One Long Trip (In a Space Shuttle)
I can’t stop thinking about the red deans! There is a
curious symmetry to their lives.
To the lives of Hewlett Johnson and Tony Blair, I mean – not
all of you will have read that last post. There is the preacher who dived into politics. And the politician who drowned himself
in religion… who knows how long Blair could have survived without Iraq, though
I think we can speculate on his future reputation had he not. Similar to that of a distant relative
who, if he’d never started a major war, may have been eulogised as the greatest
of chancellors - for a long boom throughout the course of his reign; and a
history of successful interventions that enhanced the power of the state; and
which had the support of most of the political class; though they were uneasy
about his thuggish cohorts and his anti-Semitism.[i] Who knows, history could have made him
Number One; although he would have struggled with Churchill (Pitt the Elder, it
seems, is on the way down).[ii] Of course he'd have to have left office by 2007, but I guess his talent smelling something in the air would have warned
him in time.
For Johnson God was not big enough. In a secular age, and what was more
secular than the communists with their promise of salvation through dialectical materialism, the biggest
players were human ones; and Stalin the biggest of all – he created a new
country in the 1930s. Living in
rising times and safe inside his own illusions, Hewlett’s world could not
collapse – he was dean for life –, and so he could preach on until the very
end. No conquering army was going
to obliterate the metropolises of his ideology.
In a post-modern age, an age of illusion and faith, and
where careers can be built on media spin and fantasy, it is no surprise to find
a politician wanting to expand beyond his material base, to reach higher
things… Everything is possible,
especially when you leave it to market forces; for as the power of politicians
reduces so their rhetoric expands, until their become salesmen for the new
millennium, built on debt and run by showbiz. And this may suggest the appeal of neo-liberalism. By giving up responsibility for the
economy, and outsourcing public utilities and services to private companies,
there is not much the politicians control. And so they turn on the taps of their rhetoric; and initiate
their foreign adventures (one area where the British state remains powerful),
creating fantasies on an enormous scale.
With such endless possibility Blair’s imagination took off; almost from
a standing start – he was like a Harrier Jump Jet in his ability to rise from
almost total ignorance of a country to a belief in saving it. [iii]
He fell like Icarus.
Unlike the dean Blair could not live long on his beliefs
alone, weak as they were, and based
mostly on himself. The hard
facts of political life quickly smashed through the flimsy doors of his
self-built church. Although like
Hewlett he is a born preacher, and cannot give up delivering his evangelical
message: to the power hungry and the power mad, to the converted and the
hopelessly innocent. It pays well
too… Something else he shares with
Johnson, although the dean inherited his wealth. Money, it seems, the best way to reach heaven – by leaving the earth, and its mundane concerns, its actual causes and
its real people, behind. All
aboard to Hayek and Mill! Two new
planets our PR agents have created.
Places where all our dreams will come
true….
[i] “Six hundred members [of the Nazi party] voluntarily
sent in their autobiographies. The
astonishing fact is that sixty per cent of these Nazis never mentioned
antisemitism at all. Some even
expressly dissociated themselves from this aspect of party policy: ‘It
quickened my pulse to hear about the Fatherland, unity and the need for a
supreme leader. I felt that I
belonged to these people. Only their
statements about the Jews I could not swallow. They gave me a headache even after I had joined the
party.’” (Norman Cohn, Warrant
for Genocide)
It
should hardly need saying that in most respects there is no comparison at all
between them. Blair himself does
not appear to be racist, although his social authoritarianism and his support
for the War on Terror has indirectly encouraged anti-Arab racism, a contemporary
form of anti-Semitism. See my Tantrum for an example from the most impeccable of liberal
sources.
[iii] John Kampfner makes this point in his book: before he
became Prime Minister he had no interest in foreign policy (Blair’s
Wars).
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