The ‘career politician’ was a phenomenon of our times, comparable to the career television presenter. Phillip Schofield left school at seventeen and worked as a bookings clerk at Broadcasting House in London. His family moved to New Zealand two years later, and he became a TV presenter for a programme called Shazam! Thereafter, he was imprisoned in the television. It was as if he was actually locked up inside the box. When he came back to England in 1985 he became a ‘children’s presenter’, and between 1987 and 1993 he presented Going Live!. It was one of those programmes which take up the desultory Saturday mornings of children whose parents cannot be bothered to play with them or suggest they do something interesting. Schofield remained in television, moving on to present programmes for grown-ups. By the time he was co-hosting Dancing on Ice, he was said to have secured a £5 million two-year deal. His hair had turned white. He was already looking like an old man, the televisual equivalent of Dickens’s Mr Dorrit, the ‘Father of the Marshalsea’, who had been in the debtor’s gaol so long that it had come to feel like home. Schofield once presented I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, one of the programmes in which a group of people are incarcerated together and spied upon by the cameras. By a supreme irony of language, these exercises in artificial group sadism were called ‘reality shows’. Did something in Schofield scream ‘Get me out of here?’ or had he become the twenty-first-century equivalent of the figures on Keats’s Grecian Urn, ‘for ever piping songs for ever new’, frozen in artifice.1
Career politicians inspired similarly disconcerting impressions. ‘Lord Kinnock’ had begun as an activist in the students’ union at the University of Cardiff, and done nothing, nothing, nothing in his life except to be a politician, first as an MP, then as a European Fat Cat, then as a member of the House of Lords. Life whizzed past, for him, as for Phillip Schofield. Nothing happened, except the words which they read from their autocues.
Most politicians in the Blair era gave the impression of being like this, and although Tony Blair was obviously much more than that, he was a Phillip Schofield–like figure himself, a face to be seen on the television for a slice of most British people’s lives, but fading as soon as he left it.
‘You don’t look or sound like a Labour MP.’
That was how Edward Heath addressed Tony Blair when they were first introduced in the House of Commons.2 The words were not only perfectly true; they exactly summarise why Blair was so successful in defeating not merely the Conservative Party but also his own party, Labour. When he said the word ‘sound’–SAYOWND–Heath would immediately have signalled to any listener that, for all the plumminess of his Oxford-educated tones, he remained the carpenter’s son from Kent. Tony Blair, much more inclined than Heath to identify himself with another Carpenter’s Son, defied social analysis, at any rate as far as his pronunciation of the English language was concerned. Much more a creature of artifice than Edward Heath, or than any previous Prime Minister, Blair could, by his voice, sometimes sound like a gormless rock singer–as a student he had played the guitar for a band called Ugly Rumours, and he would still, as Prime Minister, strum the instrument for recreation. As an orator, the new Prime Minister could sound like an evangelical preacher, as when he had offered his messianic vision to the Labour Party Conference of 1999–‘A century of decline, 20 years of Conservative Government still not put to rights. Do you think I don’t feel this, in every fibre of my being?’ Like all rhetorical questions, this suggests to a sceptical ear the opposite answer to the one intended by the speaker; but at the time, his jerky, half tearful and verbless sentences made a great appeal. ‘The frustration, the urgency, the anger at the waste of lives unfulfilled, hopes never achieved, dreams never realised. And whilst there is one child still in poverty in Britain today, one pensioner in poverty, one person denied their chance in life, there is one Prime Minister and One Party that will have no rest, no vanity in achievement, no sense of mission completed until they too are set free.’ As time was to advance, his sense of himself as a saviour would extend beyond the one British child living in poverty to embrace the entire planet, as when he was able to offer salvation to the continent of Africa (first at the G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2005, and then at the Labour Party Conference). Being also a canny politician, as well as a Messiah, Blair’s actual proposal for overseas aid, contained in his 2005 election manifesto, was 0.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, a figure far higher than most British taxpayers would want, but scarcely the sacrificial giving which Blair probably believed, when on the podium and delivering his speech, that he was offering to the starving children of Darfur or Eritrea.
The electorate had perhaps thought they were sacking the dull bank manager and replacing him with a charming young man who was a little more, well, normal. Waking up on May Day 1997, many of the electorate, however, realised that they had chosen a person who was by no means run-of-the-mill. After the strange eight-year episode of the poor son of circus trapeze artistes and garden-gnomes makers, the British found themselves with a pop-star revivalist as Prime Minister. But both the personae–the Vicar of St Albion’s as Private Eye was quick to dub him, and the Bono/Geldof side of Blair that liked wowing crowds and making big, global gestures–were distinctly part-time. He never stopped being an extraordinarily disciplined and relentlessly focused political operator.
