POLITICS: Knock Blair's glasses off
He's not big and he's not clever
The Prime Minister was at his petulant worst last week, when summoned to the House of Commons to explain his botched efforts at constitutional DIY. At times like this, he always resembles the playground skit, the irksome little twerp who likes to poke fun at all around him but, when on the receiving end, covers up his own irritation with mocking laughter. We've all met someone like that at some point, usually before we are six.
The outburst which made the news bulletins went something along the lines of "Nya-naa-ne-nya-naa! Duncan Smith wears women's tights! Duncan Smith wears women's tights!" Perhaps this is not quite verbatim, but I try not to listen too closely when I know that the actual words will be no less puerile. In any case, I want to concentrate on another of Mr Blair's snide remarks, which received rather less coverage before the next morning's broadsheets were published.
On the question of where to go from here with the remnants of our constitutional integrity, the Conservatives, brayed the Prime Minister, were "Outraged Don't Knows". My, how the playground laughed. Pleased with himself at that one, smug little Tony went off to play marbles with Jack (he would have played them with Gordon, but Gordon doesn't like to play with Tony very much and, apart from which, Tony's friend Ali says that Gordon has lost his marbles). Battered and bruised, poor Iain meanwhile retired to the canteen, according to my spies in the catering department, for a very large beaker of orange squash.
As with all puerile utterances, however, the phrase "Outraged Don't Knows" was not clever at all and in fact begs a confident response.
For one thing, it is not so much that those calling the Prime Minister to account from the opposition benches were Outraged Don't Knows as that they were Outraged Didn't Knows. Just a week before this parliamentary clash, they didn't know that Mr Blair was within twenty-four hours of rewriting the constitution on the hoof, just to get out of a short-term difficulty. To this category, with or without the outrage, may be added the Queen, the Civil Service and most, if not all, Labour MPs as well. Indeed, in all probability, the Prime Minister himself didn't know, that previous Wednesday afternoon, through which mangle he was about to feed the judicial system, still hoping at that stage that compromise could be reached with David Blunkett in order to create a Ministry of Justice.
One other Outraged Didn't Know was the far-away Mr Speaker. His outrage at not having known was the very reason Blair was standing there to explain himself before MPs in the first place. One would have thought that even Tony Blair might therefore have approached the occasion with a little deference, with a little recognition of why Parliament, manifest in the Speaker, was at best bewildered by the way in which he could so arbitrarily and arrogantly have dealt with some of the nation's most important arrangements, without consultation, without legislation and without mandate. Even Tony Blair, one could have hoped, might have had just some inkling of contrition for the constitutional shambles to which his appalling haste had led.
Breathtakingly, within this precise context, the Prime Minister sought not to explain or justify such a casual attitude to constitutional matters, but to mock the Conservative Party for eschewing similar negligence.
Clarity of direction is a virtue in politics, which ERO would be the first to recommend. Just occasionally, however, when presented in opposition with unexpected developments which require careful thought in response, it is not a weakness but a strength to say that one has not established the answers just yet. It is, moreover, a peculiarly Tory strength, which the prodigal Blair, perpetually afraid of his roots, knows all too well and which might explain his shrill, raw-nerved performance last week. (This, incidentally, is one of the great overlooked aspects of the Prime Minister's 'barn-storming' display: the man's nerves are shot. If he'd been a mate of 'Smithy's' during the last chukka against the Hun, he'd have been hauled out his crate for some urgent R&R months ago. You wait and see: the final word on this regime will be implosion.)
Previous left-of-centre governments have quickly become tiresome in this country, because the objects of their radicalism have impinged directly on the daily lives and interests of the electorate. In those circumstances, the Conservative Party was invariably brought back out of the drawer like a cozy old jumper. Mr Blair's great good fortune, or the consequence of his genius, depending on one's point of view, has been to concentrate his radical proclivities on things which aren't going to raise many temperatures down the pub. In the earlier years of his premiership, his jibes about full-bottomed wigs and women's tights would have hit the mark: most people would have wondered what the fuss was about and another plank of our constitution would have been dismantled without so much as a dicky-bird, even if it had been handled as cack-handedly as the last fortnight's farce.
Time has moved on, though, and this government's accident-prone reputation is now well established. People aren't any more desperate to keep the Head of the Judiciary in full-bottomed wig and women's tights, but they are more alert to the idea that that is not the main issue. Gradually, but perceptibly, Middle England is reconnecting with the age-old, queasy feeling in its bones that left-wing iconoclasm is alien to it, or, to put it into more suitably lay terms, Labour acts in haste, the nation repents at leisure.
The country has just seen what happens when a government acts with arrogant caprice; it does not want another one to lurch with equal indecency. There is no shame, at such moments, in saying one doesn't know; the only shame is in demonstrating one doesn't have a clue, but one is going to act rashly anyway.
In short, there has never been a more propitious moment to stand up and be Conservative again.
Adrian Muldrew is ERO's political editor; he is presently writing a biography of Robert Carr.
Adrian Muldrew, June 23, 2003 09:04 PM