Eminentoes / Labour's Sure Thling
Reid, Stuart
Labour's Sure Thing by Stuart Reid Only a fool (or knave) would predict that Tony Blair will be the next prime minister of Great Britain. The general election is at least two years away, and as...
...If Britain had been at war in the sixties, Blair would have registered for the draft...
...you won't hear either man say a word against renewal, opportunity, responsibility, and the politics of meaning...
...A poll published three days after his election showed that he was ahead of Major in areas where the Tories traditionally lead: for example, on government spending (by 20 points), handling of the economy (22 points), crime (24), and taxes (29...
...Both are lawyers and are married to lawyers...
...And why is he the best hope the Labour Party has had since Clement Attlee ran (and won) against Churchill in 1945...
...At any rate, he has not had a drink since...
...He is known also as "Tony Blur"—on account of his apparent unwillingness to commit himself to hard policies...
...After fifteen years, the country has had enough of the Tories...
...John Gray, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a former hard-line Thatcherite, has urged Tories to vote Labour, on the grounds that it is the conservative thing to do...
...N aturally, Blair is not to everyone's taste...
...For as well as being in possession of the high ground—the ground occupied by the Volvo-owning middle classes—he has a secret weapon: boredom...
...Stuart Reid is assistant features editor at the London Sunday Telegraph...
...Blair's family background is a tad less conventional than Major's...
...10 Downing Street...
...All this is anathema to the Old Right, of course...
...Blair will no doubt get on well with Clinton when eventually the two men meet, but then Blair is the sort who would get on equally well with Bob Dole, Phil Gramm, Jerry Brown, even Lyndon LaRouche...
...He enjoys a glass, but in moderation, and at 41, he looks good on it...
...Socialism has been rejected, but so has the managerial revolution...
...As Shadow Home Secretary he promised to be "tough on crime—and tough on the causes of crime...
...Gray's revisionist views have caused a stir in political circles here...
...The times they are a-changing, but this time it is the mothers and fathers throughout the land who are calling the shots...
...Blair pere was brought up by William Blair, a Clydebank shipyard rigger, and his wife...
...The Tory reforms of the National Health Service, for example—in particular the creation of an "internal market" with thousands of new bureaucrats—are deeply unpopular, not least with Conservative voters in the Home Counties...
...He joined the Army in World War II as a private and left as a major...
...He was a bright boy, and a good soldier...
...In July he expressed his misgivings about single mothers, and said it was okay to be monogamous...
...The middle classes, who, except for a liberal fringe, supported the Great She-Elephant during the 1980s, are now backing Blair...
...Blair was the son of a couple of vaudeville artists, Charles Parsons (a.k.a...
...This gave the Tories a nasty fright, since it reassured the bleeding hearts without entirely alienating the "hangers and bashers...
...To the left he is simply the most right-wing, market-friendly leader the Labour Party has ever had...
...Blair's father is one thing...
...Booth, star of the 1960s social comedy "Till Death Us Do Part" (on which "All in the Family" was based), is prepared to share his thoughts with the press...
...er, in Britain . . . again...
...That is why Blair, who was elected leader of the opposition Labour Party in July, will be the next prime minister...
...The old orthodoxies of left and right have lost their pulling power...
...He wore his hair long and played in a rock band called the Ugly Rumours...
...He seems to have been temperate all his life, though at school (Fettes, the Eton of Scotland) and at Oxford he was a statutory rebel...
...But Blair is not about to make a role model of a man widely regarded in Britain as either a crook or a clown, or both...
...He can't lose...
...Professional folk are looking for the quiet life, for balance and perspective...
...It is hard to imagine Blair pulling that sort of stunt, even if he lost the keys to No...
...He has yet to say anything compromising or more than usually embarrassing, but editors live in hope...
...His delicate good looks have earned him the nickname "Bambi...
...Even readers of the Daily Telegraph—by tradition, the "Torygraph"—are abandoning the One True Faith...
...There is no Paula Jones in his closet, no Whitewater, no Dan Lasater...
...extremism in the defense of idealism is out...
...He was thus a "ranker," an honorary gentleman...
...Thatcher's government was returned for its second term...
...S o who is Tony Blair...
...In fact, he was a pragmatist, who believed that Labour had to ditch its socialist baggage if it was ever again to form a government...
...A letter writer to Private Eye pointed out that "Tony Blair MP" is an anagram of "I'm Tory Plan B." Blair, of course, is stealing the opposition's clothes, much as Clinton did in 1992...
...In a study published by the Social Market Foundation, he argues that Mrs...
...Support for the Conservative Party among Telegraph readers dropped from 70 percent in the second quarter of 1992 to 50 percent in the second quarter of this year, while support for Labour rose from 12 to 23 percent...
...The new Labour leader is going to have to be nimble, especially when he tries to explain how he will deliver better health care, better education and better policing without at the same time indulging in Labour's old "tax and spend" habits...
...yet the Thatcherite "revolutionary defeatist tendency" is covertly campaigning for a Labour victory...
...Much of Blair's energy will therefore be devoted to selling moderate policies to his own immoderate followers...
