Tony Blair was Bad

Old Saws and New Maxims

It is tedious to re-litigate settled debates but then mankind, as a whole, is tedious. The chariot of moral progress is ever sliding backwards into the mud. The world-changing personalities point the way to new heavens, while the vast, doltish majority suffer a perpetual confusion only interrupted by the illumination of force. So, I apologise to many readers of this newspaper for whom the sins of B.liar are old news, they ought to be old news for everyone but a growing number of commentators are, out of a misaimed search for a foil to Starmerism, perpetuating dangerous revisionism vis a vis New Labour which must be stamped out.

Blair the man was born into comfortable wealth and displayed no natural advantages outside of it, he coasted through public school and Oxford. His overwhelming ambition for the first 30 years of his life was to be Mick Jagger. This was not an intellectual or politically ambitious man. Peter Hitchens relates an anecdote of seeming veracity in which, on encountering Blair at a train station, the conversation led naturally to the Premier’s novel discovery that the language of Brazil is not Spanish. It was Cherie Blair who was the political one (and genuinely intelligent, topped her bar exams) and it is telling that Blair only gets selected for Beaconsfield after Cherie fails her own application to a Labour safe seat. Cherie moved in the London municipal government/legal circles in which the ideology which would dominate early 21st century Britain was formulated. It was an intensely reactionary brand of moral sentimentalism in which a new religion would be foisted on secular society; a gospel of bankruptcy popular only when it became obvious state socialism had failed. The 1960s was over, the old fighters were all middle-aged, poor and embittered in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.