Avoidance of social embarrassment is something of a British national obsession. So that moment in any election campaign when a political party has to deal with their difficult “ex” is always likely to produce a squirm. For years the Conservatives tied themselves in knots about Margaret Thatcher. Now Labour has its Tony Blair problem. Speculation has been rife for months that the former prime minister is lukewarm about current Labour leader, Ed Miliband. The party couldn’t lock Blair away, Bluebeard-like, in a cupboard for the duration of the campaign. But what to do with a man who in the words of the late Mo Mowlam, a former cabinet minister, “thinks he’s f*****g Jesus”?
Since leaving office in 2007, Blair has become toxic in British politics. The war in Iraq has damaged his reputation with the majority, eclipsing his substantial achievements in public service reform, major constitutional change, and peace in Northern Ireland. His legacy has been further tarnished by widespread distaste about the millions he’s made with Tony Blair Associates since leaving office.
Yet the muscle-memory of the old Blair remains profound in the British body politic. He is, after all, a three-times election winner who put together a coalition of support that won convincing victories in 1997, 2001 and even 2005, after the invasion of Iraq. Many suspect that he could have pulled off another win in 2010. None of the current generation of politicians has been able to present a vision that commands similar support, which is why Britain is apparently heading towards another hung parliament. So Blair, in Churchill’s phrase, was a leader who understood how to “make the political weather.”
Here he was this week, the political undead, giving his first and possibly only major speech of the Labour campaign. The familiar tics–the nervous grin, the preacher’s hands and the glottal stops–remain in place. It was like watching a rerun of your favourite 90s sitcom through your fingers. But the political old master was still there too.
The speech was on Europe–a subject about which Blair cares deeply and, conveniently, one of the few on which he is in lockstep with Ed Miliband. But its intent was to push a knife into the heart of David Cameron’s election message that voters can only trust the Conservatives on the economy.
Focusing on Cameron’s promise of a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, Blair offered a vision of post-election disarray. “Think of the chaos produced by the possibility, never mind the reality, of Britain quitting Europe,” he said, “Jobs that are secure suddenly insecure; investment decisions postponed or cancelled; a pall of unpredictability hanging over the British economy. And for what? To satisfy the insistent Europhobia of a group who will never be satisfied.” Around the world, he went on, “Wherever you go—USA, China, India… the most common response is: why would you do that?”
It was a sad image of Little England expertly drawn precisely for the kind of voter who supported Labour during the Blair years. Withdrawal from Europe is now the one issue where the British business community is out of step with the Conservatives. Similarly, as in the 1990s, voters who are economically “dry” but socially progressive worry about the Conservatives as the self-styled “nasty party.” David Cameron won many of those voters back from Labour in 2010 as the “heir to Blair.” Now here was the man himself questioning in pained tones whether the prime minister could still be “the standard bearer of an open minded culturally tolerant Britain.”
Blair’s speech illustrated how effective he remains at political rhetoric—a virtuoso of Ethos, Pathos and Logos. As if to emphasize that point, Michael Fallon, the conservative Defence Secretary, shortly afterwards provided a masterclass in rhetoric at its most clumsy and inept. Writing that Britain’s nuclear deterrent was under threat from Labour, Fallon launched a bitter personal attack on the party’s leader, saying he would do anything for power. “Remember: Ed Miliband stabbed his own brother in the back to become Labour leader,” he wrote. “Now he is willing to stab the United Kingdom in the back to become prime minister.”
Never mind the “nasty party.” Fallon’s intervention was worthy of the nineteenth century rebuke that the Conservatives are the “stupid party.” Even prominent supporters blanched at the level of personal invective. “Embarrassing,” tweeted Tim Montgomerie, founder of the influential ConservativeHome website, “Way too personal from Michael Fallon against Ed Miliband.”
It’s the kind of mistake Blair never would have made. Here Endeth The Lesson.
