red indian
2nd Level Yellow Feather
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Caught between Brummie and Rummie
By Boris Johnson
(Filed: 13/03/2003)
Whoa, steady on there Gordon. Keep the champagne on ice, my fellow Tories. I am not sure we are quite at the glorious moment when the Blair people carrier pulls out of Downing Street for the last time.
I may be wrong, but I fancy the wondrous Carole Caplin, nude masseuse and aromatherapy fiend, can count on people-oriented work at Number 10 for some time to come. They won't get Blair this month, or next month, or the one after that. He will still be Prime Minister this time next year.
And yet something has changed in the political weather; a great, slow-building thundercloud of Labour unease has finally broken, and one day, in a manner we cannot foresee, the inundations may carry him away.
It is a quite stunning testament to Tony Blair's weakness that Clare Short should still be in the Cabinet. Sometimes, during the Tory years, ministers were known to brief privately against the Prime Minister.
But never did a minister say anything so disparaging, so contemptuous, so diametrically opposed to the government's central purpose on Radio 4 and remain in office. After all his efforts to win round the public, to gain the backing of suspicious mums on prime-time television, Clare Short told the nation that her boss was being "reckless" with our future.
All that televangelising; all that clench-thumbed, furrowed-brow, trust-me beseechings - and the response of Clare Short, the implacable Cherokee-cheeked Brummie? Blair was being reckless with his party, with the country and with his own career.
Just as he is reeling from this insult, what reward does he get from the Americans for his superloyal poodling? How does the Pentagon say thank you to Tony for being its unpaid global PR man? Donald Rumsfeld, in a fit of superb crassness, says that the British Armed Forces are magnificent, but not absolutely necessary. We are, in truth, a glorified figleaf for American might.
As he looks between them, Rummie on the one side, Brummie on the other, Blair is placed in an appalling dilemma. He cannot possibly allow America to go it alone. Not only would it be deeply worrying to see the untrammelled and unmediated deployment of American force overseas; it would be an abject humiliation for Blair.
What is he supposed to do? Fly out to the Gulf, stand on top of a Wombat, and tell thousands of loyal British troops that they must come home because Clare Short won't hear of them fighting? And yet if he does go to war, with America but without a second UN resolution, he faces a revolt of unknowable severity.
Already the parliamentary bag-carriers are resigning from posts that no one knew they had in the first place. Clare will eventually discover her principles and follow. Robin Cook, who has long been muttering his opposition in a consonant-munching way, may be the next. One by one the graphite rods of restraint will be removed from the nuclear pile of the Labour Party, and the whole thing could go critical.
All prime ministers have a kind of pivotal moment. Until that moment, they carry all before them; after it, one subject never goes away, and that subject is "leadership". For Mrs Thatcher it was Westland in 1986. For John Major it was the ERM disaster.
There are reprieves, and remissions, but the problem is sown on their back benches, and it never entirely vanishes. It doesn't matter that Blair is right about Iraq; it doesn't matter that he will win, and he will deserve to win. What has changed is the way he is seen by his own side.
Blair is now locked in an amazing battle with Jacques Chirac, in which two highly skilled political operators are essentially trying to finish the other off. For my own money, there is something nauseating about the French veto.
Chirac isn't interested in the suffering of the people of Iraq. He isn't interested in upholding the UN. He doesn't seem to care about removing a blood-soaked tyrant from Baghdad. If he did care, he would be doing everything in his power to convince the Mesopotamian madman that the UN really is determined to enforce resolution 1441, and so to avert war.
But Chirac is actuated by a simple, spiteful, dog-in-the-mangerish antiAmericanism. He dislikes the fact of American power, even though France, like every other EU country, refuses to spend enough on defence to offer the slightest alternative.
He brandishes the veto not to save the Iraqis, but so that France may have her moment in the international spotlight, and so that a 70-year-old opportunist, who is only protected from criminal investigation by presidential privilege, may drape himself in the raiment of principle. If and when the French finally come round, as they normally do, it would be nice if we could think of some way of keeping their noses from the trough.
This time, when France decides to agree, in return for massive deals for Elf-Aquitaine and Fina-Total, why don't we tell them to get lost?
The Americans are so disgusted with the French that a national campaign is under way to rename "French fries", and call them "freedom fries". Wouldn't it be marvellous if the Americans finally saw sense, by the way, and called them "chips"?
Blair is so popular in America that he could probably achieve this with a passionate appeal for transatlantic verbal unity, on the subject of chipped fried potatoes, in one prime-time Fox TV interview; and that is precisely why he is so unpopular with his anti-American back benches.
I don't know how he will get out of the current impasse. But as I squint ahead, I dimly see, amid much tribulation, a victory, the end of Saddam, great Iraqi rejoicing and vindication. And will the Labour Party love him again, for having proved them silly and wrong?
That is to misunderstand human psychology. They will wait, and seethe, and trust to events to provide them with another provocation. Top-up fees, foundation hospitals, the failure of public service reforms: the opportunity will come.
Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator
Compare and contrast, minimum 5000 words on my desk monday week!
By Boris Johnson
(Filed: 13/03/2003)
Whoa, steady on there Gordon. Keep the champagne on ice, my fellow Tories. I am not sure we are quite at the glorious moment when the Blair people carrier pulls out of Downing Street for the last time.
I may be wrong, but I fancy the wondrous Carole Caplin, nude masseuse and aromatherapy fiend, can count on people-oriented work at Number 10 for some time to come. They won't get Blair this month, or next month, or the one after that. He will still be Prime Minister this time next year.
And yet something has changed in the political weather; a great, slow-building thundercloud of Labour unease has finally broken, and one day, in a manner we cannot foresee, the inundations may carry him away.
It is a quite stunning testament to Tony Blair's weakness that Clare Short should still be in the Cabinet. Sometimes, during the Tory years, ministers were known to brief privately against the Prime Minister.
But never did a minister say anything so disparaging, so contemptuous, so diametrically opposed to the government's central purpose on Radio 4 and remain in office. After all his efforts to win round the public, to gain the backing of suspicious mums on prime-time television, Clare Short told the nation that her boss was being "reckless" with our future.
All that televangelising; all that clench-thumbed, furrowed-brow, trust-me beseechings - and the response of Clare Short, the implacable Cherokee-cheeked Brummie? Blair was being reckless with his party, with the country and with his own career.
Just as he is reeling from this insult, what reward does he get from the Americans for his superloyal poodling? How does the Pentagon say thank you to Tony for being its unpaid global PR man? Donald Rumsfeld, in a fit of superb crassness, says that the British Armed Forces are magnificent, but not absolutely necessary. We are, in truth, a glorified figleaf for American might.
As he looks between them, Rummie on the one side, Brummie on the other, Blair is placed in an appalling dilemma. He cannot possibly allow America to go it alone. Not only would it be deeply worrying to see the untrammelled and unmediated deployment of American force overseas; it would be an abject humiliation for Blair.
What is he supposed to do? Fly out to the Gulf, stand on top of a Wombat, and tell thousands of loyal British troops that they must come home because Clare Short won't hear of them fighting? And yet if he does go to war, with America but without a second UN resolution, he faces a revolt of unknowable severity.
Already the parliamentary bag-carriers are resigning from posts that no one knew they had in the first place. Clare will eventually discover her principles and follow. Robin Cook, who has long been muttering his opposition in a consonant-munching way, may be the next. One by one the graphite rods of restraint will be removed from the nuclear pile of the Labour Party, and the whole thing could go critical.
All prime ministers have a kind of pivotal moment. Until that moment, they carry all before them; after it, one subject never goes away, and that subject is "leadership". For Mrs Thatcher it was Westland in 1986. For John Major it was the ERM disaster.
There are reprieves, and remissions, but the problem is sown on their back benches, and it never entirely vanishes. It doesn't matter that Blair is right about Iraq; it doesn't matter that he will win, and he will deserve to win. What has changed is the way he is seen by his own side.
Blair is now locked in an amazing battle with Jacques Chirac, in which two highly skilled political operators are essentially trying to finish the other off. For my own money, there is something nauseating about the French veto.
Chirac isn't interested in the suffering of the people of Iraq. He isn't interested in upholding the UN. He doesn't seem to care about removing a blood-soaked tyrant from Baghdad. If he did care, he would be doing everything in his power to convince the Mesopotamian madman that the UN really is determined to enforce resolution 1441, and so to avert war.
But Chirac is actuated by a simple, spiteful, dog-in-the-mangerish antiAmericanism. He dislikes the fact of American power, even though France, like every other EU country, refuses to spend enough on defence to offer the slightest alternative.
He brandishes the veto not to save the Iraqis, but so that France may have her moment in the international spotlight, and so that a 70-year-old opportunist, who is only protected from criminal investigation by presidential privilege, may drape himself in the raiment of principle. If and when the French finally come round, as they normally do, it would be nice if we could think of some way of keeping their noses from the trough.
This time, when France decides to agree, in return for massive deals for Elf-Aquitaine and Fina-Total, why don't we tell them to get lost?
The Americans are so disgusted with the French that a national campaign is under way to rename "French fries", and call them "freedom fries". Wouldn't it be marvellous if the Americans finally saw sense, by the way, and called them "chips"?
Blair is so popular in America that he could probably achieve this with a passionate appeal for transatlantic verbal unity, on the subject of chipped fried potatoes, in one prime-time Fox TV interview; and that is precisely why he is so unpopular with his anti-American back benches.
I don't know how he will get out of the current impasse. But as I squint ahead, I dimly see, amid much tribulation, a victory, the end of Saddam, great Iraqi rejoicing and vindication. And will the Labour Party love him again, for having proved them silly and wrong?
That is to misunderstand human psychology. They will wait, and seethe, and trust to events to provide them with another provocation. Top-up fees, foundation hospitals, the failure of public service reforms: the opportunity will come.
Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator
Compare and contrast, minimum 5000 words on my desk monday week!
