Cuprinol diva pulls out the old theatrics
THE muzzle was more prominent, as happens with age, but this was still the ham-thespian Blair of old: Angular frown lines, two hooking eyebrows, a slightly crossed, begging-spaniel gaze to the cameras as he declared his ‘mission’ to overturn the EU referendum result.
Interesting word, ‘mission’. Did he mean it in the military or evangelising sense? Does Temperance League Tony intend, with hosannas and tambourine-bashing, to convert us to Brussels federalism?
Yesterday morning’s speech was delivered at the City offices of Bloomberg, where four years ago David Cameron promised to give voters the say on Europe.
Yesterday’s event was arranged by the Remain campaign under its new badge, Open Britain. Privately-invited onlookers included Cherie Blair, Anji Hunter (wife of Sky TV’s Adam Boulton), former Tory health secretary Stephen Dorrell and Blairite Labour MPs Pat McFadden, Heidi Alexander and Siobhain McDonagh.
Their exiled Dauphin delivered his text with the staccato riffs and cheesy pauses first sold to us in the early 1990s. He was as bronzed as a modern-day Cuprinol man, with a touch of Juanles-Pins tennis coach round the leathery dewlaps.
There were furtive downward glances – deliciously bogus hesitation – before each sly little outrage slipped out its burrow.
He did not intend to be rude about Theresa May – but proceeded to slag her off at length. The voters had ‘no widespread appetite’ to revisit the Brexit debate – but he wanted a second referendum all the same. This was such a rounded speech that it contained its own naked contradictions.
He threw himself into the fray almost with a choking sob – ‘OK, gonna go straight into it’. There was not even time for an adoring Mandelson to grasp his slender ankle shrieking: ‘Don’t do it, Tony, they’re not worth it.’
Mr Blair was a little breathless, as though keen to show us how brave he was – the only person left with principles! ‘I don’t know if we can succeed,’ he gasped. In a Tintin book this would have been accompanied by three droplets of sweat jumping off his brow.
Fading divas retain their theatricality. It’s the notes that go wrong. Hundreds of thousands of today’s voters were not even born when this man won his first general election. The Blair era was a different world. How odd to think that this man once understood the power of the new.
Soon we had the customary Blair moan about the Right-wing Press and its ‘cartel’.
Darn it. Who told him we Fleet Street political sketchwriters regularly have tea and sticky buns together to carve up the adjectives and metaphors?
The clout of the Right-wing Press – which liberals always like to say is shrivelling – may be slight compared to the suggestive powers of the BBC. Its live coverage of Mr Blair’s speech was accompanied by a side-box with a swirling Union Flag. Trying to nudge us to see Blair as patriotic?
HE patronised Mrs May, placing heavy emphasis on ‘I’ as he said ‘I know how demanding the job of leadership is’. She was offering ‘Government by oneoff plebiscite’. And now, er, he wants another such plebiscite.
His biggest rehearsed gulp came before he attacked Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, saying ‘the debilitation of Labour is the facilitator of Brexit’. Too many syllables in that soundbite.
As he spoke of the need for a new ‘movement’ it almost felt as though he was launching a rival political party, as Roy Jenkins and David Owen and Shirley Williams and that bloke no one remembers did in Limehouse in 1981.
The May Government was ‘mono-purpose’, and ‘obsessed with Brexit’, he said, right eye not quite twitching.
His pronunciation of ‘ideologue’ was unusual, being more ‘idi’ at the start than ‘idea’. And more than once he said politics had become ‘surreal’.
When a multi-millionaire PR man for foreign dictators comes hectoring us about the result of the biggest election our country has held, and does so in the name of liberal democracy, surreal is certainly one description. Bonkers, selfdelusional egomania is another.