A return for Tony Blair? That really is my nightmare before Christmas
ANIGHTMARE haunts my dreams, that the Blair Creature will return to rule us again. I very much fear that the country and the Labour Party will soon be ready for this moment. I thought that, if I mentioned it here, now, I might somehow make it less likely. But think about it. Millions of people clearly want to be ruled by some sort of populist strongman who bosses them around for their own good. Covid, which seems to have become a permanent fixture rather than a passing disease, provides a perpetual excuse for such a government.
And there he is, toned, fit, tanned, fantastically rich, nearly 11 years younger than Joe Biden, bored out of his mind delivering speeches to conventions of disinfectant manufacturers, or whatever it is he does, his eyes glowing as vacantly as ever and his silvered locks glinting in whatever spotlight he can attract.
And once again his hour has come. Just as, back in 1997, the electorate went collectively mad and voted for New Labour’s Eurocommunist project because it didn’t understand it, we are once again in a period of mass lunacy.
Instead of being furious at the Government for devastating the economy, crashing the NHS, relaunching inflation, stealing our most basic liberties and all that, we are collectively enraged because they had a few quiet drinks in the office last Christmas. Call the police! And see how this absurd, misdirected fury plays straight into the hands of the people who want to turn us into an authoritarian state, run by them, forever.
The most gripping political event of last week was the Labour Party’s decision to support the Government’s latest Covid measures. If they had voted against them, they could have brought the Government down, which is what oppositions are supposed to do.
But in fact they believe so strongly in the new dictatorship of health that they were ready to save a totally divided Tory Party from itself.
Why? Because they can see that we have entered a new stage of the revolution which has been transforming this country, for the past 60 years, into a multicultural, Green, post-Christian, sexually liberated and egalitarian state in which only one opinion is, in reality, allowed.
Covid, quite unexpectedly, has provided the pretext for so much of what they have long wanted, surveillance, social control, the driving of dissent to the margins of life. For, if dissent can be portrayed as actually dangerous to the health of the people, then why should the people put up with it?
The Tory Party never understood what Blairism was about, and still doesn’t. It only crawled back into office by accepting the whole package of Blair’s social and economic revolution.
Probably the least Blairite premier since Blair retired in 2007 was Gordon Brown. The current Tory attempt at an antidote, Alexander Johnson, mocked Blairism’s policies in opposition and then adopted them in government. Amusing though he may be, he has no real politics of his own, and his command of the Government rested on an authority and an electability he is now busily trying to lose.
Meanwhile, Labour thirst for office but are hamstrung by the poverty of their leaders, the latest one having all the charisma of a wardrobe. Sooner or later it is going to occur to them that they once again need the empty, unprincipled political glam rock star who longs above all for adulation and fame, and whose shimmering fake brilliance conceals the shifty bunch of machine men, spindoctors and manipulators who actually run things.
As before, he can be parachuted into a safe seat at the last moment. As before, he can be propelled into the leadership by smoothie techniques and the BBC.
Are you really sure it couldn’t happen?
I AM glad Australia’s deputy premier, Barnaby Joyce, has joined the campaign against the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the USA, basically for being a journalist. Like me, Mr Joyce does not especially like Mr Assange. But he can see that something repressive and nasty is going on here. Australia’s Labor opposition is also worried. The Guardian has rediscovered its liberal voice, too. A few years hence, I suspect everyone will agree. But the time to say so is now.