Just a year after Labour came to power, I wrote a column about Tony Blair’s inner age. If William Hague was, at heart, a 62-year-old, I argued, the Labour leader was perenially 19. I haven’t revised my view, and it is this perpetual adolescent streak inside the Prime Minister that explains many of the difficulties in which he has found himself.
Adolescents tend to be both wildly idealistic and to have grandiose delusions about their own power. All you need is love is a typically adolescent anthem in its unrealistic idealism and its grandiose notion that if only we all hugged each other, the world’s problems would be solved.
Compare this with Blair’s idealistic ambitions. He is not content with trying to tackle child poverty; Labour must “eradicate” it. He thinks he can “heal” Africa and “defeat” climate change. And, of course, in the early days, he insisted that Labour was going to be not just marginally better than the tarnished Tories, but “whiter than white”.
These are now the hooks on which he has hanged himself. In the past few weeks, the newspapers have been full of stories about Labour’s failure to meet targets on child poverty and teenage pregnancies. The Daily Telegraph said that the campaign to cut teenage pregnancies has been “an embarrassing failure”. The missing of targets on child poverty was “devastating”, said Save the Children.
But what is the real story? Actually, 700,000 children have been lifted out of relative poverty since 1997, not a bad achievement in terms of happier lives. The target was to cut the number of poor children by 25 per cent; the outcome was either 23 per cent or 17 per cent, depending on whether you include housing costs. Had the target been marginally lower, the papers and pressure groups would now be forced to celebrate Labour’s success, with exactly the same number of children hoisted out of poverty.
And teenage pregnancies? The target was to cut the number by 15 per cent. For under-16s, this was more than met. But for under-18s, it was 11 per cent. Still, this is hardly an embarrassing failure, is it? If the Government had set a 10 per cent target, it would have been a roaring success.
You could argue that it is the very ambition of the targets that is forcing government agencies to improve their performance. That may be true. But it is still the case that Blair’s Government, by setting grandiose targets, has brought unnecessary “failure” upon itself.
And how much worse is this in the case of the peerages scandal. Blair was determined to make us believe that Labour would govern quite differently from the Tories. After he was caught out granting a favour to Bernie Ecclestone, a major donor, he protested: “There’s been a desire to say right from the word go: ‘They’re all the same. The Tories were sleazy, Labour’s not different.’ I don’t believe we’re like that at all. I said I would deliver something different and I can do it.”
But he hasn’t. And it is not as if this month’s events were out of his control. We are not talking about the wayward sexual behaviour of a minister or the casual corruption of a backbencher. It was Blair himself who permitted these anonymous loans and Blair who kept the knowledge of them from his own funding committee, the party’s national executive committee and the House of Lords appointments committee.
Does he still believe he is different? He probably does. He would cite the fact that it was he who brought in new rules to make political funding more transparent. All credit to him. Yet it was also he who then exploited the loophole that allowed lenders to remain anonymous. All discredit to him.
Adolescents typically house two extremes inside themselves. As the psychoanalyst Anna Freud wrote, they are “excessively egoistic, regarding themselves as the centre of the universe and the sole object of interest and yet . . . capable of so much self-sacrifice and devotion. They are selfish and materially-minded and at the same time full of lofty idealism”.
There are also two personalities inside Blair, and he is willing to acknowledge only one of them. He sees himself as the idealistic, Superman figure who is whiter than white, can eradicate poverty, bring peace to the Middle East, heal Africa and conquer terrorism. He chooses not to notice the existence of the other Blair, who is just like other politicians: the Everyman rather than the Superman, the expedient rather than the principled.
No wonder Blair is fascinated by Pontius Pilate. As he once confessed to Matthew d’Ancona, he views Pilate as “the archetypal politician, caught on the horns of an age-old political dilemma . . . Should we do what appears principled or what is politically expedient?”
A good question.
Honours devalued by their peers
I should declare an interest here. My great-grandfather, Rudolf Sieghart, was caught up in a cash-for-peerages scandal before the First World War. When he worked as the Austrian equivalent of the Cabinet Secretary he used to sell peerages and use the money to bribe journalists to write flattering stories about the government. I don’t think the latter has been tried here, but it’s probably only a matter of time.
When, at the end of his political career, Rudolf was offered a peerage, he turned it down on the basis that the bauble was tainted and he would rather have a more distinguished decoration — the equivalent of the Order of Merit. (Which is why my brother is not called Baron von Sieghart.)
So I sympathise with Labour peers who have been going round complaining that their title has been devalued. “Honestly,” they’ve been telling anyone who will listen, “I didn’t pay anything for this.”
Taxing favours
Government ministers are so depressed at the moment. Ask them how they are, and they sigh loudly. For a start, they are fed up with being asked on to TV and radio programmes, only to spend all their time defending a practice they deplore. But there is still room for some gallows humour. This week, one joked to me: “What is really unfair is that not everyone can afford £1 million for a seat in the House of Lords. We need to introduce some real equality of opportunity. How about a peerage tax credit?”
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
