The Spectator’s Notes | 18 March 2006

The Dunblane massacre took place ten years ago. Its effects on the families of the victims are so terrible that it seems dangerous to speak about them. But there were secondary effects as well. In the aftermath of the horror, the then prime minister, John Major, invited the other party leaders, Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown, to join him in visiting the town to pay tribute and meet the bereaved. The idea, surely right, was that this should be a grief which united people across politics. Watching the scene on television, I was struck for the first time by Mr Blair’s way of parading feeling, while everyone else, including the bereaved, was showing restraint. He appeared to move about more than other people, contort his face more, upstage those near him. It struck me as something new in our politics, and something unpleasant. At the time people seemed to like it, and similar techniques worked well after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. But it was an early intimation of what it is that, today, people so dislike about Mr Blair. Having agreed, both publicly and privately, that Dunblane was an issue above party, Mr Blair found a way, by the autumn, of ‘moving on’. Vulnerable Dunblane parents were persuaded to come to the Labour party conference to attack the government over gun control laws. In his big, messianic speech there (‘a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years’) Mr Blair devoted part of it to assailing those Tories who opposed a ban on handguns almost as if they were complicit in the killings. Normally there is a certain solidarity between past and present prime ministers based on a shared understanding of how difficult the job is, but that comradeship is notably lacking in the case of John Major and Tony Blair.