ANOTHER VOICE
The hard truth about honesty which Mr Blair will discover in stormier times
MATTHEW PARRIS
An incident can be minor in itself, but illuminating. One such occurred last Wednesday at and after Prime Minister's Questions. This was the first such session since the Commons reassembled after the summer and the party conferences. We were looking forward to a renewal of the weekly clash between Tony Blair and William Hague, not least because this is a rare forum in which the Conservative lead- er gets an equal shout, the Prime Minister is unable to rig the occasion in his own favour, and the Tory often wins.
And so it seemed this time. Mr Hague ribbed and railed against Mr Blair for allowing his Home Secretary to pretend that Britain was getting more police offi- cers, when the 'more' was only relative to a planned reduction. Shameless as ever, Blair refused to acknowledge the sleight of hand; but he sounded rattled and, as he was plainly wrong, came off worse. It was an unedifying spectacle but not unusual, nor typical, of this Prime Minister alone. I well remember Margaret Thatcher's brass neck as, time and again at PM's Questions, she would doggedly refuse to acknowledge the weaknesses in Cabinet colleagues' cases. After a good deal of this, Hague and Blair resumed their seats, the latter slightly bruised. But near the end came the Prime Minister's chance to get his own back. Mr Blair found an opportunity to attack what he claims is Mr Hague's party's extremism in demanding a renegotiation of the treaties governing our membership of the European Union. No other country in Europe would agree to this, he shouted at Hague and his 'foxy benches — 'Name one!'
A hubbub ensued, as MPs shouted back: noise from which none of us could discern much. 'Norway?' shouted the Prime Minis- ter. 'Norway's not a member of the Euro- pean Union.' He had heard (we supposed) someone on the Tory benches shout 'Nor- way' in answer to his question. Hague stared ahead. Ann Widdecombe looked around in angry confusion, as if to find the culprit. Led by Blair, the Labour benches erupted into mocking laughter. The Press Gallery, where I sit, was heaving with mirth. Even in the Strangers' Gallery, tourists were laughing.
But nobody seemed to have heard an Individual shouting 'Norway'. In the lobby behind our gallery afterwards, we milled around seeking evidence from other wit- nesses. None came. And here is the extraordinary thing. We all thought the same: that Tony Blair might well have made this up. Right from the start — the moment it became clear nobody could name a heckler — members of the press were speculating that Tony Blair had lied.
Further inquiries never did yield a name. My colleague Simon Hoggart went on to write a hilarious spoof detective-sketch for the Guardian the following morning, finger- ing the Prime Minister. Other explanations included the theory someone had shouted 'No way!' from the Labour, not Tory, benches. Nobody knows. But the idea that Blair might have invented the whole thing was born in reporters' and lobby correspon- dents' minds the moment an explanation for his response seemed called for.
On reflection I rather doubt whether he did lie. The theory is too clever by half. In the unpredictable circumstances of Prime Minister's Questions it would have been a risky business for a prime minister to try acting out a response to an imagined heck- le, and the scene could have gone badly wrong. Tony Blair does not care for situa- tions whose elements he cannot control, and I doubt whether he would have con- trived this one. Most of my fellow journal- ists have come to the same conclusion.
But what is remarkable is not the conclu- sion we reached but the premise from which we started: that if Tony Blair saw clear advantage in making something up, and felt he could do so with safety, he would not scruple to do so. That, I suggest, is now the prevailing view among print and Janet's always been more of a cat person, haven't you, Janet?' Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times. broadcast journalists. And ours is the medi- um upon which a prime minister must prin- cipally rely in order to project himself to the wider public. This strikes me as a seri- ous problem for Mr Blair.
Or potential problem. It is unlikely to make itself felt while the government he leads is plain-sailing, as it is now. A reputa- tion for tricksiness or mendacity does not do a man much harm — may even do him some good — while he is winning. We wink at each other and chuckle at the brazen cheek of it all: indeed, we did so on the afternoon in question, as Mr Blair told an incredulous William Hague that 'more police officers' did not mean more police officers. Ooh, you are awful, Tony — but we like you.
And we do seem to like hint. Blair's pop- ularity ratings with the public at large have dipped a bit but remain extraordinarily high. If the PM cuts a few corners here and there, if a rival or troublemaker mysterious- ly falls, their good name murdered in a dark alley by an assailant whose identikit description answers to that of the Prime Minister's chief press spokesman, we reflect that all this may be rather unsavoury but none of it is doing the economy any harm. In easy times, a reputation for veracity is about as useful as a winter coat on a sum- mer's day.
It is when the weather turns foul that what Mr Blair has so spectacularly lost over these last two years will be missed. There will come a point in any prime minister's career when he needs to be able to say 'trust me' in circumstances where he can offer no better reason to do so than our own confidence in his trustworthiness. It is that belief in the minds of the press (not yet, I think, the public) which is being qui- etly shot to pieces as Mr Blair's apparently untroubled progress continues.
The part of the graph which is displayed on the screen the voting intentions of the electorate — shows a serenely unper- turbed continuity: the graph stays high and flat. But off the screen and beneath that - plateau is a line visible only to a few — to those close to Westminster, Whitehall and its processes. That graph has taken a steep dive. The dive has consequences which have not yet appeared, but will.
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