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Mr Blair's sinister `we'
No 10 is always intruding on public feelings and delivering moral lectures.
The Prime Minister has a genius for stealing the show. Any show. There is no occasion too important or too trivial for him to exploit in his own interest; he can turn almost any event into an image enhancement opportunity. He did it with the death of the Princess of Wales, when with trembling lips and broken voice he managed to identify himself with her mystique and her mass appeal; if she was the People's Princess, what was he, bursting with feeling in the pulpit, but the People's Premier? He managed to do it with the Queen's golden wedding celebration, when he almost upstaged her in a royal walkabout.
He certainly tried to do it with his emotional remarks after the deaths of Frank Sinatra, whom he never met, and Linda McCartney, whom he didn't know, as if the country were eagerly awaiting a personal response from the People's Prime Minister. He did it after the football riots in Marseilles with his immoral and illegal suggestion that soccer hooligans should be sacked - a particularly nasty example of this habit, which he was lucky to get away with. And last week he did it again with the England-Argentina match; once again it was impossible for him to let pass the enormous public relations opportunities offered by the People's Favourite Pastime.
So we had the preposterous spectacle of the Prime Minister of this country addressing the nation on his feelings following a football match, snatching personal glory from the jaws of national defeat; Sky television was permitted an emotional little interview in the garden of Number 10, when Blair, with features adjusted for manly disappointment, expressed his passionate interest, his sorrow, and his laddish familiarity with the game. Then came morality. He urged us to look upon the young player Michael Owen as a role model. "It's a lot to put on him," our Prime Minister continued, "a guy that young, but he showed determination, maturity, courage - all the things that we'd want to see." Others, tragically, a small number of fans, he continued, are besmirching the reputation of the country. "We don't want that; it's not the way I feel about England."
Who, I wonder, is this sinister "we"? Does Blair presume to think that he knows what we all feel, and that we all want him to emote in public on our behalf? Or is he, when he says "we", rather regally referring to himself? Can it be, after only a year in office, that the "we" and the "I" are one and the same, namely Tony Blair? Alternatively, does it simply refer to his closest advisers and most particularly Alastair Campbell? We may never know, but whichever way you look at it, this performance, and others like it, are genuinely alarming.
Here is a Prime Minister who appears seriously to think that it is part of his job to intrude on public (and indeed private ) feelings and deliver moral lectures whenever it occurs to him, or whenever Alastair Campbell tells him to. It is bad enough that he seems to take such a view, ridiculous, paternalistic and misguided as it is. It is equally bad that his followers seem to share it. Their attitude (or what the Blairites think or hope their attitude is) was summed up by the Labour MP Kate Hoey on Newsnight. Her justification for Blair's holding forth on football was purely in terms of adulatory sentiment. "The Prime Minister is a human being . . . Tony Blair cares about football. People would expect him to make a statement." She is wrong there. A great many people, who are also human and care about football, would expect him to keep quiet on the subject, and get on with governing the country.
Worse still, however, is my suspicion that Blair knows perfectly well that there's no need for him to emote about football or Sinatra or anything very much - it's just good for him and his image. His cynicism should not be underestimated. Every single thing he says or does, no matter how spontaneous or emotional it seems - and the more so the better - has been carefully orchestrated for him. I suspected this on the day of Diana's death, and well-placed journalistic gossip suggests his responses were carefully stage-managed even then. And this manipulation of Blair's image, this attempt to insinuate him into the national psyche, is just one of the many manipulations in the name of the New Labour project, to stay in power. As Jeremy Paxman said last week, in his furious exchanges with Alastair Campbell, no Government has ever been so obsessed with public relations as this one.
Sooner or later, I hope and almost believe, people are going to get tired of all this bamboozling. Sooner or later there will be a backlash. Perhaps it is already beginning. John Major made a withering attack on Blair last week for his dumbing down of political debate, concentrating on soft interviews and subjects such as the Spice Girls instead of the big issues. The Des O'Connor Show and the Richard and Judy sofa, as he pointed out, are not the right shop window for Government policy, nor should appearing on them be a substitute for debate in Parliament. However, it does seem to be. Increasingly we have Government by soft soap and soft sofa. And increasingly we have government by leaks to the press, well before briefings to Parliament, much to the fury of the House of Commons and its redoubtable Betty Boothroyd. Blair may be a superb showman, but even he cannot fool all of the people all of the time. I wonder why he feels he needs to try.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 05, 1998
