I envy Tony Blair’s biographer. The contradictions of this prime minister’s personality provide material for a fascinating study. One day he plumbs the depths of sleaze. The next he is the global statesman, articulating as nobody else can what should be our hopes and fears in this dangerous world. On those good days he outclasses by a distance his political contemporaries at home and abroad. Writing almost weekly about him in this column, I am alternately driven close to extremes of condemnation and praise.
In a speech last week in Los Angeles, in words that sounded like his own, he set out in simple terms the threat posed to the world by “an arc of extremism” that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and the terrorists operating in Iraq. He lamented that “so much of western opinion appears to buy the idea that the emergence of this global terrorism is somehow our fault”. With startling clarity he countered: “It is based on religious extremism . . . And not just any religious extremism, but a specifically Muslim version.”
He called for the moderates of the world — including moderate Muslims — to engage in a war of values, in other words to win the argument for secular government, freedom of expression and plurality.
Some interpreted the speech as a retreat in the face of cabinet dissent against his support for the US and Israel, and his refusal during the days before the United Nations resolution yesterday to call for an unconditional ceasefire. Blair refused to be neutral between the fire and the fire brigade. He wanted Israel to have a full opportunity to extinguish Hezbollah.
Blair was not in retreat. It is not new for him to urge the US to win hearts and minds, to use political and psychological weapons alongside high explosives. He has long been exasperated that President George Bush refuses to involve himself in a Middle East peace process. As his reward for supporting the war in Iraq, Blair asked Bush to unfold the so-called “road map”, and the president obliged. But unfold it was all he did. After a few warm words the White House let the issue drop.
The prime minister may be naive about what can be achieved by talking. There was no prospect of travelling the route to peace while the Palestinians remained divided between moderates who will accept a new state alongside Israel and extremists who wish to destroy the Jewish state. Converting the road map into an American-sponsored plan was, in any case, not the best way to win over open-minded Palestinians. But Blair has long felt that the White House’s lack of commitment to a settlement is a presentational disaster.
The alleged cabinet revolt was barely a squall in a thimble. A few ministers who want to curry favour in the Labour party sneakily briefed the press (while the boss was safely on the other side of the Atlantic) on their heroic stand. Blair can survive even if the cabinet is split. The only division that really matters in any government is the one between the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer. In this unusual administration that schism has been institutionalised since its first day in office.
Gordon Brown apart, no cabinet in history was half as supine as this, and so when a minister is plucky enough actually to ask a question it makes headlines. David Miliband was said to have demonstrated that he is prime ministerial material by asking about the Lebanese crisis: “Where will it all end?” His pitiful intervention merely showed that unlike Blair he would be driven by events rather than attempting to drive them.
Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, tried to bounce the prime minister, in breach of his clear position, into joining the European clamour for a ceasefire. Blair saw her off. When she was appointed a few weeks ago she let out a four-letter expletive in consternation at being asked to take on a role for which she was wholly unsuited. My reaction matched hers. It was puzzling that Blair could select someone with so little aptitude. The explanation is that he does not give an expletive for who fills the post, since he alone makes foreign policy.
Ten years ago I was on ministerial business in Israel when Hezbollah showered rockets onto its northern villages. I made the headlines back home when at a press conference I declared that Britain stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel against terrorism. John Major, then prime minister, was unhappy that my remarks were too clear-cut. Since Americans were financing the IRA to kill Britons, universal declarations against terror were not yet fashionable.
But David Manning, the UK ambassador to Israel, gave me valuable support. Sir David (as he now is) is today our man in Washington and probably one of only two British diplomats who have Blair’s ear. The other is Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, once the cleverest boy in my year at school. Both men, though level-headed and objective, will have little difficulty in understanding Washington and Tel Aviv perspectives, probably to the frustration of the anti-Israeli majority in the Foreign Office, and Beckett, their nominal boss.
Blair does not mind what the Foreign Office, the cabinet, parliament, the Labour party or the opposition thinks. In these matters they are all Lilliputians to his Gulliver, and they will not tie him down. Jack Straw, Beckett’s predecessor, inflated himself as best he could and feted Condoleezza Rice in his Blackburn constituency. It now seems that the visit merely alerted the American administration to how dependent he was on Muslim votes and so contributed to his fall.
Brown, the man who will probably be prime minister this time next year, has nothing to say. It is disappointing, to say the least, that having half run the country for almost a decade he has yet to achieve any political maturity. While great events unfold, which for better or worse are shaping the future of our globe, he is content to remain a silent spectator, fearful that any comment might buttress the prime minister or offend the Labour party ahead of the leadership election.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has also been reluctant to speak about the Middle East. That is a pity because he could gain political stature and establish an advantage over Brown. Cameron should not take his advice from his foreign affairs spokesman. Claiming to speak as a friend of Israel, William Hague has accused it of acting disproportionately and so playing into Hezbollah’s hands. It sounded painfully like a man trying to have it both ways.
Of course that is what politicians usually do, and for all his clarity about the arc of extremism, Blair is hardly innocent of that charge. The more we focus on the danger that Iran may establish a wide Shi’ite theocracy between the Tigris and the Mediterranean, the more the allied invasion of Iraq looks like a mistake. After the ayatollahs seized power in Iran in 1979, allied policy was to support Iraq. Saddam Hussein, its leader, was a brutal tyrant but his secular government maintained a firm separation of mosque and state. His aggression against his neighbour kept Iran bogged down and limited its success in exporting terror. Saddam’s Sunni minority ruthlessly checked Shi’ite aspirations within Iraq.
Last week US generals and Britain’s departing ambassador in Baghdad warned that Iraq could descend into civil war and break into smaller states. That would be a humiliating defeat for the Americans and British. Iran would never again have to worry about living alongside a strong Iraq, and would gain a new Shi’ite satellite in the southern part of its dismembered neighbour.
Given the magnitude of Blair’s past errors it might seem odd to regret that he will soon leave the international stage. But I do. Over nine years Blair has amassed huge experience. He has a matchless familiarity with the issues and with world leaders. He has freed himself from the prejudices of his party and has no fear of striking clear positions and taking decisions. His likely successors show no such qualities; indeed they display no interest in foreign policy at all.
It has taken Blair years to perceive the threat from “reactionary Islam” as clearly as he does now. When he is replaced, first by Brown, maybe later by Cameron, his successors will take time to learn again what Blair has learnt already. During the time of their apprenticeships, Britain will be weaker and the threat will be growing apace.
