Tony
Blair's very weak point
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
May 2, 2005
LONDON - No one should ever doubt
Prime Minister Tony Blair's leadership capabilities. He
has the right combination of inner arrogance (friends
would say conviction) and outward modesty. In the House
of Commons he is rarely bested and in the country at
large there is a great appreciation for what eight years
of his government have done in keeping the economy on the
high road, repairing the run down National Health
Service, helping the poor and aged with income
supplements and Africa with more aid, improving the
working class housing estates and grappling vigorously,
if not always productively, with the declining academic
prowess of the state school sector.
His government has also been a good
friend of the arts and of liberalizing the British
culture of the stiff upper lip and the social rigidity
that accompanies it. In this and a multitude of other
ways he has made the British feel upbeat about their
country in a way they haven't since shortly after World
War 2 ended when the Labor party led by Clement Atlee
triumphed over Winston Churchill and enacted the crucial
legislation that created the modern welfare
state.
Still, something is not right with
Blair and the electorate, belatedly, seems to be sensing
it. It is a question of character and it is question of
the war in Iraq and the two are linked.
The majority of the electorate may
be voting their pocket book but a substantial minority is
preoccupied by the integrity, or rather lack of it, of
the prime minister. They may be prepared to put the war
itself behind them, now that the big fighting is over and
a semblance of order is returning since Iraq's elections.
But they have been troubled (and the more educated the
voter the more troubled he or she is) that Blair who has
made much of his honesty and Christian faith has been
caught out in a bad lie.
Did Blair lie over the reason for
going to war with Iraq - the supposed stockpile of
weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed? It
depends how you define lie. If you define lie as saying
this cat is black when in fact it's white he didn't on
the big issues. But what he did do was to give the
impression the cat was assuredly black when in fact it
was a sort of grayish white. His intelligence services
did seem to have the goods on Saddam Hussein's weapons of
mass destruction.
But as the independent reports made
by a distinguished judge and former civil servant have
made clear the caveats were left out and the presentation
was polished. We in the public didn't have the
pre-polished version, but Blair did and he must have
known in his mind, if not his heart, he was taking a
gamble with the evidence. Why he was not prepared to
persuade George Bush to wait a few more weeks until the
evidence that Hans Blix, the chief UN arms inspector, was
in the midst of collecting on the ground inside Iraq, was
available, was totally irresponsible. Sanctions had
Saddam boxed in. He was able to harm no one outside his
country. The UN policing had not only led to ridding him
of all the weapons of mass destruction, they had been
imposed after the 1991 war that had effectively wiped out
his air force and navy and broken the back of his army.
Yet on this the word "lie" cannot
quite be used, although the Conservatives are throwing
the word around. But in a related matter it can. It
concerns the controversy over the naming of the Ministry
of Defense's weapons' expert, David Kelly, who shortly
after he was ousted in the press as the source of reports
claiming the government's public dossier on Iraq's
weapons had been "sexed up", committed suicide. Although
an inquiry exonerated Blair of any blame for
precipitating the suicide, a BBC interview two weeks ago
caught Blair out lying in a way we could all understand.
He told the interviewer, "I don't believe we had any
option, however, but to disclose his name [to the
press]."
Until that interview Blair had
always maintained that it was "completely untrue" that
the government had done this.
The electorate is disconcerted.
This and the row over the advice given Blair by the
attorney general on the legality of the war have
re-energized all the doubts that the war stirred up two
years ago. Many Labor supporters will be abstaining, if
not voting Liberal Democrat. Even if Blair wins, his
majority may be so reduced, and thus his ability to
govern effectively, that he will be forced to step down
in favor of Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the
Exchequer.
Then he might recall Shakespeare's
line, "Lilies that fester smell worse than
weeds."
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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