...Cherie, like many Liverpool Catholics, was Labour through and through...
...Privately, furthermore, Bambi (three children) and Slick Willy (one) are very different animals...
...He keeps his own counsel...
...He says he is left of center, but don't you believe it, or him...
...Blair himself has cordial relations with the Clinton administration, not least with Paul Begala and Mandy Grunwald...
...62 The American Spectator October 1994 Blair was not political at university, but he did fall under the spell of an Australian minister, Peter Thomson, who converted him to a form of social Christianity...
...by 1996 Armageddon--or worse—may be upon us...
...Where is he coming from...
...Bambi has good reason to smile, but there is hard and dirty work ahead...
...One term of Labour, they figure, and it will be morning in...
...Blair and Clinton talk the same language...
...Here is how Gray makes the case for Blair: The paradoxical likelihood is that—in Britain at any rate—the task of conserving, perhaps in altered forms, the best elements in our national inheritance will pass to parties which presently think of themselves as being on the Left...
...No wonder he smiles a lot...
...After the war he qualified as a lawyer and is today chairman of the Shrewsbury industrial tribunal...
...His is slap-dab in the middle, is a paleo-centrist, a conviction moderate...
...At the same time, the anti-labor mood of the eighties is now so diluted that during this summer's rail-strike a majority of the public sided with the strikers...
...As the increase in support for Labour among Telegraph readers indicates, some conservatives have a genuine liking for Blair...
...his father-in-law, Tony Booth, quite another...
...From the start Blair was a modernizer, which is to say a right-winger...
...He will be more inclined to look to Europe, however, than to America...
...The bumbling post-Thatcherite Conservative government of John Major is doomed...
...If supposed conservatives succumb to the pseudo radicalism of free-market ideology, then genuine conservatives have no option but to become true radicals...
...If he had smoked dope, he would have inhaled...
...That seems to have been his rock-bottom...
...This means that the United States could not automatically rely on Blair in some future Gulf War...
...As the far-left MP Ken Livingstone has observed, Labour could win the next election "even with the corpse of Kim Il-Sung as our leader...
...He will fail, and there will be much foot stomping and door slamming at Labour Party headquarters, but Blair will still win the election...
...He was elected to Parliament in 1983, when Mrs...
...His feet boiled in his boots...
...Much of what he says—at least on free trade—echoes the thoughts of that other revisionist conservative Sir James Goldsmith...
...Thatcher's "paleoliberalism" has destroyed true conservatism, and that the intellectual hegemony of the right is over...
...The logic of Blair's foreign policy position—which resembles that of Helmut Kohl and the other continental conservatives—is that war ought to be waged by Brussels, not by the individual members of the Union...
...He endorsed (and has persuaded the Labour Party to endorse) many of Margaret Thatcher's labor reforms—for example, the outlawing of the closed shop...
...On November 17, 1979, finding himself locked out of his girlfriend's flat, he attempted to gain entry by climbing onto a stack of kerosene drums and crawling through a window...
...One of the drums exploded, and Booth burst into flames...
...Everything's going his way...
...Less than a month after his election, Labour was 33 points ahead of the Conservative Party...
...Booth is a Liverpool Irish Catholic (like the late John Lennon), and was something of a swinger and a boozer until his luck ran out...
...The defeatists reason that a Blair government would force the Conservatives to dump Major and to unite behind the robust policies of the eighties...
...He is a solid citizen, a true-blue Conservative...
...Of course, many Labourites want Labour to tax and spend...
...Let us now complicate matters...
...That's about the best Blair's enemies can do...
...He is the first leader of the Labour Party wholeheartedly to endorse what is now called the European Union...
...The prime minister's father was a mere trapeze artist...
...Jimmy Lynton) and Cecilia Ridgeway, who were not married when he was born...
...Conservative Central Office began to sweat blood...
...Once the honeymoon is over the public will begin to notice that for all his charm and moral purpose, Blair is just another pol...
...It was not until he met his future wife, Cherie Booth, in the early seventies—they were student lawyers together—that he began to take an interest in politics...
...His enemies on the right have sought to blacken his name by (1) accusing him of being "nice" (like Major) and (2) by insisting that he is a pal of Bill Clinton (of which and of whom more later...
...The Great British electorate is experimenting with a new political position, the center...
...This has not escaped the notice of Rupert Murdoch, the Great Satan himself, who has indicated that he may put his weight behind the new Labour leader...
...The story goes that Sir Edward du Cann, a Thatcherite Tory, thought that he was a new Tory MP and warmly welcomed him to the Commons...
...In June he told the Financial Times: "We want a dynamic market economy," and soon after his elevation he was being courted, indeed heavily petted, by the City of London...
...Under her influence, Blair joined the Labour Party in 1975...
...All the same, Tony Blair will be the next prime minister of Great Britain...
...He is the natural candidate of the center...
...The general election is at least two years away, and as Harold Wilson observed, a week is a long time in politics...
...indeed, he is the first potential prime minister to do so...
...0 The American Spectator October 1994 63...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
