Letter From London: Tony's Rockin' Guitar
Carnegie, Marc
LETTER FROM LONDON by Marc Carnegie Tony's Rockin' Guitar The best thing about limousine liberalism is always the limousine. Not even three months into Britain's first Labour government in a...
...But the explosion of the "alternative" press (as this magazine has often demonstrated) has exposed their shenanigans and hypocrisies more relentlessly than ever before—with the result that politicians as a class are now about as popular as child molesters...
...Now Deny Irvine, a Labour cabinet minister, is having his Westminster Palace apartment refurbished at a public expense of £65o,000...
...Say that last sentence with the proper tone of breathless juvenile excitement, and you understand something of the psychology of Britain's new prime minister—he is the first world leader who'd really rather be a rock star...
...Since he's got stuck being the elective leader of 58 million people instead, however, the prime minister has stumbled on an ingenious solution to his dilemma: running the government as if he actually were a rock star, with one set of attitudes for his adoring public and quite a different set backstage...
...The cost...
...They seem invariably to be about immigrant transvestites living in public housing who long for the brighter days ahead of racial equality and the end of hatred—and nobody wants to watch them...
...The chief difference is that at some point the rest of us finally saw this fantasy for what it was and put it aside...
...BOY CLINTON FOUR YEARS AGO When President Clinton blew up at my now-famous question about the "zig-zag quality" of his decision-making, I wasn't sure what had set him off, but I knew one thing: the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol had promised me were about to begin...
...About the only part of the culture factory that has received regular nanny-state supervision is England's film industry, which has regularly been given immense infusions of public funds...
...But as Blair seems to understand, bringing the beautiful people into his political sphere means that his government will increasingly be written about by the uncritical entertainment journalists—almost all of whom are already left-wing anyway...
...More than half of all British films are never distributed for general release...
...But Tony Blair (still) plays the electric guitar—the preferred mode of self-expression for teenage boys everywhere...
...Bill Clinton can lay fair claim to have done this first with the BloodworthThomasons, but Blair has made it an art form on his own...
...Furthermore, the ministry's "work" is now to be supplemented by a new "Creative Committee" — a gaggle of celebrity-types including film producer David Puttnam and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines and Virgin Records...
...But even this, as they say down south, is only janglin' change: it ain't foldin' money...
...11 Tories, and without government assistance...
...Unlike their colleagues who cover politics, entertainment journalists don't want to catch their subjects with their pants down...
...The day before this column was written, the leftish newspaper the Independent offered on its op-ed page a slavish piece about the wonderful state of the arts in the Age of Blair...
...Giving the media its own cabinet ministry only further renders his administration critic-proof, and ensures the continuing orgy of adulation...
...Politicians, of course, always have and always will operate in this fashion...
...Recently the rock group Genesis—whose singer Phil Collins oftenbleats about the homeless, the environment, etc...
...He remains effectively answerable to the public, which (at some level) makes the eminently sensible distinction between the moral responsibilities of those who govern and those who merely entertain...
...And after the president patched things up by calling on me for a "follow-up" the next day and jesting about my recent marriage ("You got a honeymoon, and I didn't"), my fifteen minutes were up, except for one thing: the mail continued to pour in for a week or more...
...we grew up...
...We don't mind if you sleep with little boys, Tony, we love your music...
...Not even three months into Britain's first Labour government in a generation—after ousting the Tories by incessantly denouncing them as Fat Cats—the wife of the prime minister was discovered to have had her London hairdresser flown to Denver for the Blairs' summit meeting with Mr...
...Another surefire way to blur the distinction between the celebrities and the pols is to make the celebrities part of the government...
...As Blair himself has already taken to boasting, "Our rock music is taking both Europe and America by storm...
...The reactions fit a predictable pattern: Clinton lovers thought I had behaved outrageously, and Clinton haters thought he had...
...More than £2000...
...62 September 1997 • The American Spectator for multi-day stays in posh hotels to meet with various Labour Party "stars"— just like those radio contests for backstage passes to meet your favorite bands...
...The star-struck prime minister showed up on time...
...Brit Hume "My Fall Into Disabuse" TAS, SEPTEMBER 1993 The American Spectator • September 1997 63...
...Within everyone of my generation," he once said, "there's an aspiring rock singer waiting to get out" This may be true...
...I touched him...
...And because rock stars are not, strictly speaking, accountable to their public, they are free both to live lives of unspeakable depravity and to protect the secrets of those lives to the utmost degree...
...the actor didn't bother to show up at all...
...Politicians and celebs belong in different arenas...
...With his electric guitar plugged in and turned up, this was the kind of life Tony Blair had dreamt of all along...
...but the developments that have made it so—the resurgence of Britain's art, pop music, and fashion design, not to mention the wholly new idea of English cuisine —all came of age under the44 He is the first world leader who would really rather be a rock star...
