By Richard Cottrell:
Just when you thought it was safe to take the short cut home through the churchyard after the midnight chimes, the news comes through that Tony Blair has risen from the ranks of the politically dead.
The Bomber of Baghdad announces that he is to make a re-entry into British earth space, like an astronaut coming home after eons touring the stars.
The consequences are, as of yet, unknown. We did not even know where he intends to land his spacecraft. Perhaps it will be on the lawns of one of his graceful mansions. Perhaps in Parliament Square, alongside the statue of another great British dictator, the puritan Oliver Cromwell.
Unless he plans to dispense with the services of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in her jubilee year, then there is no obvious throne offering sufficient grandeur and power within the British political system to twin with Blair’s gargantuan ego.
He is the black hole of the British public landscape, into which knowledge, judgment, information, sense of proportion, the simple ability to grasp facts, are swallowed wholesale, never to be seen again.
As prime minister he never learnt how to use a mobile phone – or a computer. He discovered the miracle of the text message just recently.
But he was certainly smart enough to market his grotesque political record for £250,000 after-dinner speeches.
I was fortunate to study at close quarters what we might learn from Blair’s physical performance at such affairs in the Polish capital Warsaw, just before the invasion of Iraq. He was there addressing a conference on the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty, which he scarcely mentioned.
I was fascinated by the continual revolving motions of his right hand, as though he was describing the orbit of the planets (either that or cleaning a window), the strange immobile grin, the peculiar fixation to display his perfectly manicured teeth, and the equally unsettling flexing of his facial expressions.
Taken together they strongly suggest someone who is in a constant state of semi-religious fervor in which he is the idol of something close to the purveyor of absolute wisdom.
The eyes, as many others have noticed, are truly weird, like gimlet holes that lead to probably to an uninhabited mental consciousness, the furniture covered up with white sheets.
I left with the firm impression of a messianic guru who is capable of repetitively preaching a personality cult which has no contextual roots in any recognizable culture or society. When other listeners were discussing his speech afterwards, no-one could remember with any exact precision what he had actually said.
But whatever it was, they thought that he had said it well. My wife, who also witnessed the performance, suspected he possessed a self-deluding belief in his magical powers to mesmerize an audience.
I caught a short glimpse of him rushing off to the airport in the Polish PM’s limousine, holding this individual in rapt attention with the same circular penciling motions of his hand.
In office, Blair never displayed any fixed point of gravity. He himself said he could have joined either the Tories or the Labour party with equanimity. It was this sheer non-ism of his personality and political culture that granted him the precious gift to elude defeat for so many years.
Perhaps this is the same brand that intends to market once again following his homecoming.
He will find it hard going. Apparently Blair’s advisers (the tag ‘Bliar’ is still in popular currency) think that voters have forgiven him for the invasion of Iraq on false pretences or forgotten all about it.
In any saloon bar however, you will discover very quickly that Blair, or Bliar as preferred, is regarded with the same fondness accorded to the Grim Reaper.
So whatever coronation that he has in mind, an electoral connotation is out of the question. Besides there is no obvious sit vac.
This leads us to job-search a post which is expressly political but does not actually employ that term.
I suspect the long arm of Rupert Murdoch may have beckoned Blair from his non-ist (and non-result) job as the Quartet (the foursome linking the EU, US, UN, Russia) peacemaker envoy in the Middle East.
There is urgency here. Murdoch’s operations in the UK are in truly fabulous disarray, thanks to industrial-scale editorial phone-hacking operations that touched on thousands of eavesdropped individuals in all walks of life, including the parents of a murdered child.
Murdoch was forced into the humiliation of closing his flagship red top News of the World, in search of redemption for the sins of his employees. It didn’t wash.
Rebekah Brooks, flame-haired former News International chief executive, has been arrested and charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
News International executives, including Murdoch’s younger son James, have been hauled before a parliamentary inquiry, exhaustively grilled and in all practical terms humiliated concerning how they much knew personally about the wire-tapping scandal.
Of course the Murdochs have been strutting around doing as they please since Margaret Thatcher’s reign. Murdoch senior has frequently boasted of his powers to make and unmake British governments.
David Cameron, who may yet be compelled to resign over the extent of his closeness to the Murdochs, behaved as sycophantically as all his predecessors.
‘The dirty digger,’ as the Australian-born patriarch is known in the UK (a reference to the convict origins of Oz) flattered and cosseted Blair throughout his years in the premiership, jetting him to crowd-worshipping convocations of Newscorp executives to retail the joys of political cross-dressing (i.e., one-party government).
Murdoch’s pressing mission is to recover from and then bury the phone-hacking catastrophe, a role for which the ultimate non-ist Blair would be perfectly tailored.
Of course Blair himself will be looking at the pay check with close attention. After all the great non-ist who entered Downing Street as a middling barrister, quickly acquired a fortune estimated at about £20 million once he retired from active politics.
Any Newscorp position would not be confined to drawing circles in the air. Murdoch has lost none of his determination to control the direction of British politics. What better man for the job than Blair, who would find himself in the envious position of chief superintendent of British politics without having to dirty his hands with the machinery.
I think that is what Blair himself is telling us with that curious phrase that he intends to ‘re-engage’ with domestic politics.
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