POLITICS: Tone deaf
Tory hysteria about the PM
There’s a clear choice to be made in this conflict, and the time to choose is now. It’s a more serious choice than Iraq or America, or Gordon or Tony Blair, or even than Hugh Cecil or John Hayes. It’s time to pick as between ERO and our fading rival, The Spectator. Already this week we’ve panicked them into an unseemly redesign, but more embarrassingly still, inside the paper they’ve become positively unbalanced. How best in modern circumstances can one tell if a Conservative has lost his head? Very simply — if you hear the opinion that ‘Tony Blair’s in big trouble’, then you know it’s time for the headlock, spongy rag and bottle of chloroform. Over in Doughty Street, Peter Oborne has come to just this conclusion about the Prime Minister, and we need to knock this sort of thing on the head, before anyone gets hurt. So to stop the ardent champions of Prime Minister Duncan Smith from getting over-excited and spilling their Ribena: Tony Blair is not about to stop being Prime Minister, and no responsible Tory policy should be based upon that fantastic possibility.
Peter Oborne’s article is choc-a-bloc with startling claims and observations (Clare Short being ‘formidable’ being especially rank nonsense), and quite insistently silly in contending that Jacques Chirac is acting as he is become of some fiendish masterplan by which French diplomacy ends up, as its cardinal goal, upending Mr Blair. There’s even some half-remembered talk of ‘Bretton Woods’ and ‘Yalta’, but somehow in connection to, of all things, Europe’s post-war security structure. But what it’s really all about is the argument that ‘without that second [UN] resolution Tony Blair can’t lead the Labour party to war’. Which is balls from beginning to end.
Let’s go through this as quickly as we can: very, very soon Britain will be at pseudo-war in Iraq. There will be nothing pseudish about it for Iraqi civilians, nor for British servicemen actually employed in the fighting (which will be a small proportion of the total indeed, and will depend on such honours as the US high command are consent to grant them), but a war? Neither legally (you’ll wait a long time for any declaration from our side), nor in the sense of being, a conflict we have to fight, and that the fighting of will be contested and close and, well, war-like. This is war a la mode, and that means that unless we are very unlucky, we will suffer more causalities at the hands of the Americans than we will at those of the Iraqis. This war will break out before any unnecessary chit chat in Parliament. What then? At the heart of the doomsday line being peddled by people like Peter Oborne is the idea that there will, once the fighting starts, be a contentious vote in the House of Commons. This division will attract dangerously high levels of support for the antiwar lobby from inside the parliamentary Labour party, and that this will be near as damn it curtains for the PM. Except that it won’t be.
Even in the truly remarkable circumstance that such a division is called during the relatively brief period of a hot war (and anything under two months will simply whizz by), it won’t break Blairite Labour in two. It takes too great a volume of credulous Tory partisanship to think that not merely are there sufficient anti-national Labour MPs to get us to a decent score of rebels, but that this is a seriously stupid party. Anti-British Labour MPs may well of course be, but only 40 or so out of 400 are quite bold, bumptious or bizarre enough to admit to that in public, and that’s all any such vote in the House of Commons will garner for anti-Blairism. As the 1997 parliament showed on an abundant number of occasions, this particular 40 was always gettable, for each and very vote against the New Labour project. Should it happen during a war, should there be an opportunity, all it will do, by being such a falling away from the safe Labour rebellion of a fortnight ago, is strengthen the relative standing of the Prime Minister. That the rebellion was ‘safe’ was precisely because, with Mr Blair having the insulation of Tory votes, he was never in any doubt of securing a majority. In that sense the Duncan Smith line of unashamed pro-Blairism qua his pro-Americanism flushed out the maximal Labour rebellion possible, but it was essentially a soft revolt. When a serious political squeeze comes back on the government, most of the rebels will return home for any consequential vote. That future rebellions on this subject now come close to having this flashing red light status, and hence will instil discipline as outlined above, is exactly because the supposed outcome of the last one (‘Blair’s future on the line’ & etc) was hyped to such an inordinate and unrealistic degree.
