IN THE SPRING of 1993 I sat down to lunch. It took me ten years to digest the contents.
There was nothing wrong with the food, you understand. It was my guest that I spent all that time chewing over. I was director of the Social Market Foundation think-tank and we had asked the Shadow Home Secretary in for a chat. We asked him for dinner, actually, but Tony Blair said that he liked to go home to his family in the evening and would it be all right if he came at lunchtime instead?
I’d gathered a mixed group to join us, but as it so happened most of the guests were Conservative-inclined. So as the conversation ranged over the big issues of the day I was mildly surprised that our Labour visitor seemed to agree with almost everything that was being said. The only time he politely dissented was when someone, a Guardian journalist, began arguing that burglary didn’t matter.
When Mr Blair left, everyone round the table was impressed. I wasn’t. I pointed out that all he’d done was assent to every proposition that had been put to him, only occasionally adding remarks that wouldn’t offend a centre-right gathering. Come off it, how impressive was that? Didn’t he have any views of his own?
And for years that’s what I’d say if anyone asked me what Tony Blair was like. Very pleasant, perhaps a bit vanilla, taller than you’d think, and so anxious to please that he agreed with everybody.
After he’d been Prime Minister for a couple of years my view of the encounter changed slightly. I moved from thinking that the man believed nothing to thinking that he believed everything. Yet believing nothing and believing everything end up being pretty much the same thing, so my shift in view didn’t cost me much sleep.
And then, around about the same time as the invasion of Iraq, a new thought occurred to me, this time a much more disturbing one. Within a year or so I became completely convinced of it. Mr Blair didn’t assent to everything that the lunch group had said because he believed in nothing or everything. He assented because he shared the views of that centre-right group that I’d invited to lunch.
Why am I prattling on about some sandwiches I ate in 1993, when I am in Blackpool to watch the Conservatives choose a leader? Answer: because the question I’ve been wrestling with for all these years is what this week by the seaside is really all about. Last week in Brighton was about Gordon Brown. Blackpool is about Tony Blair.
What, after all, are the Conservative leadership contenders really arguing about? You can’t describe one candidate as a wet and another as a dry. Wets and dries divided over the 1981 Howe Budget, no longer a live issue, funnily enough. And, with Ken Clarke’s surrender, there isn’t a split between Europhiles and Europhobes either. At least, not for the moment. The battle isn’t even over willingness to talk about change, since they all do that. No, the real division in the Conservative Party is over what you think about the Prime Minister. The real division is between Tonies and Phonies.
The bulk of the Conservative Party still thinks of Tony Blair as, in the phrase that Tories used continuously during the 1997 election campaign, Phoney Blair. They think the whole thing, his entire premiership, all his speeches, his basic political position, is an act. Blair believes nothing and he believes everything. His only innovation as a politician has been to copy the popular bits of Conservative policy. It would be madness, argue the Phonies, for the Tory party to allow itself to be diverted by such a man. Soon he will be gone and not long after that forgotten, except perhaps by the writers of textbooks on public relations.
Candidates seen as coming from different wings of the party, Ken Clarke and Liam Fox, are in fact united in the Phoney camp. Both want to offer the party “raw politics” instead of “spin”. And the Phoney/Tony split solves the mystery of the identity of David Davis too. Hard man of the Right or John Major’s loyal follower? Eurosceptic or Maastricht whip? Mr Davis understands that these distinctions don’t matter in the current leadership race. He has become leader of the Phonies. His entire argument is that the Tory party should not try to emulate Tony Blair in any way.
For Tonies, this position will not do. They believe (we believe, because I share this view) that Mr Blair has changed politics fundamentally and that Conservatives have to understand this if they are to regain power. Mr Blair has changed the style of politics, but also the substance. His political position is a real one — he supports a vigorous global free market, reformed public services, tougher policies on law and order and a neoconservative foreign policy. He has found new ways of talking about these ideas that win broad support from Middle England. Pragmatic rather than ideological, responsive rather than unbending, persuasive rather than hectoring, politics will not be the same after Tony Blair.
There are Tonies running for the leadership (David Cameron and Malcolm Rifkind) and plenty in the top echelons of the party — David Willetts, Oliver Letwin, George Osborne, Tim Yeo. Yet this group remains in the minority. The reason? The fear that the moment the Tory party accepts that Tony Blair really means it, there will be nothing left to say.
Yet this fear is baseless. There is plenty that Tonies can say. For reasons that are secret between him and his psychiatrist, Tony Blair decided to campaign for global free markets and public service reform in a coalition with Frank Dobson and Amicus. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t worked out too well. He has achieved only a fraction of his potential. Realising he really means it doesn’t diminish his failure. It simply makes the case for a Conservative alternative stronger by showing that trying to achieve his aims on the Centre Left has proved impossible.
In other words, accepting the truth about Tony Blair wouldn’t be the end of proper opposition. It would be the beginning.
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
