Letter from London
Carnegie, Marc
LETTER F ROM LONDON by Marc Carnegie You Gotta Have Heart if hate Americans," the man slurred at me in the pub, holding on to my lapels as much for balance as for menacing effect "You've got no...
...The fact that Blair is already showing an appetite for money and sleaze is unlikely to be a problem...
...I'm not an individual," as one MP put it...
...The trouble began when the government announced with much fanfare that it would ban tobacco advertising from all British sport—and then abruptly decided that Formula One motor racing, which is largely dependent on such advertising, would be exempted from the ban...
...Yet there he was, in his first live television interview as prime minister, oozing insincerity, his upper lip just this side of sweaty, denying that the Formula One exemption was a political payoff...
...The postwar solid-backbone generation has moved on, and the wobbly and self-indulgent sixties types have replaced them...
...The people had trusted him then—why shouldn't they trust him now...
...Hmmm...
...He likes to forget there have been 54 prime ministers and more than 2,000 years of British history before him—indeed at times Blair speaks of forging an entirely "New Britain" with the slightly demonic zeal with which others talk about green men in flying saucers or bodies being dragged through Fort Marcy Park...
...That will give him a decade to form the New Britain or, as he has often put it, to re-position Britain as a brand name for the twenty-first century...
...In an effort to bail himself out Blair stood before the House of Commons and said that Labour had asked the Ethics Commissioner what to do about the Ecclestone donation...
...Holiday-makers on their way to the States canceled their trips...
...Gosh, he blushed, he was still the same "pretty straight sort of guy" that had been elected to office but a few months before...
...Noting that he had followed the ethics recommendations to the letter, Blair asked petulantly what more he could reasonably be expected to have done...
...It's not only that we're overpaid, oversexed, and over here —that was the postwar judgment, after all, when our popularity rating was still relatively high...
...It was a highly theatrical appearance—and also came as close as possible to lying without actually lying...
...piece of self-righteousness, not to mention mawkish exhibitionism...
...It was a strange question, especially coming from a man who, as opposition leader, was wildly successful in portraying John Major and the Tories as scions of sleaze...
...He is not terribly keen on seeking the wisdom of his advisers, has quickly done away with members of the press office whose performance has displeased him, and has demanded an In New Britain the stiff upper lip is ancient history...
...And, as is so often the case, Blair's moral high-mindedness is accompanied by a reputation for political ruthlessness...
...But it took the angry reaction in defense of convicted child-killer Louise Woodward to make clear how much the national character had changed...
...Indeed it set me to thinking that the apparent change in the English character is not a change of character at all, but instead merely the passage of time...
...As Tony Blair is fond of telling his electorate, "I am part of the rock 'n' roll generation—the Beatles and colour TV, that's the generation I come from...
...Blair declined to apologize for misleading the House and the British people, and instead claimed to be "hurt and upset" that anyone could be suspicious of his intentions...
...after six months in office, he is a more popular prime minister than Winston Churchill...
...The histrionic protest that followed Woodward's guilty verdict was an unmistakable sign of the latter...
...This identification is obviously a strong selling point...
...As Ecclestone had previously been a Tory supporter, the air was thick with the whiff of a quid pro quo...
...He has a strong mandate from the British people, and seems certain to be at least a two-term prime minister...
...As the Guardian explained, during the national furor over the Louise Woodward trial, the caterpillar pins that Sunil and Deborah Eappen wore in memory of their dead son "reeked] of the kind of mawkish exhibitionism which Europeans have always found repellent in American life...
...Them's fightin' words, as we used to say, and ill-advised ones at that—for these days the English are as big on mawkish exhibitionism as anybody...
...What Blair didn't tell the House of Commons was that the Labour party, while asking for an ethics ruling on the Li million, had actually solicited a second donation from Ecclestone in the interim...
...One pub landlord dumped all his American booze in the trash, and took burgers off his menu...
...Now we're loud, tacky, uncultured, stupid, arrogant, sloppy, and revoltingly sentimental...
...I'm a Labour politician...
...It's little wonder that, as the counterculture generation has in its time assumed the adult leadership of society, life in that society—and in the case of Diana and little Matthew Eappen, even death —has tended more and more to resemble the 1960's: two parts rock concert, one part protest rally...
