CHARLES MOORE
s soon as I read that 52 former diplomats had written to the Prime Minister to express dismay at his policies in the Middle East, I shouted out '364 economists!' In March 1981, following Geoffrey Howe's Budget, 364 economists wrote to the Times. They denounced the Budget as a deflationary disaster. It was from this moment that the British economy began the recovery from which we benefit to this day. Mrs Thatcher had to contend with one economist (almost) for each day of the year, while Mr Blair has only one diplomat per week, but the principle is the same — whatever shortcomings your policy has, if it is condemned by the herd of experts it can't be all bad. The 52 particularly dislike democracy in the Middle East: it must be an idea whose time is coming.
In the six months in which I have been hors de combat, buried in biography rather than journalism, Tony Blair seems to have lost that most precious possession in politics — the benefit of the doubt. The assumption underlying almost every broadcast and headline, most often produced by those who welcomed the 'nation reborn' of 1997, is that the Prime Minister is a) blundering, b) ill, ore) lying, sometimes more than one of these things. As someone who has never voted for his party, never liked his style and never believed that he has any interesting ideas for the future of the country, I might be expected to be pleased that the scales have fallen from the public's eyes. In fact, I think it is unfair. The merit of Tony Blair — and it is a considerable one — is that he intensely dislikes the Labour party and wants to use it as the vehicle to create a social democratic alternative to the Tories. This was the point of him when he became the Labour leader nearly ten years ago, and it is still the point today. By fighting the war in Iraq, he stuck to this approach, and showed notable courage in doing so. He did the right thing, if not always presented in the right terms. Now he is doing the right thing in promising a referendum on the EU constitution, yet is criticised for weakness. The rows over the euro have shown that the European project cannot survive unless it tries to win by argument rather than by stealth. Perhaps it cannot win at all (I hope it cannot, in its present form), but a referendum victory is its only way forward.
And not only is Mr Blair right, he remains a very clever politician. Look at his referendum decision, for a moment, purely in terms of party advantage. It takes
away from the Conservatives one of their main rhetorical weapons, putting them on the side of negativity and Labour on the side of 'choice'. And it strengthens the Prime Minister's inbuilt superiority in matters of timing. If, as is extremely likely, Labour wins the next election with a working majority, he can then hold his European referendum quickly against a divided Tory party, supported (crossly) by the Liberals. It could be like the Welsh Assembly referendum in 1997: public enthusiasm was non-existent, but the Tories were too weak to mount an effective `No' campaign, and the 'Yes'sayers won by a few thousand votes. With a 'Yes' on the constitution, the Tories are then trampled down for another generation and the five economic tests for euro-entry miraculously become very easy to pass. And if Mr Blair fails? Well, his famous 'hand of history' will pat him on the back for being such an honourable fellow.
What is the most overused word at present? I would say 'iconic'.
In the last ten years, the answer to the question 'How are you?' has changed from 'I'm well' to 'I'm good', which is a strange usage, because the former is something you are in a position to know whereas the latter is something which you cannot judge. People have also gradually stopped saying 'I live in X Street' and now say 'I live on X Street'. This change began with the rewriting of the Lord's Prayer from 'in earth, as it is in heaven' to 'on earth, as it is in heaven'. The change is inferior because heaven and earth are no longer held in balance by the phrase (you couldn't say 'on heaven'), and because to be 'on earth' sounds too physical, like
being 'on Mars', when what is being spoken of here is God's will. I'd rather live in a street than on it, though I can't quite articulate why.
In last week's New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote a brilliant piece about 'the perils of loving P.G.Wodehouse' from the standpoint of one who does. His argument — and he has a case-study of a besotted godfather to prove it — is that the love of Wodehouse can be a substitute for human love itself. So it can, but at another point in his piece Lane describes The Code of the Woosters as 'a book as indispensable to the alert mind of the 20th century as Anna Karenina was to that of the late 19th', which, if true, justifies the Queen Mother's declaration that she loved Wodehouse because his novels were 'so realistic'. It reminded me that I have read somewhere that Tolstoy read P.G.Wodehouse. He loved English magazines, and after he fled from his house, Yasnaya Polyana, and died at Astapovo railway station in 1910, bound volumes of The Captain were found by his bed. The Captain carried Wodehouse's early cricketing stories, which featured Mike and, eventually, Psmith. Have I made this up? What is the Russian for 'far from being gruntled'?
To help to understand the modern world, I like to imagine archaeologists of the future trying to investigate our civilisation when only tiny shards of it survive. Suppose, for instance, that the English language had been almost wholly lost and the word 'award-winning' — as in 'awardwinning building' — was found on some fragment. Intelligent inquirers would presumably conclude that it meant 'ugly and unpopular'. At Easter, we were staying with friends in Andalusia. As we drove from the airport, jagged hills rose above low cloud and on them, ghostly in the hazy light, stood colossal wind turbines. What would future scholars make of them? The structures were clearly useless, they would conclude, for they defended nothing, housed nobody and produced nothing of value, Prominently sited in remote and beautiful places and presumably erected at enormous cost, they must have been religious edifices. They appear to be have been built at the end of the second millennium of Christianity, an obscure faith whose founder had died but promised to return. The legend was that he died on a cross: Christians set up these huge metal crosses on high places to guide his second coming. It is a much more rational explanation for wind turbines than the real one.
Previous page
