By Anthony Barnett
Poetic justice!
It is especially rare in British politics. After many years of getting away with it, from the early home loan scandal of his spin doctor Peter Mandelson, to dodgy dossiers and super casinos that seemed to leave no trace on their Godfather, Tony Blair may finally be brought down by the arrest of his “brother” and bag-man, his “Lord cash-point” and confidant: Michael Levy.
The Prime Minister’s resignation has been long overdue for larger reasons, such as getting Iraq wrong. But the weird scandal of the “sale of peerages” is in its way a perfect symbol of the false modernisation of the Blair project, hence the justice of this moment.
It deserves to be Blair’s downfall. He ruled by image rather than substance. In 1997 he had three glittering faces: trust, competence and modernity. He projected himself as trustworthy – this went definitively with the Iraq war. He projected himself as efficient – only recently did this unravel with a series of departmental cock-ups, now it appears his closest mates can’t even sell a seat in the legislature with the necessary degree of competence.
But of the three the most important was the ‘modern’. The zeitgeist merchant of our time, Blair sold himself as the personification of progress.
However, inside his ‘third way’ lurked the glamour of backwardness, the hydra-headed inner demon of the United Kingdom. Blair’s reckless attraction to war can be seen as a demonstration of its fatal lure. Now a sordid fascination with the value of ermine and garters reveals him as yet another merchant of the old regime.
Britain is a strange country. Its heritage industry is world famous yet it is also fiercely capitalist and open to the world. In this context it was the Labour Party’s chosen role be the party of the people and especially the working-man, an arsenal of hope, progress and opportunity. Instead, by the 1980s it became a repository of hopelessness, regression and a deadening attachment to past failure – in short, of conservatism. Meanwhile, under Thatcher, the Tories became the apparent re-makers, the true radicals and the party of the wider world.
Tony Blair turned the tables on the Tories after 18 years in opposition. It was sexy and it was mesmerising - presented with shirt-sleeve incantations of sincerity, alongside a formidable will to power that fed the longing of a rapacious press.
Blair borrowed the Labour Party (which, desperate for power, returned the compliment), took out shares in globalisation and rented a new (for Britain) democratic agenda, not because he believed in democracy for Britain but because it was the modern thing at the time.
This was the image he mainlined and made him high. Years after he became Prime Minister, any mistake for which he might have to answer for, or any problem for which he might have to take responsibility, was turned away by the next initiative and headline. We were told, in effect, that it was not a matter of what was right or wrong so much as what was the future. Globalisation flowed through his veins. Next week’s headlines was already a glint in his eyes, and being shaped between his fingers and the phone. “It’s the future, stupid.” This was Blair’s case. If you were against it, then you were the past, and whether or not you were right was irrelevant. In this way, one of the most constantly moralising of men placed himself beyond questions of right or wrong.
It made him appear as the most contemporary of Prime Ministers. His style, his ‘openness’, his guitar, his media savvy grin, his fluent French and his ease with a Clinton or a Bush, his passion for ‘hard choices’, his simultaneous attraction to an enlarged Europe as well as a global America, all this suggested a man who had absorbed future-shock and was on the cusp of globalisation.
Indeed, should the more advanced occupants of another star cluster touch down tomorrow on globe-earth, Blair would be the first to elbow his way forward from the small fry of the G8 to hug the newcomers and declare that mere globalisation was yesterday and we all have to think galactic now.
The sale of peerages helps us see his commitment to ‘the modern’ in the true light of its opportunism. It is not a dedication to contemporary values such as transparency, accountability, freedom and democracy – any such appearance was smoke, mirrors and a lawyer’s sincerity. (It took me in for a while, I admit, when desire got the better of my judgement.) Blair was modern only in a cynical carelessness for tradition and an empty craving for money.
For what could be more regressive, rotten and plain out-of-date than selling peerages? And they were not even the real thing, at least Lloyd George sold hereditary earldoms not montage life-peerages!
Which assumes that the charges are true. They are. Not to be proven in court? Perhaps. But there are credibly sourced rumours in London that lists of candidates for the Lords were drawn up for Blair in 10 Downing Street and he himself wrote personal judgements upon them as Levy ran a tariff for their acquisition, any trace of which on his hard-drives will be prima facia evidence of a crime. Who can doubt that there was a Blair machinery of sleaze?
One of Blair’s closest Cabinet colleagues is Tessa Jowell. Her husband, David Mills, represented the then Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, whose own colleagues have Mafia connections and have been found guilty of fraud. This is not a movie. While Jowell and Mills were still together Blair went on holiday with Berlusconi. If a compliant press lets you get away with this in public why not raise your influence in private by the sale of peerages?
What the scandal illuminates is how Blair is no more the man of future than a Mafiosi who goes into on-line porn. Unlike his backward colleagues, we are told, he alone has the determination to lead old-fashioned Britain to its necessary destination with the global market. The media seems desperate to save him on this score (perish the thought that this might have anything to do with its ownership). In studios and op-eds the phrases roll: they all do it; there is no alternative; the money must come from somewhere; the Tories and Liberal Democrats are just the same; it’s life; there is no alternative.
Not so. There does not need to be a House of Lords. The scandal is not caused by the inevitability of people being on the make, it is a matter of democracy. After 1997 Blair had the opportunity, set out in his Party’s programme, to create a decisively (not completely) more honest political system, one with a democratic second chamber and a fairer electoral system.
Instead, he chose to stay dancing with the past, the sordid, grubby, cynical, cliquish, contemptible traditions of old England’s ‘thing’. He embraced its corruption, he belongs in its dustbin. Mr Twenty-First Century Zeitgeist will go down with “peerages, sale-of” in his Wiki and students will ask themselves “what were peerages”?
A Prime Minister that cannot be trusted and is not particularly competent is not unusual. But one that takes a country backwards in the name of progress is unbearable. This is the deeper crime he has perpetuated on his country.
