Tony Blair: Success or Failure

The Times‘ David Aaronovitch and Matthew Parris go head to head on the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of the Blair years.

David starts off:

it falls to me to make the first moves in this on-page wrestling bout to contest whether the Blair premiership has been a glorious success or ignominious failure. So let me emerge from the unfashionable left-of-centre corner clutching an updated copy of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in which Cyrano anticipates all the insulting epithets that may be or have been hurled at him on account of his unusually large hooter.

To start with a theme, the departing Prime Minister is Bliar, the mendacious, spin-obsessed, manipulating fraudster who lied to take us to war, undermined our independent civil service, took cash from the rich and rewarded them with peerages and favourable decisions, and suborned our politics.

This Blair is also, at best a naive, messianic prating fool when it comes to foreign entanglement, a US poodle, or at worst a war criminal who has done huge damage to international law and world peace.

Matthew reacts:

It is good of you to set out in such a spirited manner the charges against Tony Blair, but I must remind you that your task is not simply to demonstrate familiarity with the complaints, but to answer them. I shall try.

“Bliar, the mendacious, spin-obsessed, manipulating fraudster who lied to take us to war, undermined our independent civil service, took cash from the rich and rewarded them with peerages and favourable decisions, and suborned our politics” you say? You go too far, David. He’s less interesting than that. Mr Blair has cut a smaller, meaner figure. It’s not the big lies but the grubby little half-truths that are so depressing.

“Emphatically not – I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly,” said the Prime Minister to journalists on a plane over China, after Dr Kelly’s suicide. No – not a lie. Not quite. In fact Mr Blair had taken part in a meeting at which it had been decided to let Kelly’s identity “emerge” without ever actually saying his name. What a creep.

To the Iraq war later. As for spin, enough has been said. All politicians spin to some degree. Churchill did. Disraeli did. Thatcher did. We forget the spinning when it has accompanied the achievement of great purposes; and these we remember. It is because Mr Blair’s work has been so unsolid, so bereft of any real sense of direction, that we obsess about the surrounding spin. When the picture’s blank, you do tend to look at the cheap faux-gilt frame.

There is much more, so read all six ‘letters’ and make up your own mind. They do not hold back.

Let me end with Matthew’s (with whom I mostly agree) last words on this matter:

Blairophobes should not by our abuse build Blair up. Beasts have dignity. Ogres do big things. To convey the unsavoury yet flimsy qualities Mr Blair has brought to his political decade, we need a smaller word, a playground word.

It’s “cheat”. Tony Blair leaves, now, like the Cheshire Cat, fading to only a rictus grin, a mocking laugh and a lingering scent of cat’s pee and cologne.