Blair was just short of his forty-third birthday when he became the Prime Minister on 1 May 1997. He looked young for his age, and still possessed the well-scrubbed appearance of a public school prefect, the sort of boy who was never going to be a notable scholar but whose pleasant manners made him a favourite with the teachers and their wives. If prospective parents had come to the school, the housemaster’s wife would have thought Blair could be trusted to show them round the squash courts and the science laboratories and make a ‘good impression’. After Fettes, and St John’s College, Oxford, at neither of which establishment he had shone, he was called to the Bar and joined Lincoln’s Inn. He was never destined to become a great Chancery lawyer, but he had a quick mind, and a superficial plausibility. The ability to grasp one or two salient points in a case, and a boyish coquettishness of manner in front of the judge, would enable such a lawyer to put his case with success. He was never going to rise as high in the law as the woman he married, another barrister in the same chambers, Cherie Booth, the daughter of a drunken television actor called Tony Booth.
Superficiality is a tremendous advantage in a politician. Blair arrived on the political scene with no ideological ‘baggage’ beyond a slightly goofy students’ union type of Christianity, which, as he sometimes blurted out to journalists, was the guiding principle of his life. (His minder and rather brutal press secretary, North Country journalist and bruiser Alastair Campbell, intervened on one occasion to tell interviewers, ‘We don’t do God.’) Sometimes Blair would tell inquirers that the inspiration for his life had been the writings of a Christian socialist called John Macmurray, introduced to the undergraduate Blair by an Australian cleric, Revd Peter Thomson, seventeen years older than Tony and enjoying with the St John’s undergraduate what might be thought a slightly odd friendship. ‘There were people at university who got me into politics. I kind of got into religion, politics, at the same time, in a way,’ he told the television chat-show host Michael Parkinson, declining to be viewed as a Christian socialist. ‘It’s a long time since anyone used the word socialist about me,’ he said, in the same interview. It could be that Macmurray explains all; but in the case of the chameleon Blair it was never especially safe to take him at his word. When in the company of the bookish, he liked to allude to books. The editor of the Spectator, Matthew d’Ancona, told his readers, ‘in private Blair was more inclined to talk about books, ideas and history, whether it was the theology of Hans Kung, the origins of neo-conservatism or the merits of de Gaulle. But he was clever enough to keep this mostly to himself.’ So clever was he that he kept such intellectual interests a secret not only from the public, but from those close to him. One who shared a holiday with Blair and his wife and family noted that neither he, his wife nor any of his children had packed any books for a fortnight’s holiday. When not swimming in the pool or playing tennis, Blair spent his time having anxious conversations on his mobile telephone.3 Even Mr Major had read the occasional novel by Trollope, praising them for their wonderfully ‘two-dimensional characters’.4 Though he sat light to political ideology, Blair’s religious views were often a source of interest. Those who set out to explain what motivated Blair, beyond fear of his hot-tempered and strong-willed wife, sought it in the influence of the Catholic Church. But how far was it possible to distinguish that Church from Cherie, who, as a working-class ‘Scouse’, had been brought up with regular visits to Mass and confession? Throughout his period in office, indiscreet Roman Catholic priests liked to hint that Blair was some form of crypto-papalist. The bizarre Father Michael Seed, a congenitally indiscreet Capuchin friar, said Mass in the house at Number 10 Downing Street, after Tony Blair was spotted receiving Holy Communion at RC altars and Cardinal Hume, the RC Archbishop, wrote to him telling him to desist. (Blair wrote back assuring the Cardinal that he would desist, but added–‘I wonder what Jesus would have made of it.’ Interesting question.) The ecumenism of the Blair marriage seemed to go only one way. The Blair family never attended the Prime Minister’s parish church near Chequers, preferring to attend the RC service at Great Missenden where the clergyman, a figure named Father Russ, speculated to the newspapers about the probable or likely date of Tony’s ‘reception’ into that Church. And not merely reception. Blair had, claimed Father Russ, discussed with him the possibility of becoming a Roman Catholic deacon, a minor order only one down from the priesthood itself. After Blair’s resignation, Sir Anthony Kenny remembered that ‘The Emperor Theodosius was refused communion by the Bishop of Milan until he had done public penance for a massacre for which he was responsible. It is rumoured that in their farewell audience Pope Benedict rebuked Blair for his part in the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps his appointment as the quartet’s [UN, US, EU, Russian] ambassador [to the Middle East] is meant to be his public penance. If so, we must hope that it has a favourable outcome.’ After his resignation, Blair did formally submit to Catholicism. Lady Marchmain, the pious chatelaine of Brideshead in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, explained to the puzzled narrator, ‘When I married, I became very rich. It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realise that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and his saints, but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included.’5 Once he was able, as a fully-fledged Catholic, to tap into this source of Grace, Blair lost no time in augmenting his prime ministerial pension. He took a post estimated at £2.5 million with the American bankers JPMorgan Chase; and another worth £500,000 per annum with the Zurich Financial Services Group to advise them on global warming issues.6 This came on top of the seven-figure advance which he had collected for his autobiography, the seven-figure advance collected by his wife for hers, as well as her pay as a high-profile human rights lawyer, who could also command sums as high as £75,000 for speaking engagements. Christ taught that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven; but with the Blairs, all things were possible.