...A transportation company at Manchester airport banned Americans from its fleet of English-made autos...
...Blair is a darling of the media and celebrity demi-monde, and has a whopping 93 percent approval rating...
...Under his leadership the Labour government has pushed hard on the issues that offer ample opportunity for moral preening and feel-good radicalism—abolishing fox hunting, banning cigarette advertising from sport, lowering the age of consent for homosexual sex— and waffled, or worse, on the far more intractable (and important) problems facing England—the increasing costs of education, longer waits for medical services, an explosion of drug-related violence...
...the important thing for these people is to take pains to show your heart is in the right place...
...Sadly we never had the chance to debate this last proposition—our little chat came to an abrupt end when he fell headfirst onto the bar—but I could see where the guy was coming from...
...In the end Blair came out of the storm without much trouble...
...But then again, as the Observer noted in a wickedly mocking article, Blair "would much rather we abandoned our attachment to the olden days and started observing the idea that Year Zero began on i May" — the date of his own coming to power...
...Given the moral posturing Labour had undertaken about the deadly threat posed by cigarettes, the Ecclestone deal looked bad...
...This wasn't the stiff-upper-lip England that England used to be, and it reminded me eerily of college days, when all sensitive undergraduates were in a state of constant and very morally superior protest...
...LETTER F ROM LONDON by Marc Carnegie You Gotta Have Heart if hate Americans," the man slurred at me in the pub, holding on to my lapels as much for balance as for menacing effect "You've got no history, you've got no culture...and you've got no class...
...Not even the left-wing Guardian, which regularly mocks the royals and knew as much as anyone about her famously bitchy and sometimes sordid behavior, dared paint Diana as anything less than a sanctified angel of the bluebloods...
...There were calls to demolish the American Bar Association's memorial at Runnymede...
...Like his friends Bill and Hillary Clinton, and so many of their generation, Blair is prone to the belief that the whole of society can be reconstituted at will, that time-honored traditions can be abolished merely because it suits the political or moral fashion of the moment...
...First came the weepy throng that descended upon London for Diana's funeral—England's own Million Blonde March —and the accompanying gnashing and wailing MARC CARNEGIE is correspondent-at-large for The American Spectator...
...And a woman in Woodward's home town was assaulted, because she wasn't wearing one of those yellow ribbons...
...Part of that success has grown from a willingness to reinforce his generation's prejudices, and validate its surfeit of moral self-satisfaction...
...His performance was a master-44 His performance was a masterpiece of selfrighteousness and mawkish exhibitionism...
...Then it came out that the very rich head of Formula One, Bernie Ecclestone, had given the Labour Party Li million, and subsequently met with the prime minister before the exemption was announced...
...Or rather, I already knew where he was going: it's impossible to spend more than a few days here without the English telling you, either in the press or in person, how horrible America and the Americans really are...
...People on talk radio were ready to bomb Massachusetts...
...This oil-and-water mix of political machine and high moral aspiration has already landed Blair in the first real crisis of his leadership, to which he responded with self-righteous indignation...
...This revelation plunged the Blair government into a mini-scandal, and the prime minister duly appeared for a live Sunday morning television interview to salvage a worsening situation...
...The remark hit close to home...
...OF} The American Spectator • January 1998 53...
...It subsequently emerged that the junior Labour minister responsible for Blair's policy on tobacco is married to a man who until very recently was a non-executive director of a Formula One company...
...They had been instructed to give the money back, and would do so...
...52 January 1998 • The American Spectator unwavering discipline and obedience from his Labour underlings, the likes of which are not often seen in Western political parties...
...His heart is in the right place, and in New Britain that may be all that matters...
...The beloved princess may have been dead, buther "mourners" repeatedly told television interviewers that the "scene" was "beautiful"—people were camping out, sharing food, "being a part of something very special...
...He looked for all the world like the Tories he had worked so hard to discredit...
...his high popularity ratings barely flickered...
...The legendary British reserve, once as dignified as an old sherry, has degenerated into a not very fine whine...
...and the mood of those who camped out for several days to attend Diana's funeral was not unlike that of a latter-day Woodstock...
...in the newspapers and on television...
Vol. 31 • January 1998 • No. 1
