Poor old Chimperor, he’s not doing well lately.
One my one his suckup cronies are deserting him and now even his most passionate political friend has dropped him overboard by proxy from the comfort of his luxury holiday yacht. The proxy is of course – nice cuddly Tone would never get his hands dirty – John Prescott, who’s desperate to get some popularity back from the party after his recent perks and pervs problems .
This arms-length denial of Bush is Blairs’ own hail-mary pass, a last desperate scramble to hold on to his job by denying the relationship that has been the bedrock of his prime-ministerial career. But is Blair really, finally finished?
An emergency resolution to oust Blair from the party leadership is already being circulated to MPs, constituency parties and conference delegates (who are much more important in this context than the parliamentary party) by the internal Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, prior to the Labour party conference next month. Support for the resolution amongst back-benchers and conference delegates looks to be snowballing .
But Blair has survived before and he has a strategy….
It’s my theory that he put Scots hardman John Reid, with his over-the-top pronouncements on terrorism – “We’re all dooomed, doomed I tell you”– and his dour hatchet-faced demeanour, in de facto charge of the country during his luxury yacht holiday as a compare and contrast exercise. Blair was implicitly asking the country “Resolute thrusting young executive or Mussolini-lite? Your choice.”
It was also a tacit warning to English voters against having a Scot in charge – a reference to the West Lothian question and thus yet another sideswipe at Gordon Brown.
And where has Gordon Brown been during all this? Yes, he’s been on holiday, yes he has a new child, but has he not got a mobile phone? Foreign affairs and government don’t just stop when someone’s on leave, paternity or otherwise. A Chancellor and pretender to the prime ministership who’s incommunicado is not quite like a middle manager buggering off on a week-long bender in Aya Napa and turning off the phone.
Brown’s been very quiet indeed on the issue of Lebanon, Israel, Bush and US Middle East policy – remarkably so for the supposed anointed successor to the leadership. Bush has another 2 years to go so the generous view would be that its a necessary political expedience on Brown’s part (whereas he no doubt considers it a statesmanlike position), but it still leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
What it says to the electorate is that Brown’s a man too scared to take a stand on a moral principle for fear of jeopardising his own career. He likes to portray himself as the morally upright son of the manse but to the majority of the population his continued failure to condemn US foreign policy shows exactly the opposite, that he’s a man prepared to compromise his principles for advancement, and not only that, that he hasn’t got the gumption to be purposeful and ruthless enough to make himself the hero of the hour in the party and the nation and get rid of the rightly detested Blair.
With his proxy condemnation of Bush (proxies are the new political black) Blair has stolen a march on Gordon Brown yet again, which leaves Brown looking very stupid. Whatever the outcome of the emergency resolution for Blair, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Gordon will ever succeed to the leadership. Reid has been neatly eliminated from competition merely by the exposure of his true megalomaniac nature to the nation over the past couple of weeks. Other than ousted Foreign Secretary and Condi intimate Jack Straw, who seems to be biding his time, who else is is in the running?
Some commentators have been pushing oleaginous schools ministerDavid Milliband as the next Great White Hope for New Labour. Not having been a party member since the Clause 4 debacle I have no say in the matter (not that members have much more now) but if I did, I couldn’t imagine a worse choice.
Milliband is yet another member of yet another of those middle-class legacy Labour families like the Hobsbawms, Toynbees, Benns and so many others, local and national, who think that because their forebears were socialist pioneers it confers upon them the right to rule in perpetuity. Miliband’s never had a real job:
Former Head of the No 10 Policy Unit. He is a former Labour Party policy director (before 1997 election), Secretary of the Social Justice Commission and member of the IPPR. Brother of Ed Milliband, Special Adviser to Gordon Brown at the Treasury. He was paid ?70,000 in 2000. He went to Oxford University and MIT. While he was at No.10, no Government Green or White Paper was published until he cleared it.
Miliband and his peers in New Labour are not averse to using their own old-boys’ and girls’ networks to get ahead and they exude the same sense of personal and political entitlement ( though cloaked in a more touchy-feely disguise) as many of those inside-the-beltway, think-tank-employed, wingnut welfare recipents, who know no life outside that of party hacks, lobbyists and the continued jockeying for power and privilege.
We know them well, the political parasites in Westminster and Washington, the pampered ones who like to tell themselves they’re in their comfortable postions on merit and who’ve abrogated to themselves the absolute right to tell the rest of us what to do. Miliband is the most currently prominent of these and is rumoured to be Blairs own personal choice to succeed him as party leader and prsumably PM. He’s certainly been throwing his weight around like someone whose political future is assured.
Hmm. Hereditary privilege, nepotism, authoritarianism, hubris, no real world experience…
Miliband and Chimpy should get along like a house on fire.
Read More: UK Politics, US Politics, Blair. Brown, Bush Prescott, Crap, Miliband, Labour Party leadership, Middle East, Lebanon
