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Friday 10 February 2012

Memo to the Left: Blair Won Because He Hated You

Thursday, 2nd September 2010

Over at Liberal Conspiracy our old friend Sunny Hundal calls out Tony Blair:

It was always obvious that Tony Blair hated the left. His recently published book said nothing new on that front. What’s staggering is how easily he dismisses even close Labour colleagues and ministers.

[...] What does it say about Tony Blair’s loyalty to the party and the movement? What does it say about his committment to pluralism within the party?

What it says is that Tony Blair was interested in winning elections. This is not rocket science. We may not like this aspect of British politics but, at the moment anyway, the public is extremely wary of political parties. That's one reason, aming many, why the combined Tory-Labour share of the vote has fallen from 90% of voters to 65%. This has consequences and among them is the fact that the party leader - ie, would-be Prime Minister - must stand above and apart from his party if he's to have a real chance of talking to the electorate and being taken seriously by them.

Gordon Brown never managed that. Tony Blair did and, to some considerable extent, so has David Cameron. (Hague, IDS & Howard never had a hope of doing so.) The modern leader must stand out from their party if they're to be successful. They cannot seem to be beholden to their colleagues or followers, far less appear held hostage by their base.

This necessarily causes tensions and makes party management a ticklish problem and it risks making a fetish out of political positioning that, in the end, undermines your own seriousness or creates the suspicion that, actually, you don't believe in anything other than power itself. But such are the wages of victory and (for most parties) there's only so much comfort to be drawn from a pure and virtuous life in permanent opposition.

It would have been very odd for either Blair or Cameron to have been on good terms with their base. That would mean accepting it and denying the need for change. But both Labour and then, later, the Tories needed to change. Each eventually found the leader prepared to really challenge their own support; each was in such a desperate place that there were no other attractive options if they wanted to avoid yet another defeat. Something Had To Be Done and Desperation Creates Opportunity.

That was true of Margaret Thatcher too. Thatcherism was a minority enthusiasm within the Conservative party in 1980 just as Blairites and Cameroons were minorities inside their parties too. Each, in their own way, led an unsurgency designed to shake things up; each wore internal disapproval and opposition with pride.

But there's a danger: political oportunity can evaporate very quickly. It's easy to forget about magnanimuty in defeat and charity in victory. The time it takes to convince the rest of your party that you're right is also roughly the amount of time it takes the country to tire of you. Politically, Blair benefited from being able to run against Brown and the rest of them but in policy terms his failure to get a grip cost him dearly. There were too many wasted years at the beginning. And this, I think, helps explain why the present government is moving so quickly across so many fronts. There's always less time than you think.

UPDATE: I should also say that things such as the underlying state of the economy have a bigger impact than political positioning. But, importantly, positioning and other stuff like it can make it easier to get your voice heard or for you to be taken seriously. Which means it matters too, even if fundamentals outwith your control matter hugely too.

Filed under: Blair (53 more articles) , Cameron (208 more articles) , Labour (2015 more articles) , Margaret Thatcher (42 more articles) , Tories (265 more articles)

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Baron

September 2nd, 2010 8:42pm Report this comment

Alex, what’s this ranting all about.

it’s the voters that should matter, by your own admission they feel they don’t hence the sinking of the combined vote for the two parties.

Blair has indeed won three elections, Cameron hasn’t hence the coalition.

Thatcher at least created the base from which genuine growth had sprung, Blair’s legacy is a mess we haven’t cleared up yet, doing so will pain all of us, and soon.

the cause of the rot in British politics is the widening de-coupling between those in charge and the unwashed. Until that’s addressed, either of the parties is liable to be hijacked by a charismatic, fast talking opportunists. The ‘Hague’s affair’ exemplifies it well. It ain’t the electorate, or his constituents who may bring him down, but a faction of his own party. Democracy indeed.

normanc

September 2nd, 2010 10:12pm Report this comment

Elections are popularity contests. We may wish they were more than that, that we did make educated decisions based on policies, but really they are not. Once every five years we vote for our colour of choice and we posture in between to, more or less, no effect.

If the economy is doing well, people have a pound in their pocket, most will vote for the status quo. Why wouldn't they? Most people can't tell you who is the Chancellor (as I found out at a charity quiz I hosted last week - best answer of the night - David Milliburn. Around 25% of teams thought it was Alistair Darling).

That's why the previous Conservative leaders lost, nothing to do with ideology, nothing to do with how they stood in relation to their Party.