For some years previous, both Blair and Cherie had appeared to become more dependent upon the Catholic faith. Both the Blairs, however, were ever eclectic in their spiritual beliefs. Their generous souls accommodated not merely the theological complexities of the Nicene Creed, but also the sweet incense and mental aromatherapy of the New Age religion. For an exciting period, the Blair court had as its captivating Rasputin figure a former nude model named Carole Caplin. She first met Cherie at a fitness class in 1992 and by 2003 Cherie was paying her £3,500 for ‘assistance with dress, fitness, and “lifestyle”’.7 Carole’s mother, Sylvia, introduced them to spiritualism. According to one source, in Mexico, ‘the Blairs visited a “temazcal”, a steam bath enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met Nancy Aguilar, a new age therapist. She told them that the pyramid was a Mayan womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs saw the shapes of animals in the steam and experienced “inner feelings and visions”. They smeared each other with melon, papaya and mud from the jungle, and then let out a primal scream of purifying agony.’8
Like Father Russ and Father Seed, Carole was happy to blab to the greater world about the Blairs’ dependency upon her spiritual counsels. Not only did Carole become Cherie’s masseuse, but she gave details to the newspapers of her shared showers, and ‘pampering’ sessions to the newspapers. Within weeks of meeting Cherie she had persuaded her to divulge details of her life with Tony–‘Toblerone’, as Carole soon came to call the Prime Minister.9 Cherie, who had put her emotional energy into her career at the Bar and into her marriage, possessed few personal friends and was susceptible to Carole’s charms. When Cherie’s dependency upon Carole was at its height, the style guru accompanied the Blair family on their summer holidays. When Cherie, her own mother Gale Booth, Tony and the children borrowed a holiday villa near Le Vernet in the south of France from Sir David Keane, Carole came, too, bringing her sixty-seven-year-old mother with her. Carole came to dinner one day wearing a loose skirt and a diaphanous blouse. Cherie’s mother, Gale, burst out at dinner with the comment, ‘I don’t think that outfit is appropriate dress at a family meal.’ Sylvia and Carole protested that they could see nothing wrong with it, and both women continued to sunbathe all but naked by the pool, which so embarrassed one of Blair’s sons that he and his friends were unable to use the pool.10 Nobody supposed that Caplin had actually been the lover of either Cherie or Tony, but her public boasts that she chose Tony’s clothes, even his underpants, and that she gave therapeutic massage to both the First Lord of the Treasury and to his wife caused inevitable titillation in the press. Poor Mr Major’s indiscretions with Edwina Currie were an embarrassment to his admirers, but no Prime Minister in history had ever entertained such a figure as Carole, as not merely a spiritual helper, but by extension a financial adviser. Tony Blair even offered Carole’s very welcome services to President Clinton during one of his visits to Chequers. Her massage technique had clearly made an impression on the susceptible President. When he visited the Labour Party Conference a little later in the year, Clinton told Blair, ‘I wish I could have Carole again for that exercise.’11
As he came into office, Blair had made few specific commitments other than to keep to the same spending plans as the Conservatives over the first few years of government. The economy, about which he knew nothing, was handled, on the whole with admirable skill, by Gordon Brown, whose Treasury team extended more and more control over domestic policy and over the actual machinery of government, throughout Blair’s decade in office. The largely right-wing press awaited, as did the defeated cohorts of the old left, to see whether, once in office, Tony Blair would show himself to have been Old Labour in disguise. But he had never had any interest in Old Labour, and his wary adversaries on right and left slowly began to realise he did not have any interests in right or left either.
