SHARED OPINION
The good news is that Mr Leo Blair may not be as New Labour as his father
FRANK JOHNSON
By the time this article appears, Mr Leo Blair will have been in Downing Street almost a week. It is therefore an opportune moment to take stock of his time there so far. It must be said that there is widespread disillusion, particularly among old Labour voters in the party's heartlands, over his performance. The child seems to have no principles or ideology other than to stay in Downing Street for as long as possible. He is all promise and no delivery. Indeed, the only Downing Street figure who has deliv- ered so far is his mother.
Or so the argument runs. Mr Leo Blair is also said to be more concerned with making a favourable impression before the cameras than with confronting the intractable issues. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he is enormously popular with middle-class vot- ers, who forgive him his striking physical resemblance to Mr Hague. Therein lies his long-term difficulty with the Labour heart- land vote. 'Face it,' old Labour MPs and activists doubtless grumble to one another, `Leo's is a pretty elitist lifestyle. There's his address for a start. It's not exactly a council tower-block, is it? And how often does he put in an appearance in Sedgefield? He probably hasn't been there in his life.'
Mr Gordon Brown is undoubtedly becoming jealous. 'It's unfair,' he probably complains to aides and old allies such as Mr Charlie Whelan. 'I do all the work, a lot of it unpopular when necessary, and Leo gets all the good publicity. Yet all he does all day long is bawl, sleep and defecate. I'm often tempted to spend all day like that myself. But some of us have a duty to the folk who sent us here.'
Mr Peter Mandelson has almost certainly sensed Gordon's resentment, and sought to forge an anti-Gordon alliance with Leo. He has probably spent more time with Leo than anyone, not excluding Leo's mother. We can imagine Mr Mandelson's approach: `Look, Leo, I've always admired you. As another occupant of your address once said, a week is a long time in politics, and you've been here a week. Now I don't know whether you're straight or gay, and quite frankly I think it's irrelevant. Your private life is your own. The fact is there's no alter- native to my policy on Ireland, or to any- thing else I do. I'm not one to intrigue but I just thought I'd better warn you about Gor- don. He's got a grudge against you. He's always thought he had a better brain than you. But don't be taken in by that. In the media age, who cares about brains?
`If you think I've got Gordon wrong, take a look at the piece in the Daily Telegraph last week — it came out just before or after you were born — saying that Brown was now totally unpopular among Labour MPs. It was one of my best-ever pieces — I mean, the Telegraph's. One other thing. Have nothing to do with the Guardian. They only cost us votes. Keep in with the right-wing papers. True, they're against us joining the euro, as I'm sure you're not. But we can always let them down after the election.'
A Mandelson–Leo alliance will confirm old Labour fears. My own view is that much old Labour criticism of Leo is misplaced. There is no evidence to show that he is as New Labour as his father. After all, he arrived in Downing Street via the NHS, and it will be more than a decade before he goes to Eton. Still, I think nonetheless that Mr Brown will succeed him. Either that, or Leo will be succeeded by Mr Brown's first child, who seems not due any minute.
Apropos of Mr John Lukacs's marvel- lous new book, Five Days in London, May 1940, I suggested here two weeks ago — I hope tentatively — that Churchill, with France falling, was not as unambiguously opposed to 'peace feelers' towards Germany as both he and popular historiography, as well as Mr Lukacs, have later suggested. The Public Record Office documents, which are open to any of us to inspect at Kew, show that, 60 years ago this week, the War Cabi- net discussed peace terms. Friends and acquaintances who share my fascination with the period tend to retort, 'What about Churchill's 28 May speech to the full Cabi- net?' (The less well-disposed also suggest that I am a 'revisionist' — a synonym for Churehill-baitcr. I reply that my admiration for Churchill does not override an old reporter's desire to know the facts.) At that full Cabinet, Churchill said that it The Prescotts sent us two prams.' would be 'idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and fought it out. . . . If this long island story is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.'
It has been said that Churchill was rally- ing the full Cabinet against the peace-mon- gering of the War Cabinet's old appeasers, Chamberlain and Halifax. But the minutes of a War Cabinet held before that address quote Churchill: 'It would be as well that he [the prime minister] should issue a general injunction to ministers to use confident lan- guage.' It is therefore possible that Churchill's words to the full Cabinet were `confident language'. No minutes were taken of that meeting. It was therefore not a Cabinet meeting as the term is commonly understood, a meeting at which business is transacted. Our knowledge of it, in the first instance, is derived from the diaries, published years later, of someone who was present: the Labour minister Hugh Dalton. Churchill was addressing a large group of talkative politicians. He might as well have been addressing a public gathering. The War Cabinet minutes can bear the construction that Halifax pressed for peace feelers and Churchill was sceptical. The stilt- ed civil-service prose suggests as much, though perhaps we think so only because of Churchill's prewar reputation as ann.. appeaser and postwar reputation as resolute victor. Equally, the minutes bear the alterha: tive construction. Those of a later War Cabi- net meeting (after that oration to the full Cabinet) record Chamberlain as devising a formula acceptable to all five War Cabinet members. With Germany winning in France' peace feelers via then neutral Italy were `useless at the present time' (my italics). But : 'it might be that we should take a different view in a short time, possibly even a wee' hence'. Churchill did not dissent. France proceeded with her own approach via Mussolini, who did not seem to have passed it on to Germany but took it as 3 sign of French fear and declared war 0 Germany's side. By mid-June France was conquered. Britain suspended any peace feelers until the outcome in the air in t' Battle of Britain, which we won, rendering further peace feelers unnecessary. But, a: well as our finest, it had also been a mar complex hour than some, including Churchill, would later have us believe.
Previous page