As soon as things went tits up, Labour lost. You could have put a moron with a blue ribbon on his chest as Tory leader and he'd have won a majority.

If you think that if IDS, Hague, or Howard had ran the same campaigns they ran in previous years (here's an exercise, check how many votes each of them got wrt Cameron) and lost the last election against Brown then there really is no hope for you.

Bored senseless

September 2nd, 2010 10:51pm Report this comment

"UPDATE: I should also say that things such as the underlying state of the economy have a bigger impact than political positioning"

Indeed, it does have a bigger impact to us, the fools going out to work everyday. But, clearly not to the LIB LAB CON and MSM

Baron

September 2nd, 2010 11:38pm Report this comment

normanc @ 10.12:

spot on, my blogging friend.

DavidDP

September 3rd, 2010 8:11am Report this comment

"If the economy is doing well, people have a pound in their pocket, most will vote for the status quo. Why wouldn't they?"

In 1997 they didn't. By quite a margin.

"If you think that if IDS, Hague, or Howard had ran the same campaigns they ran in previous years (here's an exercise, check how many votes each of them got wrt Cameron) and lost the last election against Brown then there really is no hope for you."

Well, we'll never know. But what we do know is that Hague's campaign resulted in a net gain of 1 seat from quite possibly the lowest base possible, and Howard's campaign resulted in a still convincing loss (in any other year, a win by 70 seats is considered a landslide)against Blair at his most unpopular.

Baron

September 3rd, 2010 10:49am Report this comment

DavidDP @ 8.11:

you’ve forgotten the pain and fewer shillings in one’s pocket of the early/mid 90s from the public spending cuts (of about less than half of the rate planned for the coming spending reduction).

The 1997 election was the punishment for it.

David Lindsay

September 3rd, 2010 2:37pm Report this comment

What does Blair even know about winning elections? After the death of John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes had been larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday, 16th September 1992. There were swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after Smith's death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.

Among those of us who have been active in the Labour Party in County Durham, it is common knowledge that Blair had been about to announce his departure from Parliament at the General Election then expected to be called in 1996, but Smith's death changed his mind, at least conditional on his victory in the consequent Leadership Election. In 1992, only the most obsessive political anorak had ever even heard of Tony Blair. And that was still the case on Golden Wednesday, when the Conservative defeat, and thus the Labour "victory" by default, became a done deal.

Only in 2005 did Blair finally influence a General Election result at all. Specifically, he lost Labour 100 seats that any other Labour Leader would have saved. Thus he moved from being a mere irrelevance to being a positive liability.

Kennybhoy

September 3rd, 2010 6:52pm Report this comment

normanc @ 10:12pm:

Insightful analysis. One proviso. Said analysis applies to historically “ordinary” times. I strongly suspect that such relatively benign times may be coming to an end.

Kennybhoy

September 3rd, 2010 7:58pm Report this comment

Apropos Young Maister Lindsay's post at 2:37pm.

Having done the standard ruthless and thorough check of my own premises and conclusions, I must admit that this analysis seems to be plausible. Or is it just another of the young maister's "Essays From an Alternative Universe"? I was overseas and otherwise engaged for the greater part of the 1990s and early noughties so my question is a genuine one...

Verity

September 4th, 2010 2:59am Report this comment

"Blair won because he hated you."

Blair won because Blair is an viperous opportunist and hated anyone who was in his way. The political philosophy of Labour was irrelevant.

Blair is now airbrushed out of the CND (I wonder who commanded that, and what it cost?) but he and Cherie were major marchers much earlier. This is the man who took Britain to war in Iraq on absolutely no evidence of WMD ... but the grandstanding opportunities of "war leader", a la the most recent, Thatcher, who went to war legitimately, and Churchill, were too much of a show biz op.

War leader! I recall Blair going to visit the troops and wearing a searingly white shirt and no jacket, so even walking in front, he stood way out against the background of the servicemen in their drabs ... open-collared, of course, as though he was about to dive for a gun, and also with his arms always slightly arched at his sides, like Gary Cooper walking down the main street in "High Noon" or John Wayne ... He looked absurd, yet no one ever commented on it.

And sitting on a TV couch telling lies in Estuary.

I read that whenever, at Fettes, his headmaster saw him approaching with an "I say, sir ...", he dove now the nearest corridor.

Then his rock group, "Ugly Rumours" ... failed, but Tone was determined to get into show biz ... and he did.

Blair is probably the nastiest piece of work ever to occupy Downing Street. We currently, though, have a runner-up.

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