One of the reasons that New Labour felt so modern was that the decline of the Tories under John Major, and the rise of the Blairites in the Labour Party, happened to coincide with one of the most prodigious changes of our times: personal computers became part of personal life. When the geeky, bespectacled Bill Gates (born 1955) started Micro-Soft (the hyphen was dropped when it registered as a trade name in November 1976) computers appealed to very limited sections of the world’s populace. They were of use in speeding up scientific research. They were super-counting machines. Only nerds would have wanted one in the home. Bill Gates changed that. By 1997, when Tony Blair came to power, most offices, libraries, hospitals and institutions in Britain were wired up to personal computers. The laptop swiftly followed, and it would soon become eccentric for private householders not to so be connected to the rest of the world. So rapid was the advance in computer technology that soon e-mail became the normal method of communicating with one another; and, whether in pursuit of pornography or scientific facts, of a cheap air flight or the time of the next train to Scunthorpe, the British, like everyone else in the world, ‘surfed’ the Web. The world became linked up, and yet separated, in one sweep. Anyone anywhere could tap into their laptop and communicate with anyone else, often with people they had never met, in ‘chat rooms’. At the same time, those old-fashioned means of human communication–the arrival of the postman, the visit to the post office, the penning of a letter, the picking up of the telephone–became less necessary. Many became addicts–some to ‘chatting’, others to pornography, which was abundantly and mysteriously wafted to anyone who wanted it on the ether, some–children–to computer games. Many people wondered, as they watched their children with noses almost glued to the screen, their ears stopped with headphones, whether a profound shift in human experience was occurring, or whether Gates and the other boffins had invented the most perfect device for shutting children up. It is certainly questionable whether the universal availability of the Internet extended human liberty. That it changed life, however, cannot be questioned, and in the era when it became old hat to be socialist, it also became old hat to write a letter or look something up in a book, if you could hunch instead over the laptop.
The characteristic artists of the age were Damien Hirst (born 1965) and Tracey Emin (born 1963). Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living sold for a sum which would previously have been considered expensive for an Old Master. It was a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde. (In 2007 he beat his own record, when Lullaby Spring sold for £50 million.) One mentions the money first, in relation to BritArt, since the sums commanded were an essential part of the phenomenon. Although he severed connections with Charles Saatchi in 2003, it was through Saatchi, the godfather of BritArt, that Hirst became a commodity. The Saatchi brothers, Baghdad Jews, had set up in business in the 1970s and been of invaluable help, as Britain’s most colourful advertising agency, in promoting Mrs Thatcher, with the election poster ‘BRITAIN ISN’T WORKING’. Saatchi and Saatchi became the world’s largest advertising company, and the extent to which Charles Saatchi’s prodigious collection of art was an extension of his work as an advertiser would always be a matter of discussion. Hirst’s dead creatures (the shark in formaldehyde eventually leaked and had to be thrown away) were not metaphors for British dead past, nor for Labour’s dead principles, but they came at an apposite time. The later work he did, in which arrangements of giant pharmaceuticals make allusions to Christian iconography, the white pill of healing with the Eucharistic host, ask to be jeered at by scoffers, but give the thoughtful pause.
Tracey Emin was easier for the philistines to guy since she was a woman, she was of foreign extraction (Turkish Cypriot on the father’s side), and she resorted to that device which many women consider necessary as a way of crossing the barricades of male stuffiness–buffoonery. Germaine Greer and Jessica Mitford come to mind. Probably few had heard of Emin until 1997 when she appeared on a Channel 4 television programme, visibly drunk (she afterwards claimed an unwise mixture with painkillers on account of a cut finger). She abused the other panel members in the arty discussion, rose to her unsteady feet and tottered off, claiming she was going home to her mum. Thereafter, she was a famous character. She exuded sexual allure and charm, and, like many artists before her, she made her life her subject matter. She had been born in Croydon but brought up in Margate. At thirteen she was raped, or ‘broken in’ as the local boys called it. Her high intelligence and resourcefulness took her to Medway College of Design, where she met the arresting, overblown figure of Billy Childish and spent five years as his muse and concubine, posing naked for photographs while developing thoughts and artistic ideas which outsoared his by miles. Later she had a relationship with Carl Freedman, and it was during this period that her distinctive styles became marked. She was an extremely skilled draughts-woman, and her drawings would, at any era of art, have been esteemed. She was also interestingly involved with fabric appliqués and other embroidered works. She was witty and quirky–witness her neon signs Is Anal Sex Legal? and its companion piece, Is Legal Sex Anal? Her most famous art work was My Bed, which was acquired by the Tate Gallery and a tent, appliquéd with the names of those who could be included in its title Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. These included her twin brother, her granny and her aborted child, as well as sexual partners. Emin transcended the necessary absurd sounds and furies of the BritArt publicity machine. She seemed, miraculously, to be using all this stuff to do what art had always done–relating personal experience to the general culture. If that culture was in chaos and decline, and if many people felt the sort of confusions (and amusement) displayed by Emin in her work, she was doing the work of a public artist in a very strange era.
