Letters from London (47 page)

Mr. Blair is already, and will continue to be, a most practical politician. The scrap, he knows, is over the middle ground (that is why his party elected him), and there is no point fighting over that distant hill, even if it does have a fine view. Someone once said that there was only half an inch of difference between Labour and the Conservatives, yet it was the half inch within which we all live. Mr. Blair is idealistic without being ideological, which naturally makes him an object of suspicion to his left wing. Anthony Howard, who is still awaiting delivery of chipolata sausages, saucily refers to Blair as “Little Boy Blue,” for his rightist leanings. On the other hand, Howard acknowledges the atypical strength of the current leader’s position. He has arrived at his present eminence carrying little baggage and few debts. He owes the unions nothing. He is less of a machine politician than his two predecessors, Kinnock and Smith. “That’s his asset,” says Howard. “He can cut the painter with the past.”

Certainly Mr. Blair offers the Labour Party its likeliest chance since 1979 of a return to power. (And, as a further modernizing footnote, his success would put the first working wife into No. 10.) You would have to be cruel—or Conservative—not to wish him well: few countries benefit from extended periods of single-party rule. Labour is at present comparatively united, the electorate comparatively pissed off with the Tories, and the Tories themselves comparatively rattled. As one unnamed Tory minister brazenly said of Blair, “We still don’t know whether to argue that he has no policies or to argue his policies are bad ones.” For the moment, it is Labour who is setting the agenda and the Tories who are fretfully responding. Thus, no sooner had the words
full employment
been bandied around for the few weeks of the Labour election campaign than the Employment Secretary, David Hunt, addressed a Trades Union Congress meeting and committed the Government to such a policy as well. This was an incredibly conciliatory, or wet, thing for a Tory Minister to do, and suggested
seismic rumblings of panic. It is unlikely to have been a coincidence that a mere fortnight later, in Mr. Major’s Cabinet reshuffle, Mr. Hunt found himself suddenly without employment at Employment.

Blair sees the main danger between now and the general election (which may not come until 1996 or 1997) as “a sense of complacency on the part of the Party.” There are others: that he has longer to run than is ideal, that his face might not seem quite so fresh in a couple of years, that his evangelical language might begin to sound preachy, his talk of crusades and missions a bit too happy-clappy for our jaundiced times. There is also the danger that Labour’s long-term strategy—actively modeled on Mrs. Thatcher’s 1979 game plan—of enunciating principles and general themes rather than detailed, priceable policy may come to seem evasive. And what is there to fear from the Tories? “Their election strategy is no great mystery,” he replies. “They will go for some large-scale tax cut. They will probably back themselves into a fairly anti-European position. And they will throw as much at the Labour Party as it is humanly possible or inhumanly possible to dredge up.”

At Westminster Abbey, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band’s plaintive presence had made a fitting prelude to a service that, like Tony Blair’s manifesto, might have been titled “Change and National Renewal.” There was the reading from the Book of Isaiah (“And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations”). There was the hymn by R. B. Y. Scott which seemed full of Blairist principles (“Bring justice to our land,/that all may dwell secure,/and finely build for days to come/foundations that endure”) and aptly short on policy specifics. There was even the Archbishop of Canterbury quoting Václav Havel: “I am deeply convinced that politics is not essentially a disreputable business, and in so far as it is, it is politicians who have made it so.”

The Archbishop also quoted John Smith’s belief that “politics ought to be a moral activity.” As the Tory Party seems increasingly weary at the center and increasingly sleazy at the edges, as its thinkers and dreamers go yelping off into the reforested landscape babbling
over the return of bears, income tax at 10 percent, and prairie acres covered with exotic crops of lupins, it’s not surprising that Labour is currently in the political and moral ascendancy. Now one publicly avowed Christian has replaced another as leader of the Party. “Cleanse the body of this nation through the glory of the Lord,” sang many if not all of the congregation at Westminster Abbey.

Tony Blair won the leadership with uplifting rhetoric which starred the word
radical;
like his rival candidates, he deliberately invoked the famous year of 1945, when Clement Attlee’s Labour Government instituted a fundamental shift in the national structure. I asked Giles Radice about Mr. Blair’s hot selling line. He replied, “He said something rather clever. He said, ‘I’m not a revisionist, I’m a radical.’ That’s balls, actually. He’s trying to be Harold Wilson. And he needs to be a mixture of Gaitskell and Wilson.” One of the constant fascinations—and rhythmical deceptions—of politics lies in the disparity between the Onward Christian Soldiers rhetoric and the subsequent announcement that, sorry, folks, we can’t afford the lance and the breastplate, and by the way, the horse has been downsized to a mule. The name of Hugh Gaitskell (John Smith’s predecessor as official lost leader and recipient of transferred hope) is safe enough to invoke; that of Harold Wilson—remembered now less for the libertarian legislation of his first years in office than for the pragmatic divagations of his later ones—does not lift the heart. Tony Blair releases optimism in many for his youth, his intelligence, his expressions of idealism, his promise to cleanse, and his electability. He may very well be the British Prime Minister as the century turns. But millenarians would be premature in renting space on mountaintops.

August 1994