Blair really thinks he is the Wizard of Oz
Matthew Norman says that the Prime Minister’s fixation with Australia is a badly neglected aspect of his flawed psychology With the clanging of the bell getting louder by the week, and no one needing to ask for whom it tolls, this is a bizarre time to start praising the Prime Minister for the honesty of his rhetoric. Yet when Tony Blair addressed the Australian parliament earlier this week, there was for once no doubting his sincerity.
Mr Blair initially flew to Melbourne with Cherie on a specially chartered Boeing 777 (will they never cease looking out for Johnny Taxpayer?) for the Commonwealth Games. Even if this was another of those pointless diversionary jaunts Mr Blair tends to make at times of intense domestic pressure — often pitching up in Africa in Saviour of The World mode for photo ops with cute children — the tone was different. This time, he was coming home.
After the closing hours of the Games, during which an English sprinter’s failure to pass the relay baton may have resonated with a neighbour back home, the Prime Minister went to Canberra. ‘Australia may not be in my blood,’ he told an admiring parliament, ‘but it surely is in my spirit. My earliest memories are Australian. From the age of two until five, I lived in Adelaide. I remember running errands for our neighbour, Mr Trederay, taking showers under the garden hose in the heat on the lawn, and being chased by magpies as I ran across the open ground near our home.
‘At uni,’ he went on (and as he slips into the local diminutive, you can almost hear the ocker twang), ‘I was re-introduced to religion by an Australian, Peter Thomson; and introduced to politics by another, Geoff Gallop. I’ve been back many times. I love the people, love the place, always have and always will. Australia is just a very special place to be.’ Even to those of us who would call the Speaking Clock for confirmation if Mr Blair gave us the time of day, this has the flavour of simple truth. He genuinely views Australia as what Men at Work, in their hard-hitting 1982 social analysis ‘Down Under’, referred to as ‘the land of plenty’. If that band took a more balanced view of their homeland — ‘I come from a land down under/ Where beer does flow and men chunder’ — Mr Blair sees only those parts of Australian culture (forgive the oxymoron) that interest the country’s tourist board.
‘I wrote a speech once about how Britain had to become a “young country”, and it was Australia I had in mind,’ he told the parliament, and here we touch on an aspect of Tony Blair’s borderline sociopathic Messiah complex that has been widely ignored for perhaps too long.
Mr Blair was 20 months old when the Blairs left for Australia. Indeed, the first recorded instance of the exhibitionism that has defined his life took place on the boat which took them to Adelaide. When the band struck up on the ocean liner Iberia’s maiden voyage, his father Leo reports that the toddler Tony ‘danced until his nappy fell down’.
How blissful the ensuing three years must have been for a small child, rewarded for errand-running with lashings of Mrs Trederay’s homemade lemonade and being chased by those birds (do magpies pursue human beings? Or is this is an instance of false memory syndrome, like his recollection of watching those other Magpies, Newcastle United, from a stand that had yet to be built?). Nevertheless, many people look back on early childhood with enormous fondness.
My first years were spent in Willesden, which seemed a place of wonderment to me then, running through the sprinklers, and sneaking out of the house to the sweetshop with sixpences pinched from my mother’s handbag. But, were I to become Labour leader, I flatter myself on having become well enough acquainted with the area’s problems in the intervening decades not to set out to remould the entire country in the image of Willesden Green.
For Mr Blair, after the brief spell at university and having been back for holidays, naturally knows better than the rest of us that Australia is the model to embrace. Here is that most tedious dinner-party companion, the sanctimonious bore who bangs on about how dreadful everything’s become over here in the UK — the filthy streets, the terrible schools, etc. — who announces that the minute the last child is finished with uni, he and Pamela are emigrating to Oz. Well, it’s all so clean over there, isn’t it, and all that space! Everyone surfs, they’ve never heard of asthma, the food’s unbelievable, and you can buy a beautiful bungalow in one of Brisbane’s best suburbs, with a pool and a couple of acres, for the price of a garage in Highbury Fields! Honestly, it’s quite beyond me why anyone in their right mind wants to stay in nasty, stinky old Britain when there’s heaven on earth to be had in Australia.
One can understand the charm of a country with no history for a man who regards any event before 1 May 1997 as, at best, an irrelevance and, at worst, an encumbrance. And so much the better if Australia has come to share his own distaste for the old world of Europe, gazing longingly over the Pacific, just as Mr Blair looks across the Atlantic towards big brother America.
Distanced by vast oceans from the rest of the developed world, as devoid of culture as of history, Australia’s sole method of establishing a global identity is winning at sport. ‘At the Commonwealth Games you once again showed the world the exuberance and sheer style that is modern Australia,’ Mr Blair schmoozed the Canberra parliament. ‘You also won rather more than the rest of us!’ Of course they did. The country with the closest parallel to the Australian sporting fixation is South Africa, and despite the public face of liberalism it boastfully presents, Australia is as close spiritually to an apartheid state as the democratic world knows today.
In the speech, Mr Blair spoke of British and Australian forces serving together in Afghanistan, and of how both countries have ‘long since gotten over [you gotta love that gotten; strewth, mate, another week in Oz an’ he’d be a fair dinkum larrikin] the fear that different ethnic groups damage our identity or put our cohesion at risk. Today we take pride in our diversity.’ Indeed we do. Five years ago, John Howard was in desperate electoral trouble when that Norwegian vessel entered Australian waters with a cargo of 400 refugees, mostly Afghans fleeing the Taleban. You will recall how Mr Howard refused those desperate souls asylum, finding Australia’s Gspot to win an election he had been certain to lose. So much for the empathy for the victims of Islamic theocracies on which Mr Blair also touched in the speech.
Normally one would ascribe his ability to spout such drivel with a straight face to his actorly skills, but in the case of his Rotarian passion for shiny, happy Australia it comes from the heart. Weighed down by the wilful ingratitude of a Britain that never showed any interest in being reborn as a young country, this frustrated midwife looks at the parched grass of the Outback and somehow finds it greener. It’s all there for him and Cherie when the time comes, just an unchartered Boeing 777 away.
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