Most of us have experienced the discomfort of watching a friend go off the
rails. At first his oddities are dismissed as eccentricities. An absurd
assertion, a lunatic conviction, a sudden enthusiasm or unreasonable fear,
are explained as perhaps due to tiredness, or stress, or natural volatility.
We do not want to face the truth that our friend has cracked up. Finally we
can deny it no longer — and then it seems so obvious: the explanation, in
retrospect, of so much we struggled to reconcile.
Sometimes the realisation comes fast and suddenly. It did for me at university
when my Arab fellow student Ahmed, who for months had been warning me of the
conspiracies of which he suspected we might be victims, pulled me into his
room to show me the death-ray he could see shining through his window. It
was somebody’s porch-light. Likewise, the madness of King George III, which
came in spells, was undeniable when it came. At other times the realisation
is a slow, sad dawning of the obvious. Sometimes it is a friend about whom
we worry. Sometimes it is a prime minister.
I will accept the charge of discourtesy, but not of flippancy, when I ask
whether Tony Blair may now have become, in a serious sense of that word,
unhinged.
Genius and madness are often allied, and nowhere is this truer than in
political leadership. Great leaders need self-belief in unnatural measure.
Simple fraudsters are rumbled early, but great leaders share with great
confidence tricksters a capacity to be more than persuaded, but inhabited,
by their cause. Almost inevitably, an inspirational leader spends important
parts of his life certain of the uncertain, convinced of the undemonstrable.
So do the mentally ill. It can be extremely difficult to distinguish between a
person who is sticking bravely to a difficult cause whose truth is far from
obvious, and a person who is going crazy. It took us quite a while to
explain David Icke’s beliefs in the only useful way in which they could be
explained — and he was on the political fringe. A national leader commands
vastly more respect and will be given the benefit of many more doubts than
Mr Icke ever was. Colleagues, commentators and the wider public are usually
late to face up to evidence that the boss has gone berserk, even though the
evidence may have been around for quite some time.
There are good reasons for this. To call somebody mad is bad manners even when
fair comment. To tackle your opponent’s argument by questioning his sanity
can look like a childish copping-out from sensible discussion. How can the
victim answer back?
But the charge is sometimes germane. It may become the only thing worth
considering. Winston Churchill had lost the plot long before the proper
public discussion this deserved got under way. And I myself believe that one
of my political heroes, Margaret Thatcher, began to lose her mental balance
well before the end, and before those close to her allowed themselves to
consider this explanation of her behaviour. For me the suspicion first
dawned when the then Prime Minister devised for the Lord Mayor’s banquet a
dress with such an extravagant train that she needed someone to help her
with it into the Mansion House. This was when she was beginning to refer to
herself as “we”, and treating friends who warned her of her fate as
treacherous. A telltale of incipient insanity is when the victim begins to
take a Manichaean view of the universe.
There are good reasons why those at the top can go quietly bonkers before
their inferiors wake up to the warning signs. The first is obviously
deference. “The Madness of King Tony” might — I accept — seem an impertinent
way of discussing our leader during a war when, whatever application it may
have in Tony Blair’s case, it applies to Saddam Hussein in spades.
Beyond deference, however, those at the top of the pyramid who are anxious to
impress us with truths which are not obvious have another powerful weapon at
their disposal. They can credibly claim to know more than we can be told. To
the man in the street, the most potent of Mr Blair’s arguments for invading
Iraq is that he and George W. Bush are in possession of special intelligence
which supports their stand but which cannot be divulged. And no doubt that
is true. The question is about the amount of support such intelligence
lends, not its existence.
Note from your own experience, as well as from the history books, how those
with a claim which sounds incredible tend to support it by claiming a
private source of information they are unable to share. Joan of Arc heard
voices. Ahmed said he could feel the lethal qualities of the apparent
porch-light and reminded me that his enemies would obviously decoy the
ignorant by disguising death-rays in this way. One or another version of God
has been a time-honoured way for madcap leaders to give their actions an
authority not apparent to the five senses of their audiences. Cornered by
reality, “private sources” are the last refuge of the deluded.
Is Mr Blair among them? Let me outline some of my grounds for worry. Any one
of these grounds might be dismissed as negligible, or indicative of nothing
more sinister than conviction; but cumulatively I find them worrying.
Mr Blair has stopped sounding like a career politician. He has lost the
professional polish of a man doing a job, and developed that fierce, quiet
intensity which, from long experience of dealing with mad constituents, I
know that the slightly cracked share with the genuinely convinced. He has
lost his feel for whom to confront, or when and where, and puts himself into
situations (like the slow handclapping by anti-war women) which do not
assist his case. Historians may point to Mr Blair’s private — but publicised
— audience with the Pope as an early sign of a dawning unrealism about the
perceptions of others. Did he this week stop for a moment to think what
impression would be made on grieving parents by his wild-eyed suggestion
(based on misinformation) that two British soldiers had been executed by the
Iraqis in cold blood?
Blair’s long-standing tendency to compartmentalise logic (a habit all
politicians share to some degree) is now being pushed to extremes. The
speeches the “old” Europeans are making — about giving Iraq more time,
accepting gradual progress and not sticking to a literal interpretation of
earlier demands — are exactly the speeches Mr Blair himself gives
(persuasively) in defence of letting the IRA off the decommissioning hook.
This logic-chopping alarms. The Prime Minister has lost his sense of how his
indignation at Iraqi brutality jars, coming from someone attacking a country
whose puny forces are grotesquely outgunned by ours. His anger at the French
(whose position has been consistent and identical to that which Blair held
until a year ago) is inexplicable to those of us who are not doctors. He
displays a demented capacity to convince himself that it is the other guy
who is cheating.
He has started saying things which are not only unsustainable, but palpably
absurd. The throwaway remark to Parliament that he would ignore Security
Council vetoes which were “capricious” or “unreasonable” was more than
ill-considered: coming from a trained lawyer it was stark, staring bonkers.
It was breathtaking. For risibility I would bracket it with Ahmed’s
death-ray. The whole country should have been crying with laughter. That the
British media should have been mesmerised into reporting him in any other
way still leaves me dumbfounded. No sane lawyer could have said what Blair
said.
He keeps retreating into a hopeless, desperate optimism: another sign of
lunacy. He seems to have promised the Americans he could deliver Europe, and
told the Europeans he could tame America. There was scant ground for hope on
the first score and none on the second. The belief that irreconcilables can
be reconciled by one’s personal contacts and powers of persuasion is a
familiar delusion among people who are not quite right in the head. While
each futile promise is in the process of being demonstrated to be
undeliverable, he goes into a sort of nose-tapping, “watch this space”
denial. When finally the promise is abandoned he turns insouciantly away —
and makes a new promise.
This week he has been promising to sort out the Americans, and persuade them
to let the United Nations supervise the post-conflict administration of
Iraq. He is probably telling the Americans he can sort out the Security
Council. He can do neither. Meanwhile, he has forgotten that his previous
position was that the coalition partners invaded as agents of the UN anyway,
so it isn’t up to Washington to give permission. Any bank manager used to
dealing with bankrupts with a pathological shopping habit who have severed
contact with arithmetic will recognise the optimism.
Have the rest of the Cabinet tumbled yet to the understanding that this may
not be about Iraq at all, but about the Prime Minister? My guess is that
those closest to Mr Blair must be beginning to wonder privately. It is time
people pooled their doubts.