...And England has surely become a vibrant, "in" place in recent years...
...Bill Clinton has some of this about him, too, though Clinton at a very early age made an unswerving commitment to the pursuit of political power above all else...
...Of course the next millennium will usher itself in whether or not the British people cough up perhaps £5 million to help it along, but that's beside the point: even though no one quite knows what the Dome will be, the new Labour government guarantees that ifs going to be cool...
...Not Blair—he is often photographed twiddling with his Fender Stratocaster and makes no secret of the fact that he knows the chords to "Stairway to Heaven...
...His government has announced that, in the future, citizens would be randomly selected to participate in focus groups, and then whisked away Britain has become a nation of Blairheads...
...He looks like a pop star in real life," shrieked one woman...
...ment is the not especially rockish saxophone...
...and anyway the president's instruMARC CARNEGIE is The American Spectator's correspondent-at-large...
...they want to have their own pants down, too...
...Still, Blair can hope...
...She also called his office repeatedly to remind him: "You mustn't keep Harrison Ford waiting...
...and just opposite, the paper's editorial claimed: "[Blair] may not be as forceful as Thatcher, as heroic as Churchill or as buccaneering as Lloyd George, but there is an almost total absence of ill will towards him in the country that is quite eerie...
...Michael Jackson can (and does) make his employees sign non-disclosure agreements that are legally binding...
...By the next afternoon, there were forty-three messages on my answering machine at the office, and the correspondents' reception desk at ABC News had fielded at least a dozen more...
...I t comes as no surprise, then, that his Millennium Dome scheme includes that sine qua non of the rock concert experience, the laser show...
...The results have been predictable...
...and Mrs...
...But a leopard can't change its spots, and Blair will eventually be seen for the politician he is—a shrewd and skillful politician, but a politician nonetheless—while celebrities, like most tribes, will in the end prefer their own kind...
...He has already insisted on being called simply "Tony" and not "Prime Minister...
...Indeed, Blair seems to be adopting all the cliched trappings of pop celebrity...
...And when Mrs...
...Ford, of course, is currently appearing in a blockbuster movie in which he plays the president of the United States—which is far more glamorous than being a well-known politician worried about balancing the budget and distributing roughly equal amounts of justice and human happiness...
...The calls fell off sharply after the first day or so...
...What all this means is that the more Blair can confuse the public into thinking of him as a rock star instead of as the Fat Cat politician he is, the easier a time he will have of it at io Downing Street So far he is succeeding brilliantly...
...No, the real bucks are being poured into the new prime minister's first monumental self-aggrandizement project: a touchy-feely thing called a "Millennium Dome" that will help usher in the next, er, millennium...
...It hardly needs mentioning that the committee, which is made up almost entirely of arts multimillionaires, will be funded by dipping into the public trough...
...But a Creative Committee of the Department of Culture is about the last thing that British culture needs...
...They are not journalists so much as groupies...
...Blair flew her precious hairdresser all the way to Denver for twice-a-day touch-ups (not for a grand state occasion, after all, but an informal session in which her husband sported an ersatz cowpoke outfit and Clinton wore his extra-wide jumbo jeans), it reminded me that, at the peak of their fame, the five members of the rock group Aerosmith always traveled in five separate limousines — when leaving from the same hotel...
...Given the choice between Helmut Kohl and hard-rock cool, there's no doubt Blair prefers being one of the boys in the band...
...was discovered to have sold off the forest on its Scotland farm for timber, but no one paid very much attention, least of all the music press...
...It is a bedrock idea of the celebrity crowd that any kind of "culture" is good, and you ought to be paying for more of it...
...Any politician thought to have slept with as many children as Michael Jackson is alleged to have done, for that matter, couldn't get elected town crier, let alone remain a revered name in households around the world...
...When New Yorker editor Tina Brown was angling to get her husband named Ambassador to Washington, she held a cocktail party so that Blair could rub elbows with the in crowd...
...Most were from talk-show producers wanting to set up interviews, but there were a lot of messages from viewers who had watched the event live...
...One of his administration's first announcements was that the Department of National Heritage, created by the Tories to boost the tourism industry, would be re-named the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and headed by England's first openly gay cabinet minister—who promptly told the press that he found Blair "attractive...
...That, of course, is how celebrity works...
...In the world of celebrity, nothing succeeds like excess...
...Anyone who's ever worked as a music or entertainment journalist (as I have) can tell you that the profession is almost entirely corrupt...
...Clinton...
...When he recently became the first British prime minister in three decades to campaign for a his party in a by-election, he was greeted with a crush of fans that would have made a minor celebrity jealous...
...It's even gonna have a laser show...
...as an elected official, Tony Blair has no such luxury...
...But rock stars have a far easier go of it in the media...
Vol. 30 • September 1997 • No. 9
