge from Mr Morgan’s diaries as similar. Mr Blair is a decade or so older, but they seem to be exact contemporaries; not just contemporaries, but contemporary. They are of the age in which they live. They understand it, and are at home in it. This equips both for doing well in it. On the face of it, our age is full of dispute and strife. At a closer look, it is less disputatious and strife-ridden than any for decades. Admittedly, there can be genuine quarrels, such as the present one about the government’s anti-terrorist legislation. But they tend not to last. Most politicians and media people agree about first principles. They are for the free market and social liberalism. That is, for a fusion of the ideas associated with two politicians of the disputatious recent past: the late Roy Jenkins and Lady Thatcher. He stood for the social liberalism; she for the free market. A few years ago I suggested a name for this ideology: Jenko-Thatcherism. I see no reason to think that the Jenko-Thatcherite age does not continue.
There are dissidents. They are to be found on the Left, and in Old Labour. Not that those two are the same. Much of Old Labour was not on the Left. Quite the opposite. Mr James (now Lord) Callaghan, with his ‘base’ in the unions, was Old Labour, but not left. Dissidents from Jenko-Thatcherism are also to be found on the dwindling traditionalist Right with its belief in such causes as field sports and the importance of keeping Northern Ireland in the Union. But the free market never much excited that Right.
Thirty years ago this month Mrs Thatcher was establishing herself as the new Tory opposition leader, and the world was different. There truly was dispute and strife. She was moving towards confronting the unions, encouraging the free market and attaching more importance to defeating inflation than unemployment. Politicians and journalists took sides. Or rather, some did. Most waited to see which side was going to win. Once Mrs Thatcher looked as if she had won, many of them announced that they had been for her all along. What would the Piers Morgans and Tony Blairs have done during the preceding period of uncertainty? Probably waited.
Such men do not seem to be suited to such tumult. Both seem to be normal, and normal people do not look for trouble. Whatever else we can say about Lady Thatcher, she was not normal. It is not normal for politicians to seek out dragons to slay. Once she had slain the union dragon, she was too abnormal for her party to keep her. The party did not want her going to look for other dragons such as ‘Europe’ and the cost of local government about which her poll tax, rightly or wrongly, was an attempt to do something. Most politicians can fight only one dragon or so in a generation, if that. Tennyson, in ‘Oenone’, had the measure of what most ministers want from office:
... men, in power Only, are likest gods, who attain’d Rest in a happy place and quiet seats Above the thunder, with undying bliss In knowledge of their own supremacy.
Tennyson’s men in power may be like gods, but they take care not to do anything godlike. They just want to be in ‘a happy place’. It is clear from the Morgan diaries that being normal is where Mr Morgan and Mr Blair are content to be: in the ‘undying bliss’ of drinks and lunches at Downing Street and Chequers with each other, or in Mr Morgan’s case at this or that restaurant or party with, say, Jordan.
The rest of us should not disapprove. Thirty years ago the nation was threatened with much worse than ‘the celebrity culture’. Mr Morgan and Mr Blair are Mrs Thatcher’s children. Parents strive so that their children should have life easier than they had. Long may Mr Morgan, and Mr Blair, continue to have a good time.
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