SHARED OPINION

The compromising photographs that reveal Mr Blair's youthful indiscretions

FRANK JOHNSON

r Geoffrey Robinson is letting it be known to friends that he is in possession of photographs . . . seeing a Cabinet minis- ter . .. compromising position . . . not going at it hammer and tongs .. . but pretty clear what is going on.' But the Sunday Tittles did not go on to report who this senior Cabinet minister was.

How feeble. Why should the paper be Content just with innuendo? It is perfectly obvious who it is. Stands to reason. Could only be one man. After all, it certainly isn't a woman. The name sprang to the lips of every reader on Sunday morning. Positively leapt off the page. The senior Cabinet min- ister is, of course, Mr Blair. Mr Robinson has pictures of Mr Blair when he was a socialist. We all know about the Prime Minister's past, though he now carries on as if we do not. It is only on the BBC that you are not allowed to mention it. Most of us assume that it is true. It is just that we are adult about it. We do not think it matters.

Compromising position? Mr Blair has been adopting compromising positions throughout his career. He is only Prime Minister because he compromised with any voter opposed to higher taxes, which is almost the entire middle class apart from the Liberal Democrats. He compromised with the Sun. He is now compromising with Sinn Fein. But it is the nature of Mr Blair's Youthful compromising, depicted in the Photographs allegedly possessed by Mr Robinson, which is embarrassing to Mr Blair all these years later.

Mr Blair does not want the middle class to know that he once compromised with socialism. Anything but that. Perhaps the Photographs depict the Mr Blair of the early Eighties when he wore a CND badge. Or when fighting the 1983 general election on the then Labour manifesto advocating withdrawal from the European Union. Per- haps the photographs are, indeed, 'not explicit'. It has sometimes been said that he was never a CND member; he just wore the badge. And plenty of politicians fight gen- eral elections on manifestos with not all of which they agree. But it must be 'pretty clear what is going on'.

What was going on was that in the early Eighties you had to pretend you were a socialist in order to get on in the Labour party. Mr Blair may not have gone at it hammer and tongs with those socialists but it was obvious that some sort of relation- ship existed. He convinced them that he was that way inclined. Otherwise, in those days, they would not have made him a Labour candidate.

If such indeed is what these photographs depict, the obvious suspect for having dis- closed them is Mr Charlie Whelan. But one cannot exclude Mr Livingstone. He is him- self a practising socialist. He is to socialism what Mr Peter Tatchell is to homosexuality. Just as some homosexuals seek to convince us that a large proportion of men are, or have been, homosexual, so Mr Livingstone is perhaps one of those socialists who seek to convince us that socialism is perfectly normal. And that many men are that way inclined. The hypocrisy, as Mr Livingstone would see it, is when they abandon it once they have married, have children of school age, or become prime minister. It is because Mr Livingstone has such beliefs that Mr Blair is determined to stop him becoming Labour candidate for London mayor. Aha! There we have Mr Livingstone's motive.

Dr Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War, published about a year ago, is now out in paperback from Penguin. Although it is almost new, it already has the air about it of being a subversive classic. It is one of those books, like almost the entire output of A.J.P. Taylor, about which it can be said that whether or not we are persuaded by it is irrelevant. Books by which we are per- suaded come out all the time. In any case, a book's function should not always be to reinforce what we already think, but to make us think.

Dr Ferguson does this, among other things, on the subject of whether Britain should have gone to war with Germany in 1914. He thinks we should not have. Ger- many's violation of Belgian neutrality he dismisses as Britain's pretext. He quotes Churchill, Lloyd George and Sir John French, chief of the imperial general staff, as saying in the 1900s that, in the event of

it was fine— how was a for you?'

war with Germany, we would have to vio- late Belgian neutrality ourselves. 'In other words, if Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality in 1914, Britain would have,' Dr Ferguson roundly concludes.

Some of us will not be persuaded that Britain would have. We suspect that whatev- er British politicians and generals said before the event may have been different from what they would have done in the event. Then they would have had to worry about what the rest of the world and the nation would think. Not that this detracts from Dr Ferguson's book.

Another rare thing is that the book makes you want to know the author's opinion on related subjects that he does not go into much, so interesting is he on everything else. And it is for this last reason that I particular- ly mention the book now. For I mentioned one such subject here recently: that 1936 Churchill quotation to an American journal- ist — unmentioned in Sir Martin Gilbert's official biography — saying that the United States's 1917 intervention in the war was a disaster. It prevented a compromise peace, Churchill said, and thus led to communism and Nazism, to Lenin and Hitler. Had he been speaking after 1939-45, he presumably would have added the Holocaust.

The argument usually used against all this is that no American intervention would have led not to a compromise peace, but to a German victory. The military thinker J.F.C. Fuller, in whose Decisive Battles of the West- ern World I came across the Churchill quota- tion, denied that. 'Had not public opinion, raised by propaganda to white heat, forced Wilson [American president] to take the fateful step, now that Russia was four-fifths out of the war and Germany thereby free to

concentrate her forces against France, it is nearly certain that, without American sup- port, France and Great Britain would have been forced on the defensive, that Germany would have failed to break their front deci- sively, and that because the British Admiral- ty, by introducing convoying at sea, began to master the submarine, a negotiated peace would have been agreed with the United States as referee before Lenin could have got into the saddle.'

Herewith an even more subversive thought: that even if Fuller was wrong, and Germany would have won — since a Ger- man victory would have meant no Hitler that also would have been preferable.