Who's Tony Blair?
Bergonzi, Bernard
Bernard Bergonzi WHO'S TONY BLAIR? Maggie Thatcher in reverse There is a general assumption in Britain that by next spring Tony Blair, leader of the Labour party, will be prime minister. May 1997...
...Smith was a cautious reformer, but his main aim was to keep the party united...
...Smith had made moves to loosen it and Blair continued them...
...when he was first famous, his fawn-like countenance gained him the nickname "Bambi," but this was dropped when it became evident what a tough political animal Blair is...
...Electing a woman leader was extraordinarily risky, but Thatcher boldly seized the opportunity...
...When she became leader in opposition in 1975, she had held only minor cabinet office and had no solid, identifiable body of support in the Conservative party...
...Smith had been against disrupting the party by changing the constitution, but Blair, with characteristic courage, insisted and won the issue on a ballot of the membership...
...He has what all politicians need today, a neat way with sound-bites...
...she is not politically active, but one is inevitably reminded of that other famous pair of lawyers, the Clintons...
...He is much more a left-wing Christian Democrat on the European model than a Socialist or even a Social Democrat...
...Blair is still ready to talk about "socialism" but treats it as a potent myth or metaphor, rather like a radical theologian describing God...
...The luck has been conspicuous in Blair's career...
...There were practical, electoral motives for the change, but his basic motive seems to have been the moral conviction that one shouldn't say things one doesn't believe to be true...
...He is a slim, good-looking man, surprisingly youthful at forty-three...
...He, too, has got to the top from nowhere in particular...
...The new leader was John Smith, a popular, avuncular Scot who had held office in the Labour government of the 1970s...
...But he is a remarkable politician, still young, and, like Margaret Thatcher, he could dominate the parliamentary scene for a long time to come...
...if there were any, the indefatiga-bly malicious British press would certainly have unearthed it by now...
...But his main accomplishment was to persuade the party to remove a clause in its constitution, dating back to 1918, which stated its aim as the public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange...
...After Labour lost the 1992 election, which they had seemed to have a good chance of winning, the leader, Neil Kinnock, a decent but limited Welshman, stepped down...
...the local party needed a new candidate and had all but decided on a former MP of marked left-wing views...
...May 1997 is the latest possible date at which the general election can be held...
...he was another decent man, though a product of the machine politics of the Scottish Labour party...
...If Labour gets in, the result will be greeted with a combination of relief, curiosity, and unease, and the greatest curiosity will be about Tony Blair...
...Nevertheless, Blair was mistrusted by many on the traditional left, especially when, as leader, he made it clear how much he wanted to change and modernize the party...
...But he speaks with a standard English accent, and was educated at a posh Edinburgh "public" (that is, private) school and at Oxford...
...He is a lawyer by profession, and is a sharp debater though not a powerful orator...
...Tony Blair, though, has no hint of scandal in his past life...
...they are currently annoyed with the government, but they are likely to rally round as the election approaches...
...he has written, "I joined the Labour party out of a conviction that individuals prosper in an inclusive and active civil society...
...She had a strong sense of what she wanted to do, which was nothing less than to transform the party and give it a new direction, and to this end she brought immense courage and that indispensable element of political success, luck...
...Like many prominent people in the Labour party, past and present, Blair is of Scottish origin...
...The Left was very committed to this aspiration, as representing the Socialist ideal, but the mainstream of the party found it something of an embarrassment and treated it as obsolete and irrelevant...
...In 1994 he died suddenly of a heart attack...
...His next piece of luck was of the grimmer kind that comes from stepping into a dead man's shoes...
...The close connection with the trade unions was part of its founding tradition, but increasingly unpopular with the voters...
...He is happy to accept competition and the market economy, but in the context of a more humane and responsible society...
...He believes in marriage and the family, wants to help the poor to help themselves, and thinks that rights are accompanied by responsibilities...
...Blair, who was in the Shadow Cabinet as spokesman on home affairs, seized his chance...
...Bernard Bergonzi, recently retired from Warwick University, will be writing an occasional letter from England for Commonweal.Commonweal...
...But Blair persuaded them to see him at the eleventh hour and made such a good impression that they adopted him...
...He will face a bitter and probably dirty struggle during the coming months...
...Nevertheless, as long as the clause was there the opponents of Labour could allege that its ultimate aim was to nationalize everything in sight...
...If elected, Blair will have to fight on two fronts, against the Conservatives in opposition and again the Left in his own party...
...Blair is an impressive but mysterious figure, whose career and character are oddly reminiscent of those of Margaret Thatcher...
...He fought a brilliantly successful campaign and was elected leader by a convincing majority...
...The Conservatives, tired, accident-prone, and divided after seventeen years in office, have been trailing far behind Labour in the opinion polls and losing heavily in local elections...
...How he got his seat in Parliament was the first example of his luck...
...He is a practicing Anglican who is said to play the guitar at services in his local church, and his wife is a Catholic...
...She is a high-powered, highly paid lawyer...
...Blair looks like the probable winner but nothing is certain in politics, and the electorate may still atavistically vote Conservative yet again, whatever their present discontents...
...Blair could be described as a communitarian, to invoke that fashionable, loose term...
...these stances antagonize some on the left as much as his revisionist ideas about the economy...
...Blair has been in Parliament since 1983, sitting for an industrial constituency in the North East of England with a solid Labour majority...
...the Conservative party, however unpopular at the moment, remains an efficient machine dedicated to holding on to power, and most of the national newspapers are pro-Conservative...
...The Labour party has always been a very broad church, ranging from members who would be at home in Clinton's Democratic party to covert (and occasionally overt) Marxists...
Vol. 123 • August 1996 • No. 14
