It is as well that Mr Blair did not in the end go to Blackpool for his holiday
Nr Pézenas, Departement de L’Hérault
Random thoughts from midAugust abroad; not that they should be all that random. Now that BBC News 24, Sky and CNN can be viewed in the deepest Midi, where we are, and several British newspapers print ‘same day’ editions in Marseilles, which are on sale at 8.30 a.m. in our nearest village, most of us should be as in touch with events as we would be in London.
But somehow, in deepest August, in Mediterranean lands, we cannot be. The sun and the wine make us think we are out of touch, that they know more in London. ‘Just ringing to find out what’s happening about [say] Ken Clarke reneging on the euro after all his years as a Brussels agent,’ we tell some London answering machine. Then we discover that a similar message, from a Briton in the Midi, has been left on our own answering machine in London.
Psychologically, then, August is the only month in which we of the political class politicians and those who report them think it safe to admit to not knowing what is going on. It is a matter of pride to admit to not knowing it; otherwise we would run the risk of not being thought the sort of people who go away to the sun for August. Hitler understood this about the British. He chose August 1939 for his pact with the Soviet Union, which made it safe for him to invade Poland without Soviet hindrance on 1 September. He knew our holiday habits. Likewise, a previous Germany started the first world war in August 1914.
What interests us on holiday is not the same as what interests us the rest of the year round. So the ‘piano man’ is not a mute musical genius of unknown nationality and still in a Dartford mental home. He is, as the Times headline put it, ‘German, gay, and gone home’; also, not much good at the piano after all. That was worth the papers’ reporting this August, since some of us were still wondering about him.
By coincidence, it was reported on the same day this week that the ‘freebie man’, the Briton on whose behalf the government would not say where he was on holiday, had in fact gone to Barbados. That ended any speculation that he might have gone to, say, Blackpool.
If it had been Blackpool, estimations of the Blairs would, on the face of it, have soared, even in the Labour party. At last we would have discovered some link between Mr Blair and the Old Labour vote. Mr Blair would also have been photographed wearing a ‘kiss-me-quick’ hat. But Mrs Blair would have been photographed wearing a ‘pay-me-quick’ hat. Only she would have found some lucrative lecture to deliver in Blackpool in the middle of August. For there would have been snags in any attempt this couple might have made to appear simple and ordinary.
The couple would have consumed much fish and chips along the Golden Mile. Then the papers would have discovered that the Blairs were staying not in a boarding-house presided over by a fat landlady out of a McGill postcard and her skinny husband, but in the Lancashire hinterland at the vast estate of Sir Harry Haddock, founder of the constantly expanding Blackpool-originated national fish-and-chip-shop chain I’ve Haddock Up T’Here. Sir Harry would have received his knighthood in the most recent Blairite honours list. Shortly afterwards it would have been discovered that he had donated several million to the Labour election campaign, and had paid for the Blairs’ election night fish-and-chips-and-Krug supper at Sedgefield. Shortly after that, he would have been granted permission to build multi-fish-and-chip-complexes on green belt sites throughout Britain. The Blairs’ Blackpool holiday would not have been like any other Labour family’s after all.
In all that, Mr Blair is not alone among leaders of the nominally left-of-centre or radical party in Britain. We somehow expect it when Tory leaders such as Churchill accept the hospitality of an Onassis, or when the recently deceased Edward Heath received huge fees from Chinese tyranny in return for obscure services. But Lloyd George constantly accepted the hospitality of the plutocracy, and James Callaghan seemed to acquire an expensive farm with the help of a certain banker not long after being paid relatively modestly as prime minister, and we are uneasy about it. It is right that we should be so. The nominally left-of-centre or radical party should be judged according to its high-minded philosophy. But Mr Blair, in his holiday arrangements over the years, has gone so far that it is best for him not to consider Blackpool. It is better that he and his loved ones stick to the estates of Italian princes and venerable British pop singers in August.
An anniversary has just passed in France which the United States did not much notice, and Britain hardly at all. But it was as much to do with the Englishspeaking world as the French: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America. A Guardian editorial did notice it, but misquoted — or at least misunderstood — what with the Cold War became the work’s most famous passage. It begins: ‘There are, at the present time [1835], two great nations in the world which seem to tend towards the same end.... I allude to the Russians and the Americans.’ The Guardian, like most of those who have quoted it over the years, took this to be a prophesy of the Cold War. But a close reading of the passage does not prove that it was. True, Tocqueville says that the United States relies on freedom, Russia on servitude, which is what we supporters of the United States in the Cold War believed. ‘Nonetheless, each of them seems called by a secret design of providence to take one day in their hands the destinies of half the world,’ he adds (my translation). But he confined his forecast to that. He did not say that the two powers would come into conflict.
It could be argued that Tocqueville was still proved right as a prophet, since for a long time from the 1940s until the Soviet collapse in the 1980s they did sway such destinies. But it could be argued that he was even more the prophet of a stability and an equilibrium in the world which Islamic militancy has now ended. But there seems to be no one of Tocqueville’s prophetic powers to convince us that that is so.
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