The older guard, of course, saw a different Britain, and responded in a different way. David Hockney had spent much of his creative life drinking up the Californian sunshine and splashing it down in unforgettable images of light and water. In the twenty-first century, partly influenced by Chinese art, partly seeming to revisit Van Gogh, but chiefly, surely, by homesickness for Yorkshire, he began to paint big splashy watercolour landscapes. To use a word like elegy for these pictures implies sadness, even soppiness. Hockney was a preternaturally robust personality, and the pictures of this time have full-square confidence. Yet many who saw the fields and skies, the rainy mornings of the valley in Lillington, the red trees of Woldgate in autumn, must have believed that Hockney, after long exile, was painting a Britain which they had almost forgotten existed: the rolled haystacks, the wild flowers, the telegraph wires stretching down country roads. Even the roofscapes, when he comes towards the suburbs, so pure and red against a blustery Yorkshire sky, seem to be Yorkshire unvisited by the mullahs. It is not a ‘modern’ picture of Britain, and many in after years would be surprised to know that the pictures had been executed when Tony Blair was Prime Minister.
Tony Blair wanted to be ‘modern’, and this more or less ruled socialism out. He wanted to appeal to the sort of men–publishers, architects, senior broadcasters–who drank fizzy mineral water, and who sat in expensive restaurants in their Paul Smith shirt sleeves. Not only did he want to appeal to business, the traditional enemy of the Labour Party, but he wanted to continue in the good graces of opinion formers (provided they were young, metropolitan and trendy). The ‘views’ and ‘ideas’ and ‘opinions’ which the left had cherished for so long, and which they loved to debate in impassioned form, were all dumped–the commitment to unilateral disarmament, the belief in nationalised industries. The local branches of the Labour Party, which used to choose the candidates for parliamentary election, were overridden and Blairite lobby fodder was sent down from London, whether the local party liked them or not. The poor old dinosaurs who liked thinking about such matters were never to be allowed to do so again in front of television cameras. The Labour Party Conference, which in the old days was under the impression that it formed party policy, was taken over ruthlessly by the spin doctors. There were, in effect, no more ‘debates’ in which union barons, each commanding block votes of millions, decided the contents of the party manifesto together with the socialist ideologues of the Parliamentary Party. Instead, there were to be ‘focus groups’, which could be conveniently ignored. The shape and pattern of the conferences now began to resemble brainstorming meetings of NatWest Bank executives on a short training course. Policy was now firmly in the hands of Tony Blair and a group of trusted friends. The left of the party hated Blair from the beginning, but they put up almost no fight against him, watching powerlessly as he, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson ‘modernised’ the party. Almost at once, the pure, ‘straight kinda guy’, as Blair had described himself, was mired in sleaze. He took his first family holiday after becoming Prime Minister at the villa of Signor Berlusconi. Bernie Ecclestone gave the Labour Party £1 million from Formula One racing which received large revenues from tobacco advertising. Tony exempted Formula One from the ban on tobacco advertising. He promoted his cronies and flatmates, and he unwisely put no check on his adorer and close adviser Peter Mandelson (Mandy).
