AS I WAS SAYING
Brussels, the City, big business, even the police they'll all back the rule of Machiavelli Blair
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
'There are some political minds', wrote Michael Oakeshott, 'which give us a sense that they have passed through an elaborate education which was designed to initiate them into the traditions and achievements of their civilisations; the immediate impressions we have of them are impressions of cultivation; of the enjoy- ment of an inheritance [my italics].' This is not the immediate impression we get of Mr Blair, whose only claim to fame so far is to have betrayed his political inheritance. There can be no other way to describe what he has done, almost gleefully, with a smile on his face, to the Labour party.
He has transformed it out of all recogni- tion. He calls it New Labour, but that gives a profoundly misleading impression. More accurately it could now be called the Anti- Socialist party or, at best, just the New party. In all likelihood a change of name was considered and if such a change had been judged necessary to win the election, who can doubt it would have been made? But sensibly enough it was judged neces- sary, for that purpose, not to change it. So the name was retained not out of pride or affection but out of opportunism.
But it is the only part of the Labour inheri- tance that has been retained. The socialist ideology has been abandoned completely; not go much decently buried as contemptu- ously ground into the dust. As for the old Labour leaders, most of them did not have to be ground into the dust since anno domini had seen them off into a better place either in this world or the next. How convenient for Mr Blair. Instead of having to get rid of the old guard by a night of the long knives or some other kind of putsch, he was able to rely on natural causes to do his dirty work. Nevertheless the result has been the same. The next Labour government, if there is one, will not only have a wholly new set of anti- socialist policies but, except for an increas- ingly plastic-looking fig-leaf or two, a wholly new set of anti-socialist ministers as well. It took Mrs Thatcher a whole parliamentary term and a half to replace traditional Tory ministers, who enjoyed their inheritance, with new men willing to destroy it. Mr Blair will have a team of 'one of us' New Labour turncoats from the word go. Should we be worried? I am not quite sure. Indeed there is no way of being quite sure. The fact that many business leaders, including some newspaper proprietors, don't feel worried simply means that Mr Blair is not a socialist. But while that is something, it is not everything. After all, old Labour's sort of socialists, many of whom were the salt of the earth, were very far from being so bad that nothing could be worse. A lot of unprincipled, cynical, blue- suited New Labour spin doctors, much more fanatically devoted to the precepts of Machiavelli than ever old Labour was devoted to the precepts of Marx, could be very much worse. For unlike old Labour, which was deeply rooted in a rich inheritance and an even rich- er mythology, and thoroughly at home and at ease in traditional and time-honoured habits and customs, New Labour is starting again from scratch, its old folk memories erased, its old values renounced, its old men ignored and, above all, its old socialist compass, from which it used to take its bearings, thrown overboard. These are new men coming to power; men for whom the past seems only an encumbrance, ancestral voices a distraction, and rhythms and continuities more a hin- drance than a help. Of course such new men, wholly liberated from past restraints, should give cause for worry, not necessarily to busi- nessmen — for whom all dangers come only from the Left — but certainly to everyone else. Indeed inheriting a tabula rasa is what the proverbial man on the white horse dreams about.
Even to think about smiling Tony Blair in that role, on the face of it, on his face of it, seems far-fetched. But an Englishman on a white horse was never going to arrive look- ing the part. That was the mistake of Sir Oswald Mosley, another would-be Labour reformer's mistake: he did look the part. If he had dressed his supporters up in grey flannel trousers instead of black shirts (as one of them, Harold Nicolson, suggested he should) he might have done better; and better still if, instead of using the wealth and influence of Lord Rothermere — the Rupert Murdoch of his day — to help him start the new party he had used it instead to help him take over old Labour and bend it to his will. No, I am not suggesting that Mr
`I feel it's swung me to the don't knows.' Blair is a potential dictator, only that his methods are exactly those which a modern Machiavelli, knowing as much about the British as the Master did about the Floren- tines, might well have recommended.
Consider the prospect if Mr Blair wins. A new, highly disciplined and unprincipled non-socialist party, very much in Brussels's pocket, should have no difficulty in keeping the City and big business on its side. Nor would it have much cause to worry about the trade unions who might have consid- ered defecting to a one-nation-type Tory party but on no account to the present lot. Likewise with the chattering classes and the churches. I suppose Mr Blair might just overreach himself, in an effort to keep my friend Paul Johnson on side, by ordering the castration of homosexuals, but short of excesses of that order — which admittedly cannot be entirely ruled out — those pro- gressive constituencies are likely to go on finding him the lesser of two evils.
None of these sources of strength, how- ever, will amount to a row of beans com- pared to the support he can expect to receive from the European Union, particu- larly if — as seems certain — the Tory party in opposition topples over from Euro- scepticism to Europhobia. Brussels has all sorts of ways of helping co-operative national governments to look good and I do not doubt that these favours — amount- ing to a whole new dimension of patronage — will be as much lavished on Mr Blair as they have been denied to Mr Major. Previ- ous Labour governments have all lived in constant fear of being blown off course by the gnomes of Zurich and other capitalist enemies. That won't happen to Mr Blair, who can safely rely on fair winds from Brussels blowing him ever more deter- minedly on his way.
Last but by no means least, even before reaching Downing Street Mr Blair has squared the police. Old Labour govern- ments never had good relations with the police, naively believing that a commitment to social justice rendered superfluous a commitment to law and order. Worldly- wise Mr Blair, taking another leaf out of Mrs Thatcher's book, has no intention of repeating that mistake. Applied to old Labour and Mr Attlee, Churchill's jibe in the 1945 election about the Gestapo was ridiculous; so it would be if applied today to New Labour and Mr Blair, but, rather worryingly, very much less so.
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