How Cherie’s breeding allows her to put the Queen at her ease
Anew book, Tony and Cherie: A Special Relationship, by Paul Scott, perhaps unwittingly offers useful tips for anyone intending to have Mrs Blair to stay. At Balmoral ‘Cherie Blair had lain awake in terror of a large and ugly statue at the foot of her bed, which ... had taken on a ghoulish menace.’ When Mrs Blair comes to stay, then, do not put a statue at the bottom of her bed. I never do. If she requests a statue, we always offer her something liberal and progressive, rather than ugly and ghoulish; something resembling that pregnant disabled woman now on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. ‘Mrs Blair is said to despise the Balmoral rituals of a 6 a.m. reveille by a bagpiper.’ One should therefore give one’s bagpiper the weekend off. Or perhaps the passage is ambiguous, and it is not the bagpiper to whom Mrs Blair objects, but his presence as early as 6 a.m., in which case he should not start blowing until, say, 10 a.m. by which time Mrs Blair would have digested her muesli and completed her yoga and indeed her yogurt.
The Queen’s corgis also set off an allergy from which Mrs Blair suffers. ‘Every time she walks into the place her eyes bulge, go red and begin to water,’ said one insider. ‘She comes out in red blotches and her nose runs constantly.’ It is hard to see what the Queen and the Duke can do to help her here. They could charge extra Kleenex to the Civil List for the duration of Mrs Blair’s visits. But that might not be enough, since ‘the corgis pose a particular problem,’ the book says. ‘Cherie absolutely despises the creatures.’ Let us hope that this passage is not misunderstood. Mrs Blair is presumably a sound animal-welfarist. She cannot despise the creatures because they are corgis, there being nothing they can do about that. As a good progressive with republican tendencies, she presumably despises them only because they are royal corgis. She sees them as having sold out to the system, rather as her husband has had to. If they occasionally bit the Queen, or defecated on the Duke, she would have a higher opinion of them. As it is, they are just another example of this country’s all too prevalent deference.
Nor did Mrs Blair enjoy having to attend an afternoon tea party for the late Queen Mother’s ‘elderly women friends during a Balmoral holiday’. According to the book ‘it was not just tea but a steady supply of sherry that was on offer to the titled OAPs. The party began in a genteel enough manner, but as the afternoon progressed it steadily descended into a raucous sing-along with the Queen Mother leading from the front and insisting that a mortified Cherie join in every tune.’ To those of us of the ‘God bless y’ma’am’ generation, such an occasion sounds like heaven. We would enjoy nothing more than a raucous sing-along with the Queen Mother and various titled OAPs on a Balmoral afternoon. But Mrs Blair is a child of the 1960s. She would not have known the words to ‘A little of what y’fancy does y’good,’ or ‘Don’t ’ave any more, Mrs Moore’. Still, I cannot believe that any occasion over which the Queen Mother presided would have been anything other than enjoyable in the end, even to the Prime Minister’s wife.
‘Know any Joan Baez numbers, ma’am?’ Mrs Blair would have demanded.
‘I don’t think one does, Mrs Blair. But please sing us one.’ Mrs Blair (singing): ‘... babies dying in the ghetto ... corporate profits ... segregation ... woe, woe, woe.’ The Queen Mother: ‘How lovely!’ Sherry-sodden titled OAP (changing the melody): ‘That’s enough of that, y’miserable cow. Now, all together: My ole man said follow the van ... ’ The Queen Mother: ‘Would you like a smoke, Mrs Blair?’ Mrs Blair: ‘Now y’talkin’. Just a little joint will do.’ As always, the Queen Mother’s tact would have saved the situation. But, as we have seen from Mrs Blair’s point of view, the Queen herself can be a tiresome and demanding hostess, although eventually Mrs Blair, with her breeding, would have put her at her ease. Christian fundamentalists, implied that ‘the neoconservatives’ were among them. A critic in the October Opera magazine, writing of the Kirov’s relatively avant-garde Boris Godunov at Covent Garden, said that this usually traditionalist Russian company ‘must be tired of the plaudits of those neocons who want painted flats and historical costumes’. So ‘neoconservative’ and ‘neocon’ have achieved the status, in progressive circles, which ‘fascist’ long ago attained. The last time ‘fascist’ had a clear, specific meaning was with Mussolini in the early 1920s. Soon, the Left used ‘fascist’ to describe any system of which it disapproved.
American neoconservatives have little in common with American fundamentalists. All that they do have in common is support for Israel, and anti-Islamism; the fundamentalists for reasons of Biblical prophecy, the neoconservatives because they are Zionists. Neoconservatives, although they include practising Jews, are themselves secular. They tend not to share the fundamentalists’ opposition to abortion and homosexuality.
Neoconservatism’s founders were mainly New York Jewish liberals who disapproved of liberalism’s 1960s excesses. Some had been 1930s Trotskyists and communists. But by the 1950s they had become ‘Cold War Democrats’ in the mould of Truman and President Kennedy. Then they became alarmed at American liberalism’s turning against Israel after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. They also saw the 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ movement as a threat to traditional Jewish values of culture and education, and opposed liberal indulgence of Brezhnev’s increasingly anti-Semitic Soviet Union.
In all this, they did good work. They are now among the most unpopular forces on earth because they have encouraged President Bush into a war that looks as if it has gone wrong. But they have no line on ‘painted flats and historical costumes’ in opera. That critic should have been content with just ‘conservative’. But perhaps the ‘neo’ was necessary to emphasise the full horror of what he was describing. Just ‘conservative’ is no longer good enough as a term of abuse, which is good news for us non-neo Conservatives.
So ‘neoconservative’ is off and away with fascist; representing all injustice. ‘My partner, Tristram, never does the washing-up after dinner. In that respect, he’s the most awful neocon.’ The Left has indicted a phrase again.
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