‘Tony Blair clearly thinks the public are a bunch of boneheads’

Iloved Armando Iannucci’s 2006 comedy series Time Trumpet, which lampooned those of the era with fictional flashbacks and talking heads from the year 2035. One of the running jokes was that the former PM Tony Blair had gone mad.

There were shots of him roaming the streets of Baghdad ferreting around in bins and talking to himself and others where a tank was rolling towards him only for him to declare: “I see no tank.”

To be fair to Blair, he never annoyed me much as PM. I had respected his partnership with the US and George Bush and, after reading Observer columnist Nick Cohen’s 2007 book What’s Left, I came to the conclusion that the attempt to indict Blair as a war criminal is a variety of insanity.

As far as I can tell, the greatest crime Blair ever committed was marrying Cherie Booth and then from 1997 forcing her upon the British people and the various international dignitaries and leaders he schmoozed with.

But since leaving office, he has been an almost constant source of irritation, cynically cashing in on his status and advising monsters running the regimes of former Soviet Central Asia.

Now one of his pet projects, the EU, is limping towards a demise made of its own excesses and contradictions, Blair attains to the madness the Time Trumpet writers foresaw. In an interview with Alastair Campbell for GQ magazine, he complains that newspapers were allowed to sway public opinion in last year’s referendum.

First, I don’t recall Blair slapping down news organisations when they were openly supportive of him – especially The Sun – allowing him to win two elections easily and a third narrowly.

Indeed, the Murdoch red top only switched allegiances to David Cameron when it realised the gig was up for Labour. The Sun, you see, attempts to forestall the opinions of its readers.

But after finding himself on the losing side over the EU, Blair changed his tune and laid into the four national newspapers he blames for not getting his own way: The Sun, The Express, The Daily Mail, and The Daily Telegraph.

He told Campbell: “I think their activities in Brexit changed the dynamic of their relationship with politics. This is a decision that changed the whole course of our country’s history.” Yes, that’s why people were offered such a vote, because in a democracy it is the “demos” (common people) who decide how the “kratos” (rule, strength) will be dispensed.

But Blair makes the standard errors in his analysis.

First, he supposes that these four newspapers wield enormous influence when, in fact, they are only read by about 10% of the population.

Television and radio stations – especially the BBC, which was studiously impartial during the referendum campaign – attract a far greater share of the news-consuming public. Second, he clearly thinks the public are a bunch of boneheads devoid of the intelligence to form their own ideas. This is just a rehash of the misanthropic elitist position: we’re clever, you’re not, therefore we know best.

It ignores the fact that the nationals adopt political positions they believe will resonate with their readerships rather than try to dictate them.

At the end of the day, they’re vendors selling a product. If, for example, the Guardian or Independent titles or Mirror suddenly decided to champion Brexit, it would soon enough notice a fall in circulation.

Readers go to their favoured publications to have what they know, think or feel confirmed and articulated. Thus, the fact that the newspapers which took broadly Euphilic positions in the referendum campaign attract fewer readers should be seen as a barometer of public opinion which could not be measured by how people vote when restricted to political parties. If we take the view that the daily papers were 4-3 in favour (not counting The Star and Sport) of Brexit, then that is not an unreasonable reflection of the 52% to 48% referendum result.

So why does Blair – and others – claim that the referendum was an aberration produced by media barons?

It’s because they need to locate a convenient scapegoat to alibi themselves for their own deficiencies and the unpopularity of their stances. David Cameron made similar noises when he suggested that the Daily Mail soften or even reverse its anti-brexit position. If anyone was guilty of trying to fiddle the democratic process, then it was Cameron.

Blair and Cameron cannot compute that people voted to leave because they wanted to and because they cannot recognise that the societal transformation wrought by politicians in the last two decades is not without consequence. The real villains aren’t the media barons or their papers. It’s the people who dared to contradict them and chose another path.