KING BELSHAZZAR of Babylon could not read the writing on the wall, scrawled there by a divine graffiti artist. So Godly Daniel translated: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting,” he reported. The rest is history, and so was Belshazzar: he was promptly slain in battle, his kingdom divided between the Medes and Persians.
Tony Blair read the same writing yesterday, though in rather blunter language. He could read it in his humiliating defeat over the terror laws, but it could also be read in other, smaller ways: in the tense brawl between MPs of his own party, in the undisguised irritation of Gordon Brown, in the mood of reprisal in the Commons and in the rueful headshake of the Prime Minister himself.
Turning points are a convenient way to compartmentalise and simplify the past, symbolic instants that can be made to carry the weight of wider historical significance. But when historians assess Blair’s career, Wednesday’s events will be seen as pivotal, the tipping point that marked the start of the last act.
Every regime has a watershed moment, when power slips away. For King Lear it comes when the fool mocks him. “Dost thou call me fool, boy?” he wonders.
“All thy other titles thou hast given away,” the Fool replies. “That thou was born with.” Suddenly Lear is vulnerable, human and doomed.
Some kings and princes do not see the writing on the wall, though it be written in letters evident to all. Louis XVI was out duck hunting when word arrived that a huge and angry crowd of women was marching on Versailles, demanding bread. The king decided to carry on hunting. It was left to Marie Antoinette to wonder, apocryphally, why the women didn’t eat brioche instead. By that point, of course, she was already toast.
Did Margaret Thatcher see the assassins approaching 15 years ago? The shocked, taut expression on her face, as Geoffrey Howe’s well-worded dagger was inserted, suggested she did not, even though the signs, with hindsight, were everywhere. Richard Nixon once remarked that “a man is not finished when he is defeated; he is defeated when he quits”. But most powerful people (including Nixon) are defeated long before they depart, making the slow and halting demise of the lame duck one of the least attractive rituals in politics.
For months after he was plainly washed up as Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith averted his eyes from the writing on the wall, to the point where one colleague wondered whether he was “murally dyslexic”.
Romania’s Nicolae Ceaucescu did not see the end, even when the gun was pointed at him. His tipping point had come a few days earlier, when he stood on a balcony haranguing a crowd, to be met with a murmur of mockery that steadily built to a jeer. The look of irritable bewilderment on his face, as he turned to his aides to demand an explanation, stands as a defining image of power undermined.
Some 18 months ago John Prescott remarked “when plates appear to be moving, everyone positions themselves for it”. New Labour’s powerbrokers had been positioning themselves for the succession far earlier than that, but until this week the moment of truth was held off, largely by the force of Blair’s own political personality. He had declared his intention to leave, but his every action proclaimed his unwillingness to surrender his kingdom, however aggressively the Medes and Persians might circle.
It is a function of political power that those who hold it seldom realise when it has ebbed; the greater the power, the greater the blindness. Jumping before being pushed is a step too far for all but the most clear-sighted, and while all politicians insist they will quit when ahead, few do so. In 1967 Fidel Castro declared: “I believe that all of us ought to retire relatively young.” Today he is 79. The extraordinary emotive punch of Downfall, the German film depicting Hitler’s last days, comes from its depiction of a despot clinging to his mad self-belief, watching history overtake him with a mixture of rage, denial and self-pity.
Saddam Hussein was widely ridiculed for the gung-ho pronouncements of his press officer, still predicting victory as the missiles rained on Baghdad, but he was only doing what the tyrant, wilfully blind to truth, has always done. The end for Saddam came, not with the toppling of his statue but during a televised walkabout soon after the war started. He strode around in battle fatigues for the camera; a dutiful crowd cheered and clustered, but their hearts were not in it; on the edge of the crowd, two boys sniggered, shattering the aura of menace. Shortly before the reel ended, and Saddam vanished back into his bunker, he muttered something to an aide: that was his Ceaucescu moment. It was over, and he knew it.
Blair enjoys power (few modern leaders have relished it more) but he is no tyrant. All week he has scrapped and cajoled, losing his temper and admonishing journalists, flatly refusing to compromise or amend. He put on a bravura performance to the Parliamentary Labour Party, and his display at the dispatch box was as ferocious as ever. But by deliberately framing the Bill as a test of his own strength, his weakness has been dangerously exposed as never before. Frank Dobson yesterday quoted Shakespeare, darkly: “Fear no more the frown of the great.”
Defeat came with the traditional sotto voce mutter from an aide (“Thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting”). Blair’s shake of the head, tired and regretful more than angry, suggested a man who knows it is over, that the magic of invincibility has gone.
“Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing”; that phrase was uttered as Blair’s declaration of war; today it has the ring of an epitaph, the writing on the wall. As Blair left the chamber, I spotted an unmistakable smirk on the face of a Labour backbencher. Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Join the Debate
Send your e-mails via www.timesonline.co.uk/debate
