George Kerevan: The showman and the intellectual

Published on Wednesday 1 September 2010 14:56

DURING the Holyrood election campaign of 2007, I had a mug of tea with Tony Blair. Actually, he had the mug and I had water: his caffeine needs were greater than mine. He had won a third general election only two years before, despite having led Britain into an unpopular war.

The explanation for Tony Blair's undoubted political success - genius, fluke or Faustian pact with Satan - remains an enigma. Hence the media fuss over his memoirs. The last Labour politician to win any election prior to Blair was Harold Wilson, in October 1974. Cripes: in 1974 colour television and gas central heating were still a novelty in most British homes!

Yet I am unwilling to take Mr Blair's self-serving (if racy) autobiography at face value. Blair has always had a forte for spinning a convincing popular narrative with himself at the centre - the quintessential skill of an effective politician in the age of the crazy, zany 24-hour news cycle and the confusing, conspiratorial blogsphere. Ditto Sarah Palin. Not ditto Gordon Brown.

Blair is using his manifest skills to re-position himself politically. Gordon gets the blame for being disloyal, even a little bonkers. Iraq gets forgotten and Tony becomes an elder statesman. Somehow, the fact is forgotten that the Blair and Brown tribes spent years publicly disavowing their feud, while journalists such as myself were being phoned surreptitiously by their acolytes to dish the dirt on either side.

The feud between Blair and Brown has always been presented as something of a political aberration. Blair attempts to perpetuate this myth, blaming the friction on Brown at every turn. I've news for Mr Blair: Labour has always behaved this way. Politics is about ambition, and ambition breeds rivalry.

On the morning of Labour being declared the winner of the 1945 General Election, Herbert Morrison (Peter Mandelson's grandad) attempted a leadership coup against Clement Attlee.

He might have gotten away with it had Attlee not nipped off to the Palace to be made PM without waiting for the customary Labour Parliamentary meeting.

Labour was at it again in 1950, when Aneurin Bevan flounced out of the Cabinet. The foul language used on that occasion makes Mr Blair's book seem tame. One Labour front-bencher likened Bevan to the fascist Oswald Mosley. Bevan shouted back at one of his party critics: "Shut up, bonehead".

The Wilson government of the Sixties was even more venomous. At the time, nice Neil Kinnock, before he became an elder statesman, openly discussed "packing in Labour and forming a new party, to be founded on the trades unions".Labour has always been more factious than the Tories. At root, Labour thrives on class politics - hence the division between David and Ed Miliband.

Thinking you alone represent one class (and the underdog at that) breeds Messianic pretensions - which gives ambitious politicians a sanctimonious excuse for knifing their colleagues in the front.

But in the late 20th century it was obvious that the class map of Britain had become infinitely complex and not susceptible to a simple us-and-them rhetoric. The narrow demands of Labour's traditional paymasters, the unions, had become a barrier to economic reform.

This wind of change was sensed by rising stars in the Labour Party - particularly Gordon Brown. Thus the emergence of New Labour, directed at building an electoral alliance between the new "aspirational" middle classes in the service sector (who had no particular party allegiance) and Labour's traditional base in the skilled working class.

Enter Tony Blair as the front man hired to sell this new soap. Here is the secret of Blair's rise. Blair was the guy who sold New Labour to the factious Labour Party itself. Brown was too much identified with the traditional right of the party to have been able to persuade Labour activists to ditch the totemic Clause 4 commitment to nationalisation - and he knew it.

But like a good method actor, Blair came to live his role - something to remember when deciding who has the greater grip on reality, Blair or Brown. Once in Number 10, Blair began to exhibit presidential tendencies. That sidelined Parliament but it also proved ineffective as regards practical politics. For the British political machine delivers not through Number 10 but through the great departments of state, above all the Treasury. And there squatted Gordon Brown.

Blair's domestic record is scanty in everything but his trademark rhetoric while his foreign policy - where he was his own master - proved a disaster. Yet Blair seems unwilling to offer any personal reassessment. If he had been a serious reformer, he would have made the machinery of government work. He did not and now chooses to blame Brown's political intransigence.

In fact, it is Gordon Brown who proved the more substantial politician. Brown is that very rare animal in British politics - an intellectual. Intellectuals have ideas, which the Metropolitan elite fears as uncontrollable. Intellectuals brood and can be indecisive, but showman politicians such as Blair gamble with other folk's lives - take your pick.

Intellectuals normally come a poor second in Westminster politics - witness Denis Healey or Keith Joseph. The English empirical tradition favours pragmatism over theory in politics, which is Blair's forte. But north of the Border the Presbyterian predilection for debate affords the intellectual - and the intellectual politician - high status.This cultural difference explains much of the animus towards Prime Minister Brown in England while Scottish voters - even anti-Labour ones - thought Gordon was being unfairly picked on.

Labour is now balloting for a new leader. The issue is not the leader but the future of the New Labour project itself. Globalisation and multiculturalism have complicated the social map of Britain even more dramatically than 20 years ago, making a return to class war rhetoric futile.

Yet economic crisis and social pressures on the middle class are creating the demand for new social democratic policies that even the Tories respect. This is a time for politicians with ideas, not glib showmen like Tony Blair.