Last Call: Major Upset
Reid, Stuart
LAST CALL by Stuart Reid Major Upset London I N THE SMALL HOURS OF MAY 2 Labour revelers stood outside Conservative Party headquarters in Westminster and demanded of the tearful secretaries and...
...If the Tories are to regain power, they must again embrace the conservative virtues of moderation, prudence, civility, deference, liberality, and an attachment to tradition, hierarchy, and authority...
...Fifteen years ago he supported unilateral nuclear disarmament...
...The excitement was understandable...
...Soon after he became Labour leader he forced his party to ditch its commitment to public ownership, and is pledged to continue the Thatcherite policy of privatization...
...at times, indeed, he seems anxious to privatize anything that moves (except, perhaps, the Brigade of Guards...
...The clues are contradictory...
...I am going to be a lot more radical in government than many people think...
...All you know for sure with Blair is that he says what his audience wants to hear...
...My guess is, however, that he will alienate left and right—and center—and that within a couple of years he will be the most unpopular prime minister since Thatcher...
...These papers are the voice of the xenophobic right, and have between them 22 million readers...
...From the moment he took over from Thatcher in 1990—at a time when boom had turned to bust and rioters were burning cars and breaking heads in the streets of London—John Major became the target of the Euroskeptics, who feared that he would take Britain into a federal union...
...Well, we can all change our minds...
...In a late April interview in the Observer he said: "I want the left to realize that if we win this election, we will have done so without ceding any ground that cannot be recovered...
...He has promised to improve health, employment, and education—but (watch his lips) without increasing income taxes...
...The former prime minister is to step down as Tory leader, and in the meantime the country has a government that is likely to take Britain into a federal union...
...AT 43, BLAIR IS THE YOUNGEST PRIME MINISTER in almost 200 years...
...When he talked to the Sun in the weeks before the election he did so as an ordinary bloke who likes nothing more than to eat fish and chips and watch soaps on TV with his missus and the kids...
...When two Easters ago he spoke to the Sunday Telegraph as part of his pitch to Middle England, he put himself over as a Christian thinker who reads Kierkegaard and Jung and agonizes over Kant's categorical imperative...
...He says, without irony, that he is at the "radical center" of British politics...
...Like Bill Clinton, Blair has betrayed his traditional constituency on the left for the sake of power, and has achieved office by making the privileged metropolitan elites feel good about themselves...
...Some said they were reminded of the fall of the Berlin Wall, others of the release of Nelson Mandela...
...LAST CALL by Stuart Reid Major Upset London I N THE SMALL HOURS OF MAY 2 Labour revelers stood outside Conservative Party headquarters in Westminster and demanded of the tearful secretaries and Hooray Henries inside, "What does it feel like now, you bastards...
...86 June 1997 • The American Spectator...
...After eighteen years in power, the Tories had suffered their worst defeat since 1906...
...A year later he declared that Margaret Thatcher had "an unchecked and unbalanced mind...
...The Thatcher revolution is over...
...To a degree Labour's triumph was a victory for the Conservative right, because the Conservative right had done much to make the party unelectable...
...WAS HE TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS FIBS...
...The interests of ordinary consumers are being sacrificed on the altar of big business...
...No doubt in leafy, lefty Hampstead the closest historical parallel they could come up with was the liberation of Belsen...
...No WONDER THE NEW PRIME MINISTER IS DISLIKED by the left...
...They are likely to be out of office for at least two terms...
...What they need is another John Major...
...He is admired by Margaret Thatcher and adored by Paul Johnson ("I have learned not just to respect him but to like him and feel very affectionate towards him...
...that's what minds are for...
...What he was saying here, if he was saying anything at all, was that his right-of-center talk had been a tactical ploy, or, to put it less delicately, a fib...
...But is he a moderate radical centrist or an extreme radical centrist...
...Only a fool," I wrote then, "would predict that Tony Blair will be the next prime minister of Great Britain...
...Rupert Murdoch is sufficiently impressed by the man's accommodating ways to have put the weight of the Sun and News of the World behind him...
...After six years of sniping and sneering, after six years of the most spectacular disloyalty in British political history, the skeptics have finally got rid of Major...
...All the same, Tony Blair will be the next prime minister of Great Britain...
...But the mind of Blair is, to put it mildly, subtle...
...In 1986 he said: "Privatization is destroying the idea of public service in Britain...
...You can't be all things to all men...
...Well done, chaps...
...Nice going...
...Other Labourites were less cocky...
...Yet his own roots are in the left...
...THAT DOES NOT MEAN THE TORIES ARE A SHOO-IN for the next election...
...Tony Blair—TB to his friends (and enemies)—won the election with a majority of 179 seats, and by doing so obligingly vindicated the forecast I made in TAS in October 1994...
...HATRED OF EUROPE IS NOT an election winner...
...But the center ground is clearly the ground that suits the nation's mood, and if Blair can deliver better education and welfare services without mining the economy, good luck to him...
Vol. 30 • June 1997 • No. 6
