After a summer of content
Maurice Cowling
BLAIR'S 100 DAYS by Derek Draper Faber, £7.99, pp. 223 his book is supposed to be, and perhaps is, a diary kept by Mr Derek Draper, at the suggestion of the chairman of Faber & Faber, between 1 May and 9 August, at a time when, as a former adviser to Mr Mandelson and the Labour Chief Whip, he had a sense of the gossip which was going the rounds of middle-rank Labour advisers. He records gossip about Mr Prescott's secret visit to Sedgefield after the general election in order to turn down the Home Office (because he wanted the influence Mr Heseltine had had as Deputy Prime Minister), about the exact importance of Mr Mandelson and Lord Irvine in relation to Mr Blair, and about the tension and co-operation between Mr Blair and Mr Brown and the latter's continuing resentment of Mr Mandelson's decision to support the former as party leader.
Where the Conservative party is concerned, Mr Draper is snide and silly, except in the sympathy he expresses, per- haps duplicitously, for Mr Major, his description of Sir Norman Fowler as an 'overcooked turkey', and his claim that the Labour leaders wanted Mr Clarke as Conservative leader because he resembled them more than any of the other possible leaders. He predicts difficulty in the Labour party if Mr Blair proposes amalga- mation with the Liberal Democrats; he believes, rightly, that Mr Ashdown's importance has been neutralised by the size of the Labour majority; and he relegates to the next general election but one the need to rely on them to give Mr Blair his third general election victory.
Mr Draper's Blair combines 'radicalism' with 'traditionalism' and admires Mrs Thatcher more even than he admires Mr Gaitskell and Lord Jenkins. Though a European by instinct, he understands why the English mistrust Europe, regards Europe as the biggest challenge he is likely to face, and has a personal charm which worked with President Yeltsin as well as President Clinton. On the other hand, except at the Amsterdam summit, he has not been very good at reading official papers; he has no great interest in Green issues, and he wanted to be Labour leader not because of any particular sympathy with the Labour party but because he want- ed to be Prime Minister. Not only was he inadequate after the general election in thanking Labour party workers, he also spoke with undisguised 'brutality' in warn- ing new Labour MPs that it was not their business to tell his government what to do.
Mr Draper warns Mr Blair not to allow his closeness to business to make him neglectful of the unions. He treats his friendship with the chairman of British Airways as an embarrassment; he doubts whether an Anglican with a Roman Catholic wife and Roman Catholic children can really understand the Irish problem; and he makes no bones about the fact that, in spite of disparaging opinion polls in public, he takes the closest interest in them in private.
Nor is Mr Draper a pushover on policy. He defends the Milbank files on Labour MPs, praises the changed response which Britain has encountered in Europe under Mr Blair's leadership, and seems for a time to have swallowed Mr Brown's budget whole. But he more or less sees through Mr Cook's 'ethical foreign policy' and implies (ironically in view of more recent events) that Mr Cook timed its announce- ment in order to keep his name before the The fruit in Lot 531. Is it organically grown?' public. Camelot was mismanaged, the Jonathan Powell appointment was a 'rare set-back' and President Clinton gained more from intimacy with Mr Blair than Mr Blair from intimacy with him. Mr Draper is uncertain whether the Welfare to Work scheme, the government's economic strate- gy and Mr Blunkett's educational plans will work, and he adds that unless public expen- diture is increased, the public's trust in Labour as saviour of the Health Service will go the way of the trust it once had in the Conservative party as saviour of the economy.
Two things are missing — any reference to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and any recognition that May to August 1997 was a period in which the new govern- ment had been left so few immediate problems by its predecessor that it had for an incoming Labour government a unique- ly easy ride.
The death of Princess Diana stimulated a national sadness which was as anti-royalist as it was royalist, since Mr Morton's biography and her famous television inter- view had made it obvious that the princess was determined to play a public role at the expense of the royal family. Her death may, paradoxically, strengthen the monarchy while also bringing the monarchy into party politics from two points of view — because Mr Blair's press officers had hijacked it to Mr Blair's advantage and because the Conservative party, in pointing this out, may well make some of its allegations stick. At present they are not sticking (perhaps because they were made prematurely). But there are many conflict- ing currents in the public mind; no one can be sure how they will settle down, and it may eventually occur not only to the royal family but also to a loyal public that, even if Mr Blair himself is a royalist, much of New Labour is not.
Mr Blair's combination of youth, diffi- dence and priggishness has carried him since August into an empyrean of love and compassion inhabited by Mother Theresa and Princess Diana. And it may be that the death of the princess is his Falklands war from which there will be no turning back. Love and compassion, however, are scarce- ly Thatcherite virtues, and democratic politicians do not in any case live for long in the empyrean. They live in a broken- backed and ungrateful world where Uxbridge and Cardiff are the reality, popular favour is withdrawn as the level of taxation, the power of the unions and public-sector pay create winters of discontent, and sleaze or corruption (in western Scotland or boys' homes in north Wales) determine whether a party's (or a prime minister's) reputation will prosper.
Mr Blair's facial mannerisms, nervous hands and virtuous energy are already, just slightly, beginning to grate. Mr Draper's book indicates some of the ways in which his policies may grate on the Labour party in the future.
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