We don’t need to be too Soviet to ask, ‘Who? Whom?’ of any Labour revolt. For, as we’ve all been told often enough by now, if there were a substantial revolt, the Leader-toppling nature of it would be fully apparent to anyone taking part in it, thus the question would become: who would this inevitable Labour leadership election be for? Gordon Brown knows full well that he is not going to stroll into Number Ten, at the head of a Tankie faction who, almost to a man, have a more engaged hatred for him than they ever did for the alien, and hence unapostate, Tony Blair. Where Tories regarding this from the outside are apt to get carried away is to begin to start asserting the ‘massive unpopularity’ of Tony Blair that this coming war is meant to have engendered. Is Tony Blair unpopular, let alone, massively so? Not in any useful way, which is to say, what we would give for his ‘unpopularity’! No one who thinks on what a Prime Ministerial abscess actually amounts to (and all that takes is memory of either John Major’s final four years, or Margaret Thatcher’s final three, which had the added inconvenience of hate being larded into the mix) can seriously say that Tony Blair is an unpopular Prime Minister. The Government he heads is doing an unlovely thing, but the man himself still has precious few negatives of the sort previous Prime Ministers have all acquired in their terminal phase in office.
Perhaps the biggest problem for Tory dreams of separating Tony Blair from his seals of office — and this would assuredly be a desirable outcome, given that very popularity just alluded to — is that the sudden, heady chance is predicated on the mob and its attitude to fighting. The public doesn’t like this coming conflict, which is so implausibly in the national interest. Yet when the fighting starts, the odds are that they’ll incline to ‘getting the job done’ — Kosovo for example was not a war in advance beloved of the opinion polls, but once we got stuck in, the electorate knuckled under and put up with it. And that leads us to our next discovery: this war isn’t going to last very long, and when it’s over, just like every other aspect of foreign policy there’s ever been, it’s not going to have that much of a sustained impact on domestic electoral politics. Unless, obviously, the whole thing goes tits up — and even then, well, what then? If we ‘lose’ South London, or whatever demon preoccupies pro-war types, it would be a brave pundit who declared that this would pacify the British people. Indeed, if something happened that proved there was in truth a point to this war, it’s hard to think of anything more likely to increase popular support for Blairite bellicosity.
It’s by no means impossible, much as Labour never paid for its fervent support for ERM entry, whilst we were crucified for our lukewarm and divided backing, that a Tory party more keen on war than the Government would gain from a war that went horribly wrong, but then again, you could see why they wouldn’t. As we’ll be judged soon enough for our vatic utterances, allow me to range a few of my own against those of Mr Oborne. The Spectator’s political editor believes that:
A large ministerial rebellion, with many resignations, can be guaranteed in the event of a war without a second [sic] resolution . . . It is possible to predict with some confidence that 150 or more Labour MPs would vote against the war, with others abstaining.
Quite the reverse: there will not be a vote before war, and when a vote finally does come, those rebelling against Tony Blair’s lead will be dramatically down on that famed but irrelevant 122. Further, there will not be a ‘second’ or subsequent UN resolution of any significance before we with the US attack Iraq, and this is already becoming the self-evident inconsequentiality it always was. To repeat, this — i.e. another UN resolution — won’t happen, and it won’t (in terms of British politics) matter that it doesn’t happen.
Raving about milord Ancram and Mr Duncan Smith being in a war cabinet should, as well as warning us off seconds of whatever Peter Oborne is having, remind us more painfully than anything else of the shockingly shoddy matériel available to the Tory frontbench. That, dear God, one day we will again have to fill a government. Above all other reasons, Tony Blair will survive in office because the alternative is manifestly unfit to govern.
Kit Kildare, March 13, 2003 07:18 PM