Mandy, once in power, proved to be unfortunately accident-prone. Having secured the safe Labour seat of Hartlepool, he was able to find himself in the Cabinet. He wanted, needed perhaps, to live beyond his means. He was much the most social of the New Labourites. He liked dining out, he liked going to parties given by rich, fashionable people, regardless of their political persuasion. He liked Jamie Palumbo, Carla Powell (wife of Thatcher’s Downing Street adviser Sir Charles). He liked escorting royal princesses, and became one in a long line of homosexuals who was pleased to be Princess Margaret’s ‘walker’. Such a life necessitated, in his view, a house where he could entertain, in a suitably fashionable part of London. This meant borrowing money for a house costing £475,000–a sum way beyond his means. When Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, he borrowed £373,000 from a fellow Minister, Geoffrey Robinson. It emerged that Mandy had made a fatal error on his mortgage application form from the Britannia Building Society to supplement the loan from Robinson. Mandy had to go. Blair, however, retained an affection for him and gave him another chance, this time to become the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Mandy did not last much longer in this department, either, since it transpired that in 1998 he had personally intervened with Mike O’Brien, Immigration Minister, over a passport application made by the multi-millionaire businessman Srichand Hinduja. At the time of this conversation, Mandy had been responsible for the Millennium Dome, which contained the numinous area known as the Faith Zone, sponsored by Hinduja and his brother for the sum of £1 million. That quintessentially New Labour thing, the Millennium Dome had actually been the dream child of Michael Heseltine, when, as President of the Board of Trade, he liked to be called ‘the President’. Not that it had originated with Hezza. It was as far back as 28 March 1989 that Bevis Hillier, biographer of John Betjeman, wrote to The Times with the suggestion, that ‘it is not too late to start planning a British exhibition or festival to celebrate the year 2000? Like the Great Exhibition of 1851, it should have a cosmopolitan aspect rather than the insular character of the 1951 Festival of Britain. It should be a celebration of the western world’s achievements. Not just a crowning manifesto of its own.’12 Bevis sowed the seed, and Heseltine watered it. It was a typical Heseltine idea, based on the fallacy that by hiring a sufficiently trendy and expensive modern architect–Richard Rogers–and building an eyesore in a run-down urban area, they would achieve ‘regeneration’. It was all to be paid for out of the National Lottery. At his pre-election conference speech Blair had told the bewildered party that they had ‘a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years’.13 a typically New Labour phrase which provided the missing link between the language of the Third Reich and a cheap advertising jingle. When Blair’s first Cabinet discussed the matter in June 1997, the majority, still thinking along Old Labour lines, believed that the Dome project should be shelved forthwith. If it was being paid for out of the Lottery, that was all the more reason to discard it, since the Lottery was a tax which exploited the gullibility of the poor; such money as it raised should be spent, it was argued, on worthy causes rather than on this piece of frivolity. They could not see, these old diehards, that New Labour was by definition frivolous. Seen from afar, the Dome gave the impression that a giant flying saucer might have landed from outer space on a bend in the Thames opposite Greenwich. Seventy-two giant pieces of fibreglass, coated in Teflon, made up the roof, surrounded by a framework of steel masts.14 Bevis had sown. Hezza had watered. New Labour would bring forth the plant to glory. Egged on by Mandy, who saw the Dome as a symbol of the New Dispensation that was being brought into being, the Dome became the special responsibility of a former flatmate of Tony Blair’s, Charlie Falconer, a genial lawyer who for no reason beyond his friendship with Tony found himself elevated to a peerage. The Dome was big. Its bigness made up for its emptiness, and so its bigness was often dwelt upon. Inside you could fit two Wembley Arenas, thirteen Albert Halls or one Eiffel Tower on its side. It was the largest dome in the world, twice the size of the Georgia Dome in the United States. The comparisons had the unfortunate effect of inviting…comparison. The Wembley Arena and the Albert Hall and St Peter’s in Rome and all the other domes and great spaces which were smaller than Lord Falconer’s great space had been built for a discernible purpose. The Crystal Palace of 1851, for example, which housed the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, had attracted visitors from all over the world. Had it failed, the committee of public men who commissioned it had underwritten its costs. Blair’s Dome was not paid for by any of those who sat on committees, and so prodigally ran up expense. One early enthusiast was the journalist Adam Nicolson, for whom ‘the Dome was a catalogue of marvels, a cabinet of rarities, a circus of marvels’… ‘a kaleidoscope of the very best that we could do’.15 Others, as they stared at the finished result, the feebleness of the exhibits, the boringness of the ‘zones’, the tiny queues dwindling to nothingness as the whole project flopped so spectacularly, wondered if Nicolson’s words did not provide an unintentional description of Blair’s Britain. Was this Teflon-coated extravagance really ‘the very best that we could do’? Perhaps it was.
