Ah, what it is to have the gift of self-awareness, and how we pity those without it. Tony Blair got off the phone to his friend Muammar Gaddafi and reported that the Libyan leader was delusional and could not face reality. He did not understand that the people had put up with him for long enough and it was time to stand aside for a new leader. I suppose we should be grateful that Tone didn’t use the RAF or mustard gas when he was of a similar mindset.
The Blair-Gaddafi business, the criticisms of the former New Labour regime for its ‘cosy’ relationship with the psychopathic Arab fruitcake, have attacked the right people for the wrong reason. Blair’s narcissistic desperation to be seen as a statesman with a larger role abroad than Britain deserves was almost always wrong-headed and was ultimately disastrous — and we’ll come to that later. But cajoling Gaddafi to come in from the cold and renounce whatever weapons programmes he was working on was rational, pragmatic and surely to be applauded. Better that than another invasion with hundreds of thousands dead and al-Qa’eda sniggering in the wings, poised to step in.
But it was the other stuff, the peripheral stuff, that demeaned our government and by extension our country. It is fine to bribe or strong-arm a lunatic like Gaddafi if it achieves the ends we desire and does not harm his people; it is not right to be his best mate and take holidays with him, as Peter Mandelson did, or to use your relationship with him for personal financial gain, as Blair has done. That’s filthy and should be truly shocking to all of us. It has long been a belief of mine that almost all of the manifest evil in the world has Peter Mandelson somewhere at the heart of it — floods, pestilence, plague, annihilation etc — and sure enough, there he is enjoying a grouse shoot with Gaddafi’s smug, puffed-up idiot of a son, Saif al Islam, back in 2009. Or partying with him at a villa in Corfu.
Mandelson seems to have no moral compass whatsoever; if they are rich and powerful, he will happily hang out with them, no matter how corrupt or despotic or deranged they might be, no matter how many people they have consigned to misery. For Mandelson — surely the most morally bereft politician to have held office since Tom Driberg, whatever his talents — it is enough that they have, through inherited wealth, or hastily acquired wealth, or outright thuggery, achieved some form of power, and therefore the normal rules do not apply.
For Mandelson, like Blair, these revolting people stride the world stage and are therefore revolting but serious people, people like them — not ordinary people like the rest of us. There is no apology from Mandelson for his mateyness with the vile Saif, no apology from Blair for the vast sums of money he has accrued from the investment bank JP Morgan as a consequence of his friendship — that’s what Gaddafi calls it — with the dictator. They don’t apologise because they don’t understand why it is wrong. They think it is par for the course for people like them.
But then there’s the other issue, which is that of Blair’s world vision, his conception of the world and, in particular, the Middle East. It is a pleasant, if typically narcissistic, vision — and of course, as we have discovered time after time, fantastically wrong on a sort of epic and magnificent level. Speaking shortly after he’d had a word with Muammar (for the benefit of the world, natch), Blair said he understood the Middle East now better than he had ever done when he was prime minister. I suppose this is as close as he will get to an admission that he was pig ignorant about the region when he led our country and that the invasion of Iraq was an almost perfect example of this.
Certainly I cannot think of anyone — not even Dappy from NDubz, or the attractive actress Anne Hathaway — who would be a less competent envoy for the Middle East, as Blair became when at last he had been booted out of Downing Street. His geopolitical analysis was, and probably still is, simplistic and arrogant; a messianic liberal evangelism which cleaved to the notion that everyone in the world wanted exactly what we want and that given the chance, with the removal of despots and mad mullahs, this is what the people of the Middle East would go for.
This accounts for his palpable surprise when Iraq descended into religiously fuelled civil war, rather than a very real debate about whether or not AV was the appropriate form of governance for the new democracy. It accounted for his shock and surprise when Hamas won the Palestinian elections back in 2006, an outcome which prompted him to suggest that perhaps they should have another vote quite soon and elect someone different. He was similarly discomfited by the 2005 Iranian elections when the population went for Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Indeed, every time that Arab people are allowed into a polling booth — which isn’t terribly often, accepted — they do precisely the opposite of what Tony Blair wants or expects. And his reaction is the same every time — that they must have gerrymandered the results somehow and even if they haven’t then we shouldn’t take any notice of the result. Because the only form of democracy which Blair will entertain is one which is in absolute accord with his own political beliefs; secular, liberal, nice to homosexuals. But there is not the remotest shred of evidence to suggest that the people in the Middle East actually want that sort of democracy.
Offer ends in:
