Tony Blair and the Ideal Type

J.H. Grainger was reader in Political Science at the Australian National University and author of Character and Style in English Politics (CUP).

"Tony Blair and the Ideal Type can be summed up as arguing that Blair is a self-serving shit." Culture Wars

"Grainger has a good grasp of British politics and political history, and an unusual familiarity with the words and deeds of Blair and New Labour"  Edward P. Echin   Fourth World Review
 

The New Labour party that triumphed at the General Election of 1997 exhaled the lost promise of politics but steered clear of specific political promises. What it brought forth were not programmes but broad intentions. From the beginning it was presented as the lengthening shadow of one man, Tony Blair, possessed of superior ‘values’ and general ideas of all kinds. Grounded therefore neither in intellectual theory nor in history but in a longing for ‘things to be different’, dedicated to ‘modernity’ in culture, social and political structure and, above all, in the conduct of politics itself, the project of New Labour, with echoes from both the defunct Social Democratic Party and the small but extant Liberal Democrat Party, stood for co-operation not conflict among competing political parties, amity not enmity in society. In the arrangements of politics Blair despised the wisdom of the ancients, disparaged the ‘ages’ hard-bought gain’ or what Attlee, a very different politician, had once called ‘the mess of centuries’.

It is indeed, at first sight, surprising to find this passion for making things new — for pitting what turned out to be this simple political or utilitarian rationalism against what had been used and proved over time — by one who in some ways appeared to be a political romantic. For romanticism, we learn, lies not in the object contemplated, the individual, the age, the venture, the departure, the victory or the project, but in the subject himself using what ‘occasions’ are available or conjurable to create from wish or dream imagined ‘realities’, alternatives to those which diurnally persist. From such displacement politics moves to a higher plane on which harmony ensues. Whether or not in the Weltanschauung of, say, Blair all innovations, transformations and departures are reconciled within his romantic self or there persist anomalies, disjunctions and contradictions, there can be little doubt about the eclecticism of his conduct or politics. As prime actor and mover his states of mind observe no frontiers. At the same time it seems that he is utterly convinced of his own chameleonically derived insights into his own times and the validity of his political judgments. He is unlikely to concur with the perception of Hans Georg Gadamer that:
 

The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.

‘Blairism’ was to consist of the development of a moment for renewal, political, social and spiritual. As in 1906 and 1945, ‘the people’ were persuaded that something was happening. Yet Blair was a leader qualitatively other than either Campbell- Bannerman or Attlee. Throughout his campaign from Labour leadership to the Election, his appeal was to the emergent; he was the chosen vehicle of what was to come. The historic purpose of Labour, writes Ben Pimlott, was sloughed off ‘like a snakeskin without growing another that is no more substantial than mere consumer responsiveness’. Ascriptions, labels, derivations and lineages — ‘New Liberal’, ‘Social Democrat’, ‘Christian Socialist’, ‘Ethical Socialist’ — fell away from him like leaves from a tree. Ideas, inert or ineffective, such as ‘Social-ism’ as a substitute for ‘Socialism’ proved to be unargued, unconcluded counters, rapidly consumed or left for dead in the flame of what John Lloyd called his ‘bombastic, emotionally promiscuous, hubristic’ platform rhetoric. Blair has no settled views even on ‘stake-holding’, that much bruited social democratic specific of European (and Singaporean) provenance in which the merits of the market and the virtues of the civic order were to be merged so as to yoke the energies and efficacies of commerce to the ends of social cohesion in Blair’s version of ‘one nation’. None of them mattered much to one deeply engaged in the projection of values rather than the prescriptions of an ideology. . . .

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