Cover Story
Nothing to fear but fear itself
13 March 2004
Simon Jenkins says that Tony Blair’s Sedgefield speech was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not
‘And the clouds came flying through the air bringing winds and hurling lightning and arrows, and it rained hail, fire and swords, and killed a great number of people.’ So cried the Florentine monk Savonarola of the coming Day of Judgment in 1492. The terrified citizens duly rose and followed him into a disastrous alliance with Italy’s new conqueror, Charles VIII of France. Four years later they had had enough of Savonarola’s apocalyptic waffle, dragged him from his monastery and hanged him.
Whenever I hear Tony Blair nowadays, I think of Savonarola. In his passionate foreign policy apologia in Sedgefield last week, he declared Britain to be ‘in mortal danger’, facing threats ‘different from anything the world has faced before’. Mr Blair plainly sees his primary task as no longer to improve Britain’s public services. Mankind is on a path to destruction from which he alone can save it. The Prime Minister is either terrifyingly right, or mad.
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