Tony Blair should go down on his knees and thank God for Sir Edward Heath. He owes him everything. So should Margaret Thatcher. So should the crop of Tory leadership contenders limbering up for this autumn’s contest. Successful prime ministers are usually lucky and can teach us little. It is the failures we should study and prize.
Heath failed spectacularly. He was prime minister for barely four years but for 30 he was a suppurating boil of misery and resentment. He embodied the politics of bile. Heath was the Great Lesson. For a third of a century he sat in the House of Commons, hunched and heaving, an almighty sob on the face of history. To his chest was pinned a simple message, “Don’t go here.” Nobody did.
Without Heath there would have been no Thatcher and without Thatcher there could have been no Blair. Without Heath’s awful example the Tory party would not have torn itself apart, nor would Labour after it. He was the necessary sacrifice. Otherwise, British government would have stayed in the same rut as still afflicts France, Germany and Italy — boring and ineffective.
Heath was the last prime minister of the old guard. He was the last to try to reshape post-industrial Britain in terms of what is called the “post-war settlement”, through the institutions of a corporatist welfare state. He did briefly test the waters of Thatcherism when in 1970 he made a stab at fiscal prudence, labour regulation and public service reform. He even declared a “quiet revolution”. Britons were not ready. In 1972 came the crash, the U-turn and in 1974 electoral immolation. Heath had no charismatic capital on which to draw. He and his party were destroyed.
From the ashes roses rose the screaming phoenix, Margaret Thatcher. She declared one mission alone, never to be Ted Heath. She would never repeat 1972. She brushed aside the wall of tradition that separated a prime minister from the voters and told them what she thought of them direct. She studied communication and spin. She altered her voice, her hair, her dress. She went over the head of her party. Loved or loathed, she was known and understood. She was able to ram her message home. “I did not get this far just to do another Ted” became her mantra.
Thatcherism not only transformed Britain, it transformed Labour and thus assured its longevity. Labour learnt there was no going back to the old religion. Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock had to fail to prove it. By 1997 there was no alternative to anything-but-Heath. Modern politics in Britain is about charisma or it is nothing. Only charisma trumps apathy and cynicism.
Come the hour, cometh the man. Blair tore up the constitution of the Labour party. He led the way in abolishing clause 4, bringing in one member, one vote and stripping power from party institutions. He not only rebranded Labour but virtually disbanded it, never again to be a constraint on a Labour prime minister.
He arrived with no political baggage, only the inheritance of the ark of the Thatcher covenant. He adored her and invited her first among former leaders to Downing Street, within a fortnight of taking office. From her he learnt to disregard cabinet and parliament. His closest aides have always been his spin doctors. He was “the project”. Ecce homo.
A brilliant recent essay by the Australian political scientist JH Grainger (published by Societas) assesses Blair as the “ideal leadership type” of the 19th-century pioneer of sociology Max Weber. The prime minister is seen in the mould of charismatic German romanticism, the hero spellbound by his own charm, who places himself above party as “the political wing of the whole British people”. He discards policies and defines himself as a portmanteau of “values”. His talent is at vacuously projecting the argot of the age, “Hey, guys, we’ve a deal, I’ve got conviction, trust me.”
Grainger presents Blair as “chameleonic”, embracing every colour of social democrat, Thatcherite, liberal, socialist, neoconservative, Marxist. His biographers are at a loss to find any thread in the verbal ectoplasm that exudes from Blair’s utterances. His only published work, a vapid Fabian pamphlet on the third way, leaves only a miasma of community, partnership, togetherness, newness, delivery. He is the classic “outsider” with neither hinterland nor destination. Blair constantly claims a “covenant” with the British people but like a good charismatic never says what it is.
Blair is in all senses what Heath was not. He has dispensed not just with Labour but with what passes for a British constitution, a tradition of institutional pluralism and dialogue. Blair does not do dialogue, only a “conversation with the nation”. His infrequent descents from on high to parliament are disdainful question time feints. Communication has become a carefully spun monologue from platforms or television sofas. He is immune from correction since, as Peter Mandelson put it, “he creates his own truth”.
Such a leader is what Grainger calls an “occasionalist”. Most leaders find “events” a tyrannical restraint. To Blair, with no other programme, they are meat and drink, an opportunity to seem active. The death of Diana, foot and mouth, G8, even the latest outbreak of London bombings are history’s passing parade. Each carries Blair forward on a palanquin as embodiment of nation. They boost his poll rating. They require no decision, just that “Tony be Tony ”, the people’s person.
Nothing fazes him. The new European constitution is one week essential for Britain’s future, the next it is cat’s meat. No matter. An event that would have cast Heath into humiliation and despair emerges from Downing Street as Blair’s “historic opportunity to build a newer, stronger Europe”. This is wow politics.
Weber’s ideal leader discards as irrelevant what Attlee called “the mess of centuries”. He is vulnerable, but only to charisma’s occupational disease of hubris. Like Quixote, the leader needs a few foes of impenetrable villainy to emphasise his knightly virtues. Blair has found them in Gordon Brown and Saddam Hussein. Brown is Blair’s spirit of Labour past, old misery guts, a charnel house of past resentments. Brown plays Heath to Blair’s Thatcher.
Iraq serves a similar elevating purpose. It is the classic just war, its cause long forgotten but declared noble by God’s neocon on Earth, Blair. Brown and Iraq exist to make Blair sweat a little. They force him to put on his armour, take up his sword and remark, “Phew, guys, this is tough. Believe me.”
Blair and Thatcher are the apotheosis of not-Heath. Their success shows that in media-mediated politics the selling of personality is critical. The public cannot know a leader but, above all through television, it can be made to think it knows him well enough to establish trust. It craves familiarity. Hence Blair’s exploitation of his family, his “beliefs”, his interplay of doubt and certainty over Iraq.
I still cannot believe that Blair will voluntarily resign. He has shown that Britain’s constitutional emperor has no clothes. He can do what he likes, so long only as he wins elections. Who cares what he promised Brown? Blair has reduced his old friend to a whingeing, charisma-free zone, pleading with comedians to lend him jokes and his wife to make him smile. For Labour to replace Blair with Brown would truly be a Michael Foot moment.
A more immediate crisis faces the Tories. They remain incorrigibly club-bound. At Michael Howard’s bidding they are invited to exclude party members from the final choice of who should be their next leader. In a nutshell, MPs only want someone with whom they themselves are happy to work.
A 21st-century party cannot make itself less democratic and be taken seriously. Tory MPs loathe charisma. They chose Thatcher only on the rebound from Heath. They rejected the three men in a row most likely to command nationwide support: Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo. A party which does that has lost touch with reality.
The historical clock cannot be stopped. Heath is dead. Westminster is dying. Charisma, the selling of a political personality nationwide, is king. The Tories must declare their leadership subject to an open primary, American-style, and go into the political highways and byways to find someone capable of beating Blair at his own game. Like it or loathe it, it’s the only game in town.
