Showing posts with label John Major. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Major. Show all posts

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Blair is back, and Miliband will have to deal with it



If being Prime Minister is inevitably the toughest job in British politics, then being a former Prime Minister is surely not that far behind.

Of the three surviving bearers of the title, the only one who has made anything approaching a decent fist of it over the course of recent years is that much under-rated figure, Sir John Major.

I will never forget his quiet dignity in defeat on that bright May morning in 1997 when he spoke of curtains falling and actors leaving the stage before going off to watch some cricket at The Oval.

And he has continued to be dignity personified throughout the ensuing years, never once succumbing to the temptation to criticise any of his many successors as Tory leader and only ever intervening in a way helpful to his own party.

In this, Sir John was determined not to follow the example of his predecessor Margaret Thatcher, who made clear her own intentions shortly after he succeeded her by declaring her skill at back-seat driving.

The Iron Lady, who was finally laid to rest this week, clearly found being an ex-Prime Minister rather harder to come to terms with than the actual job itself.

So, it seems, has Gordon Brown.  When he lost the premiership in 2010, those of us who still counted ourselves among his admirers hoped he would rebuild his reputation by becoming a good constituency MP and backbench elder statesman.

Unfortunately, he has veered off into the biggest political sulk since Edward Heath’s, barely ever turning up at the Commons and, save for a rather self-justificatory attack on Rupert Murdoch, saying almost nothing of any value since leaving Number Ten.

But the former Prime Minister whose post-Downing Street career provides the greatest fascination, for me at any rate, is surely Tony Blair.

Aged just 54 when he left office in 2007, it was never remotely likely that the former Sedgefield MP would go gently into that good night as Sir John had done ten years earlier, and some sort of comeback was always on the cards.

For a time, this looked likely to be at European level, with the presidency of the European Council of Ministers the most obvious potential destination.

But thwarted in that ambition by the surprise elevation of Herman van Rompuy, his attentions have turned back to domestic politics and, specifically, the future of the Labour Party.

Mr Blair took to the pages of Labour house journal The New Statesman to warn party leader Ed Miliband that his opposition to welfare reform and spending cuts risked reducing Labour to a party of protest.

In another recent intervention, he declared that the result of the last election would have been closer had he still been leader, thereby implying that the party’s chances of winning in 2015 depend on the extent to which it stays true to his legacy.

This, incidentally, is poppycock.  Whatever Mr Brown’s failings, had Mr Blair gone on and on and attempted to win a fourth consecutive term in the teeth of a recession,  and with the baggage of Iraq still hung around his shoulders, he would have gone down to a landslide of 1997 proportions.

But no matter.  Blair is back, and it is clear that the younger Miliband had better get used to the fact.

For now, the party leader’s stock response has been to turn Mr Blair’s own revisionist methodology against him, saying:  “Tony Blair taught us the world changes. The world does change and we will learn our lessons."

But while this is undoubtedly true, he will eventually have to explain in much more detail how the Labour Party under his leadership has responded to those changes.

Over the past couple of weeks, Prime Minister David Cameron has had to suffer the inevitable unhelpful comparisons with an illustrious predecessor who won three straight election victories where he could only manage a hung Parliament.

Mr Miliband’s chances of going one better may well depend on how far, if at all, he can escape from Mr Blair’s long shadow.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

A tale of three Prime Ministers

Shortly after Rupert Murdoch sacked him as editor of The Times in 1982, the great newspaperman Harold Evans wrote a book about his experiences which he both hoped and believed would devastate the Australian media mogul.

‘Good Times, Bad Times’ remains a classic of its kind and is still pretty much essential reading for anyone wanting to enter our profession, but if the truth be told, its political impact was far more limited than its author had envisaged.

Over the ensuing decades, Murdoch’s continuing accretion of power over the UK media became by and large a subject of interest only to a few left-wing mavericks, with governments of both colours content to indulge the News International chief in the hope of winning his papers’ backing.

Then came the phone hacking affair, propelling the ‘Murdoch question’ to the centre of national debate to the point where it now threatens to eviscerate the entire UK political and media establishment.

This week’s hearings of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards might be termed a tale of three Prime Ministers, each one giving a subtly differing account of his dealings with the Murdoch empire.

Of the three, Sir John Major - who once promised to create a nation at ease with itself - was the only one who looked remotely close to being at ease with himself.

Actually his most intriguing revelation was not about Mr Murdoch at all but the man who defeated him in that 1997 election landslide.

Sir John’s estimation that Tony Blair was “in many ways to the right” of him seems to confirm my long-held suspicion that Tory governments seeking to reach out to the centre-left end up being more progressive than Labour ones which seek to appease the right.

Unlike Sir John, who admitted he cared too much about what the papers wrote about him, Gordon Brown claimed he barely even looked at them during his two and a half years in 10 Downing Street.

This was one of many scarcely believable claims which, taken together, served to undermine the credibility of what otherwise might have constituted a powerful body of evidence.

Mr Brown effectively accused Mr Murdoch of having lied to the inquiry about a 2009 conversation in which the former PM was alleged to have threatened to “declare war” on News International.

Cabinet office records appear to bear out Mr Brown’s version of events, but claiming he had nothing to do with the plot to force Mr Blair out of office might lead some to conclude he is a less than reliable witness.

The contributions from Messrs Major and Brown contained much that will be of interest to future historians, and may yet have a significant bearing on Lord Justice Leveson’s eventual recommendations.

But in terms of the impact on present-day politics, the key session of the week came on Thursday as David Cameron took the stand.

For such a renowned PR man he seemed very ill at ease, perhaps unsurprisingly given the excruciating contents of the text messages which he exchanged with News International boss Rebekah Brooks.

To his credit, though, Mr Cameron did not attempt to shy away from the responsibility for some of his more controversial actions, admitting that he was “haunted” by the decision to make former News of the World editor Andy Coulson his communications chief.

For me, the party leader who emerged with the least credit from the week was not Mr Cameron but Nick Clegg, whose decision to abstain in the vote over Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s future looked like the worst kind of gesture politics.

If they really wanted to see an independent investigation carried out into Mr Hunt’s role in handling the BSKyB bid, they would have voted with Labour, but this was no more than a cynical exercise in political positioning.

In Journal political editor Will Green’s excellent analysis of the state of the Liberal Democrats in the North-East published earlier this week, Gateshead Lib Dem councillor Ron Beadle was quoted as saying that Mr Clegg would not lead his party into the next election.

Party loyalists aside, it is becoming harder and harder to find anyone prepared to dispute that assertion.