DOWNING STREET'S NEW NEVILLE
Mr Blair's character means he
AS Britain's peripatetic international negotiator, Mr Tony Blair is fast turning into a calamity. Behind the lip-trembling psychobabble and the awesome ability of Mr Alastair Campbell to persuade the media that black equals white and vice versa, the Prime Minister is turning into the Neville Chamberlain of the Nineties. For when the spin-doctored dust has final- ly settled, one cannot help but notice that after every marathon negotiation with Britain's enemies or competitors, Britain always ends up with the short straw.
Like all unsuccessful negotiators, Mr Blair permits himself two over-arching conceits. The first is to presume that he possesses a complete comprehension of the psychological mindset of his adversary.
Chamberlain did that both at Bad Godesberg and at Munich. On grounds entirely his own he persuaded himself that he fully understood Adolf Hitler and that the man was basically, like himself, a civilised, fair-minded and reasonable chap who, once having given his word, could be trusted to keep it.
How he got to this delusion is hard to perceive. The mandarins at the Foreign Office were probably not to blame, since Ivone Kirkpatrick and Robert Vansittart already had a pretty dusty view of the Ger- man dictator. There was moreover a four- year canon of evidence that Hitler lied as he breathed. Personal vanity would seem to be the key. At Rambouillet last winter, the equally ludicrous US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright convinced herself and anyone who would listen (which, alas, included the Oval Office, Robin Cook and Nato HO) that she had a complete grasp, as a fellow Slav, of the mind of Slobodan Milosevic.' If he would not sign the chitty at Paris, a few days of judicious bombing of his country would bring him to heel. Really? The Western taxpayer will be fork- ing out for that little conceit for a long time to come.
Confronted by the blood-stained thugs of the IRA, Mr Blair seems to have made the same error from the outset. They had hinted that they would decommission their weapons commensurate with the release of their desperately needed 200 top impris- oned colleagues; they had actually said they would, so they would. Well, they didn't, and they haven't, and they won't.
Faced with this minor imbroglio, Mr Blair reacted like Chamberlain at Munich: he equated a team who for 30 years had killed, bombed, blinded, burned, tortured and maimed their fellow citizens with their political adversaries who had resolutely held the line for parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.
This extraordinary equation is not for lack of information. Tony Blair has at his disposal a massive archive proving beyond a shadow of doubt who and what the Sinn Fein leaders are, their virtual synonymity with the IRA Army Council, their records in murder and mayhem, and their fre- quently stated (and electronically inter- cepted) contempt for democracy. And still he equates the two groups as potential ministers of the Crown. The second conceit is to entertain the conviction that if you concede enough and go on doing so, you will generate goodwill; this can then be parlayed into 'influence' to lead the sinner away from his fanatically held ambition and back to the paths of righteousness. Politicians, who are basical- ly not good negotiators because they suc- cumb too quickly to the illusion that what they want really is the case, are always obsessed by the will-o'-the-wisp of their own influence.
Like Chamberlain at Bad Godesberg and Munich, Blair at Belfast just conceded and conceded and conceded; and like Hitler, Sinn Fein/IRA just gobbled up the concessions and came back for more, shouting into every microphone that he who would not grant them their next demand was being 'unreasonable'. So 'rea- sonable' Mr Blair has humiliated the Paras with the Saville inquiry, virtually compared the RUC with Serbia's ethnic-cleansing MUP thug police and sicked on to them the oleaginous Mr Patten, pledged the overhaul of the judicial system that sent the IRA killers to jail, overlooked the beatings, maimings and terror campaigns mounted by the IRA now against the Catholics in their turf empires, and extend- ed deadline after deadline for even a scin- tilla of a hint of a suggestion that maybe, one day, at your convenience, gentlemen, a peashooter or two might be handed over. And, of course, it has not worked. Sinn Fein/IRA are as obdurate today as the first morning they sat down on every key issue that marks the difference between Mao's power through the barrel of a gun and democratic government.
There is a third factor that marks out the weak and frustrated negotiator: such men will usually turn to petulance and Don't you think you're being a bit last-judgmental?' then bully not their opponents but their allies. (Weak and vain men normally have a bigger than usual streak of petulance and a bit of the bully.) At Munich, Chamberlain turned on the hapless but democratic Czech president Eduard Benes, whose only crime was being unable to concede Hitler's right to invade his country. In Belfast, the Blairite whisper machine has sought to thrust into the pub- lic-opinion dock David Trimble and the Unionists, who have actually conceded every single thing they could concede and can go no further.
Across the Channel in Brussels, Mr Blair has proved as ineffectual as in Belfast, and for the same reasons. Here the interlocutors are nothing like the IRA, but they are still skilled and subtle negotiators and are pre- pared ruthlessly to pursue their deeply fed- eralist agenda, which is not what Mr Blair wants (well, anyway, that is what he says for the nonce). So in pursuit of the magic 'influ- ence', he has made massive concessions that have damaged Britain's competitive edge and has got nothing back in return.
So he tells us that we are now 'actively engaged' and 'showing a positive attitude' (pick your own meaningless cliché) and this is bringing us influence we never had before. The reality is that apart from end- less rounds of applause as the concessions are gobbled up (and he does seem to regard champagne toasts in Brussels as a junkie regards heroin), we have as a nation got nothing back from Brussels as a quid pro quo. It does not seem to occur to Tony Blair that the tough-minded intellectuals of Brussels are gloriously immune to his clichés, his sententiousness and Alastair Campbell. Nor does it occur to him that the driving impetus of the EU, the Fran- co—German Axis, have not the slightest intention of allowing a young premier from Britain with a toothy grin to lead them away from their Holy Grail of a federal sin- gle Europe that they have worked night and day for 20 years to achieve.
There are two truths about hard-edged negotiating that Tony Blair should really hoist aboard. The first is that when you are up against the tough squad, you need both the carrot and the stick. He keeps going into the arena with no stick. And in Belfast even the massive carrot he did have, those 200 of the most vicious terrorists in Europe under lock and key, he gave away for noth- ing. Not even a pound of Semtex, not even a rusty carbine.
The second truth is that a man who lusts after something passionately but does not have it will always be taken to the cleaners by one who possesses it but despises it. At Munich and Belfast that something was peace.
Mr Blair should study a bit more of the history he clearly thinks does not apply to him. Or even Latin. He might ask Dr Eric Anderson, his old headmaster, the meaning of the phrase Dderint dam metuant'. It is not nice, but it works.
Previous page