The New Millennium was ushered in at Greenwich in a chaos, as the favoured guests queued for hours at Stratford East station in order to be allowed from the newly built underground station to the Dome. When they finally entered the symbol of Britain’s regeneration, they were greeted by the uninspiring Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, cruelly dubbed ‘Mr Blobby’ by his own clergy, who intoned the Lord’s Prayer. There was then a rendition of the Beatles’ song ‘All You Need Is Love’, followed by a toe-curling jazzed-up version of the National Anthem.16 The floor show, like the New Labour project itself, as it was to unfold in the coming years, was a strange mixture of the boring and the tawdry. As midnight struck Tony and Cherie linked arms to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. On his right, his monarch permitted her fingers to be held, though she did not link, or swing, her arms with her neighbours. While they roared, ‘We’ll tak a cup o kindness yet’, Elizabeth II’s mouth remained rattrap-furious closed.
As in the case of Thatcher, and indeed of almost all Prime Ministers, Blair began by attempting to impose his will on domestic politics. Then, as this became messy and intractable, he turned his attentions to foreign policy and began to see himself, not without some justification, as a figure on the world stage.
The left watched and waited through ten years of Blair’s premiership for any noticeable social engineering, or–to use a phrase popularised by David Shepherd, Bishop of Liverpool–‘bias to the poor’. They could wait in vain. Blair had no more interest in closing the poverty gap than had Thatcher. In the matter of constitutional reform, the radicals were to feel an equal sense of letdown. The historian Ross McKibbin, author of one of the best left-wing analyses of modern Britain, felt that at the end of his time as Prime Minister, ‘Blair has had opportunities unavailable to any other Labour Leader, and has thrown nearly all of them away…the greatest of these opportunities would have been the democratic reform of the constitution.’17
Whether you agreed with McKibbin depended upon your perspective. If you were a Tory (feeling as disenfranchised by the antics of modern Conservative parties as socialists were by New Labour) you might have felt that Blair’s constitutional reforms went too far. Almost as soon as New Labour took power, they announced devolution for Scotland and Wales. Although neither country showed especial enthusiasm for the scheme, and in Wales it was all but necessary to fudge the referendum to make it seem as if a majority wanted a special Welsh Assembly, each country was fitted up with its own expensive legislature, and in the case of Scotland the setting up of the Parliament was but the first clear step on the road to nationalist independence and the breaking up of the United Kingdom. This was quite a radical change to have put into ineluctable effect within a year of taking office. Likewise, the introduction of an elected mayoralty to London was a significant change, even if central government held on to so many of the purse strings that the elected mayor (faced with a truly grotesque choice of candidates, Londoners opted for Ken Livingstone, former leader of the GLC) did not have anything like the spending power, hence administrative capacity, as the mayors of New York or Paris. The machinery was there for other elected mayoralties, if only the sluggish British could become more excited by ‘democracy’ and its processes. The truth is that from the time of the Chartists, only a very small percentage of the British electorate have been democrats, in the sense of wishing to be consulted about every change in or operation of the law. The system of representative government, by which voters send a local member to Parliament, to act and vote on behalf of all his constituents, regardless of political affiliation, had worked quite well until the Blair era, and for many voters it was preferable to the hectic political systems cobbled together in France and Germany after the Second World War. These voting systems, undoubtedly more democratic, were based on a proportional representation idea, rather than a first past the post system. Godfather Woy tried to persuade young Tony to adopt some such European scheme, but he never did so. In the matter of the House of Lords, the radicals were no doubt as disappointed as the Tories were outraged. In May 1997 there were 1,067 peers in the House of Lords. In March 2000 there were 682. In May 1997 there were 633 hereditary peers with voting rights. By March 2000 there were only 92, and these were subsequently abolished. The others were 564 life peers and 26 lords spiritual. Parties of the left–the Liberals under Gladstone, and even more under Lloyd George, and the Labour Party ever since its inception, had been talking about abolishing the system whereby hereditary peers automatically formed part of the legislature. It was Blair who actually did it.
