Said Danny Finkelstein in the Thunderer column on this page yesterday: “I wouldn’t like it if he were proved a liar, but in the end I would shrug .. . his so-called lies saved lives.”
So there we have it. Tony Blair’s new communications tool: The Big Shrug. We can script the youth-market video already. (Footage of nerdy-looking, elderly bearded left-winger banging on about missing weapons of mass destruction. Fade sound to voice-over: bright, cheeky, Estuarial, young.) “Get smart, daddy, the world’s moved on. We won for Chrissake. So the weapons can’t be found? Whatever. That bastard Saddam has gone. WMD was yesterday. Soooo 2002. Yesterday’s gone. Today’s today. Get with tomorrow.” (Cut to Tony in white shirt, holding rose and surrounded by adoring Iraqi schoolgirls singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Sliding tickertape onscreen subtitle, repeating: “The Future not the Past.”)
No 10 Downing Street must pray that Danny Finkelstein speaks for the nation. He does not. Danny is as principled a man as any of us and has powerful humanitarian reasons for celebrating the removal of Saddam Hussein, but nothing better illustrates the sort of cocky, media-wise cynicism that will infuriate the Prime Minister’s critics, dismay those who are uncertain about him, and abash even his friends, than the suggestion now being peddled that when it comes to weapons of mass destruction and the question of Mr Blair’s honesty, “in the end” you’ve got to shrug.
You do not. As Tony Blair and his cartload of attendant journos jet their way between continents, someone had better tell the Prime Minister that this is hardly the way his countrymen are seeing it back here on the ground. Britain is declining to shrug.
And that surprises me. I had not expected my countrymen or our news media to maintain their interest in the topic of WMDs, once the war was won. We doubters were set to become a band of barrack-room international lawyers, bleating obsessively about the past, while our Government easily nudged the rest of Britain to remember what a monster Saddam was, and “move on”. I had resigned myself to overhearing whispered regrets: “Poor chap. Becoming a bore. Got a bit of a bee in his bonnet about WMDs.”
In short, I thought Finkelsteinism would prevail. The opposite is happening. Iraq is moving back on to the front pages. A number of things surprise and hearten me about this. First is the evidence that millions of ordinary people are not amnesiacs, do remember why Mr Blair said Britain must attack and do still care whether that was true. I hear this in buses, round kitchen tables, in saloon-bars, everywhere. “So where are they, those weapons?” is the question of the hour. Britain’s news media are undoubtedly responding to this. Interestingly, even those newspapers (the majority) firm in their support throughout the war are not looking sheepishly away or changing the subject, but returning to a story that could be said to undermine their own editorial positions.
And in politics, on the Left and the Right, people are starting to demand answers, and they are not all the usual suspects. Sir Malcolm Rifkind is the latest to join them. Charles Kennedy, who switched from opposing to supporting the war once it started, will now be switching back. Kenneth Clarke, who opposed the war throughout, may have the last laugh on glib commentators who mocked him as having “blundered” by opposing the war — as though, contrary to everything known about Mr Clarke, he trims his sails to enhance his leadership prospects.
All this suggests that the British are not as fickle as I feared, that they do not share the cynics’ preference for victors’ justice, that they are not ready to be winked at by wiseacres chuckling “of course, we grown-ups always knew that WMD stuff was just spin”. More people in Britain than I supposed care about the argument, not just the score.
As any Letters Editor will confirm, little more reliably infuriates our readers than Fleet Street’s habit of splashing a story across its front pages and then forgetting it. What happened to the giant African cockroaches, set to swamp Europe? How is that cross between a camel and a llama produced by Arabian scientists faring? Where are those weapons of mass destruction? Readers’ insistence that we keep giving them news about WMDs fits a pattern and suggests journalists are sometimes more infantile than readers, and not the other way round. But I believe that there are special reasons why my countrymen have sunk their teeth into the WMD debate and are not inclined to let go.
A particular danger threatens any leader who falls in love with his probity. When his habit has been to skew his platform away from today and towards tomorrow, this probity must take centre stage, for what is a prophet if he is not trustworthy? A leader whose pitch becomes a series of extravagant promissory notes, backed by cheesy appeals to his personal sincerity, is asking for trouble.
He becomes ever more reliant on an implicit admission that the evidence for his prospectus is not yet available but that we should give him the benefit of the doubt because he is an honest man. You can often persuade people to do this, but if you finally disappoint them their anger is made worse by the feeling that they have been made fools of. It is not difficult to make a fool of someone if your promise is sufficiently categorical, but it is best not to be there when he finds out.
By no means all politicians behave like this, but a certain type does, and they often enjoy early success. Tony Blair stands out for his habit of putting his own trustworthiness at centre stage, and in the reflex reaction he displays whenever challenged about the present, which is to make yet another promise about the future.
To check my own hunch I have been rereading all the conference speeches Mr Blair has made since becoming Prime Minister, and comparing them with the record of Margaret Thatcher’s political utterances. You will not be surprised to learn that, from the earliest days, the present Prime Minister has only had to mount a rostrum to begin spouting promises, often of an astonishingly categorical and detailed kind. (“Everyone within the next two years will be able once again to see an NHS dentist just by phoning NHS Direct” — September 1999.)
What might surprise you is how little Margaret Thatcher did this. She was certainly not a humble speaker (Mr Blair has captured the modest tone more successfully than she ever did) but on the whole she avoided making large undertakings, general or specific. Her speech was long on analysis of the past and present, short on prophecy for the future.
And she almost never talked about her own probity. She would have thought it undignified to insist that she was a pretty straight kind of a gal. She would feel that one should not answer what should not be in question. But listen now to Tony Blair in Basra yesterday telling the troops that “when people look back, I honestly believe they will see this as one of the defining moments of our century” (my italics). A tiny detail, I realise, but why did he throw in that “I honestly believe”? It is one of his habits to footnote his own prophecies with reassurances about his personal sincerity (even agony) in making them. What subterranean doubt gnaws a man who does this?
The italics in this extract from John xiv, 2, quoting Jesus, are also mine: “In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you.” I’ve been there, mate. You haven’t. You can’t, yet. So trust me. Would I let you down?
There are, on reflection, a handful of stations in life that may draw a speaker to make the integrity of his own conviction part of the argument. They include religious leader, insurance salesman, confidence trickster and politician. In each case the audience has a special need for assurance about the honesty of the speaker. All these speakers are claiming privileged information. Each in his different way must persuade us that he knows about or has personally seen a vital link in the chain of his argument, but which is not yet open to public inspection. For the time being we must, therefore, trust him.
We did, with Mr Blair, over weapons of mass destruction. Even I did. We did over that promised UN second resolution. The Prime Minister’s speech delivered in the critical Commons debate on the eve of war was one of the most effective he has made, and it hinged utterly on his powerful claims not only as to the existence of weapons of mass destruction, but the huge and immediate threat they presented.
He was emphatic. He was sure. We said: “He’s in charge; he says he knows; we must give him the benefit of the doubt.” By an act of trust we made ourselves vulnerable to being made to look not only wrong, but dupes. If that happens we will feel hurt in a rather personal way.
Perhaps those weapons will be found. If not, I remain unconvinced Tony Blair will survive.
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