Yet, in a brilliant short book, a young German scholar, Katrin Rohde, sees that Blair was never intent upon a revolution based on Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The pattern to seek in his administration is the essentially conservative one of Edmund Burke who, in opposition to Paine at the time of the French Revolution, saw that in order to be preserved, institutions needed constant minor reform. The plant which had been tweaked and pruned did not need to be uprooted.18
Blair’s Britain was different from Mr Major’s. If it was more modern to be governed by Tony’s appointees, such as ‘Lord’ Falconer and ‘Lord’ Levy and ‘Lord’ Alli, rather than clever hereditary peers such as Max Egremont, Robert Salisbury, Conrad Russell, Garry Runciman or Andrew Devonshire, then British government had certainly become more modern. Hundreds of hours of parliamentary time were spent debating the issue of foxhunting. On Sunday 1 March 1998, a mass movement of the ‘countryside’ marched through the streets of London, almost matching the size of the protests against the government’s wish to go to war against Iraq. Blair had no interest in the question of whether people should hunt foxes with hounds. He wanted, as often, two contradictory things–to please the dwindling country-dwellers and to appease those class-envious lefties who saw the hunt as one of the last bastions of old privilege to be swept away, like the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, to the dustbin of history. Blair, as a good Thatcherite, knew that soaring property prices in the 1980s had removed the last squires and parsons from the manor houses and parsonages of England and filled them up with yuppies, replacing the kitchen gardens with swimming pools, and erecting Colefax and Fowler festoons of fabrics in drawing rooms which had never previously known central heating. Meanwhile, in the villages and on the edges of fields, what had been affordable rented agricultural cottages became second homes for the white flight, those not yet fortunate enough to own old rectories and old manors, but who did not want their Boden-clad children to play in inner city recreation grounds, littered with used syringes and condoms. With the virtual extinction of cheap property to rent, and with a diminishing agricultural workforce, it was no surprise that the rate of suicides among the rural working classes soared. Thatcher had espoused Thatcherism knowing it would be hateful to the majority. The knowledge even gave her a certain satisfaction, just as predestinarian sects in the Protestant world enjoyed the warmth of inner assurance that those not elected to glory–a majority of the human race–would probably be damned. Blair, however, whose mind was drawn more instinctively to the doctrines of universal salvation preached by the Catholic Church, and who had the greasepaint in his blood, wanted to woo audiences and to be liked. He was a Thatcherite who lacked the one thing necessary to be a successful Thatcherite, namely the enjoyment of being hated. He wished to be seen as a man who took seriously the complaints of farmers and agricultural workers who had seen their quality of life eroded over twenty years, with more and more legislation coming from Europe; with mechanised conditions reducing those employed in agriculture; with the decline of country buses, schools, shops and post offices. ‘I wouldn’t live in a big city if I could help it,’ he told Country Life. ‘I would live in the country. I was brought up there, really.’19 Really? At no time did Blair live in the country, spending most of his childhood in suburban houses on the outskirts of Durham, or at boarding school in Edinburgh. Yet he saw the foxhunting matter as something which could be offered to the left-wingers on his back benches, who were dismayed by his foreign policy and by the impenitent prudence of the Treasury. When, after spending hundreds of hours of parliamentary time discussing the question, what had been lost was not so much the hunt, as the spirit of live and let live. As it happened, nearly every hunt continued to go out with hounds during the season, some just about keeping within the limits of the law by drag-hunting, or by taking a gun with which to kill the fox when found; but most openly defying the law. But New Labour Westminster had shown that it was a government which wanted to boss, to impose the will of an urban and suburban majority upon the rural minority.
If this was their attitude to hunting, it was no surprise that they all took pleasure in banning smoking in public places. Their definition of the word ‘public’ took in bars and public houses, even if these were free houses owned by a publican who wanted his customers to smoke. They included private clubs, and offices and places of work, even if owned by one individual who permitted his workforce to smoke. As in the case of hunting, what was surprising was not so much the fact that so many Members of Parliament wished to mind other people’s business. It was that the Conservatives and the Liberals, which some voters had supposed were parties which were meant to stand up for liberty of the individual, could not see that a matter of principle was at stake. Among public figures in Britain the painter David Hockney was alone in vociferous protest. Overnight, the pubs and clubs of England became less friendly places and within months many publicans faced bankruptcy. The bleak news was followed by news bulletins, dispatched without any questioning of their plausibility by BBC newscasters, about the ‘improvements in public health’ since the ban.
It was, then, a bossier, less tolerant Britain under Mr Blair. This should perhaps have made the British more capable of understanding the Muslims, who follow a scripture which is almost devoid of the narrative interest of the Hebrew Bible, and is largely injunctions and prescriptions. The Koran and New Labour’s formidable reams of new legislation, governing every aspect of British life, could indeed be seen by students of comparative religion to have much in common. Both were essentially puritanical creeds, and though New Labour was not teetotal as such, it was undoubtedly a movement fuelled by white wine spritzers rather than Thatcher’s malt whisky.