by A. N. Wilson
Career politicians inspired similarly disconcerting impressions. ‘Lord Kinnock’ had begun as an activist in the students’ union at the University of Cardiff, and done nothing, nothing, nothing in his life except to be a politician, first as an MP, then as a European Fat Cat, then as a member of the House of Lords. Life whizzed past, for him, as for Phillip Schofield. Nothing happened, except the words which they read from their autocues.
Most politicians in the Blair era gave the impression of being like this, and although Tony Blair was obviously much more than that, he was a Phillip Schofield–like figure himself, a face to be seen on the television for a slice of most British people’s lives, but fading as soon as he left it.
‘You don’t look or sound like a Labour MP.’
That was how Edward Heath addressed Tony Blair when they were first introduced in the House of Commons.2 The words were not only perfectly true; they exactly summarise why Blair was so successful in defeating not merely the Conservative Party but also his own party, Labour. When he said the word ‘sound’–SAYOWND–Heath would immediately have signalled to any listener that, for all the plumminess of his Oxford-educated tones, he remained the carpenter’s son from Kent. Tony Blair, much more inclined than Heath to identify himself with another Carpenter’s Son, defied social analysis, at any rate as far as his pronunciation of the English language was concerned. Much more a creature of artifice than Edward Heath, or than any previous Prime Minister, Blair could, by his voice, sometimes sound like a gormless rock singer–as a student he had played the guitar for a band called Ugly Rumours, and he would still, as Prime Minister, strum the instrument for recreation. As an orator, the new Prime Minister could sound like an evangelical preacher, as when he had offered his messianic vision to the Labour Party Conference of 1999–‘A century of decline, 20 years of Conservative Government still not put to rights. Do you think I don’t feel this, in every fibre of my being?’ Like all rhetorical questions, this suggests to a sceptical ear the opposite answer to the one intended by the speaker; but at the time, his jerky, half tearful and verbless sentences made a great appeal. ‘The frustration, the urgency, the anger at the waste of lives unfulfilled, hopes never achieved, dreams never realised. And whilst there is one child still in poverty in Britain today, one pensioner in poverty, one person denied their chance in life, there is one Prime Minister and One Party that will have no rest, no vanity in achievement, no sense of mission completed until they too are set free.’ As time was to advance, his sense of himself as a saviour would extend beyond the one British child living in poverty to embrace the entire planet, as when he was able to offer salvation to the continent of Africa (first at the G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2005, and then at the Labour Party Conference). Being also a canny politician, as well as a Messiah, Blair’s actual proposal for overseas aid, contained in his 2005 election manifesto, was 0.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, a figure far higher than most British taxpayers would want, but scarcely the sacrificial giving which Blair probably believed, when on the podium and delivering his speech, that he was offering to the starving children of Darfur or Eritrea.
The electorate had perhaps thought they were sacking the dull bank manager and replacing him with a charming young man who was a little more, well, normal. Waking up on May Day 1997, many of the electorate, however, realised that they had chosen a person who was by no means run-of-the-mill. After the strange eight-year episode of the poor son of circus trapeze artistes and garden-gnomes makers, the British found themselves with a pop-star revivalist as Prime Minister. But both the personae–the Vicar of St Albion’s as Private Eye was quick to dub him, and the Bono/Geldof side of Blair that liked wowing crowds and making big, global gestures–were distinctly part-time. He never stopped being an extraordinarily disciplined and relentlessly focused political operator.
Blair was just short of his forty-third birthday when he became the Prime Minister on 1 May 1997. He looked young for his age, and still possessed the well-scrubbed appearance of a public school prefect, the sort of boy who was never going to be a notable scholar but whose pleasant manners made him a favourite with the teachers and their wives. If prospective parents had come to the school, the housemaster’s wife would have thought Blair could be trusted to show them round the squash courts and the science laboratories and make a ‘good impression’. After Fettes, and St John’s College, Oxford, at neither of which establishment he had shone, he was called to the Bar and joined Lincoln’s Inn. He was never destined to become a great Chancery lawyer, but he had a quick mind, and a superficial plausibility. The ability to grasp one or two salient points in a case, and a boyish coquettishness of manner in front of the judge, would enable such a lawyer to put his case with success. He was never going to rise as high in the law as the woman he married, another barrister in the same chambers, Cherie Booth, the daughter of a drunken television actor called Tony Booth.
Superficiality is a tremendous advantage in a politician. Blair arrived on the political scene with no ideological ‘baggage’ beyond a slightly goofy students’ union type of Christianity, which, as he sometimes blurted out to journalists, was the guiding principle of his life. (His minder and rather brutal press secretary, North Country journalist and bruiser Alastair Campbell, intervened on one occasion to tell interviewers, ‘We don’t do God.’) Sometimes Blair would tell inquirers that the inspiration for his life had been the writings of a Christian socialist called John Macmurray, introduced to the undergraduate Blair by an Australian cleric, Revd Peter Thomson, seventeen years older than Tony and enjoying with the St John’s undergraduate what might be thought a slightly odd friendship. ‘There were people at university who got me into politics. I kind of got into religion, politics, at the same time, in a way,’ he told the television chat-show host Michael Parkinson, declining to be viewed as a Christian socialist. ‘It’s a long time since anyone used the word socialist about me,’ he said, in the same interview. It could be that Macmurray explains all; but in the case of the chameleon Blair it was never especially safe to take him at his word. When in the company of the bookish, he liked to allude to books. The editor of the Spectator, Matthew d’Ancona, told his readers, ‘in private Blair was more inclined to talk about books, ideas and history, whether it was the theology of Hans Kung, the origins of neo-conservatism or the merits of de Gaulle. But he was clever enough to keep this mostly to himself.’ So clever was he that he kept such intellectual interests a secret not only from the public, but from those close to him. One who shared a holiday with Blair and his wife and family noted that neither he, his wife nor any of his children had packed any books for a fortnight’s holiday. When not swimming in the pool or playing tennis, Blair spent his time having anxious conversations on his mobile telephone.3 Even Mr Major had read the occasional novel by Trollope, praising them for their wonderfully ‘two-dimensional characters’.4 Though he sat light to political ideology, Blair’s religious views were often a source of interest. Those who set out to explain what motivated Blair, beyond fear of his hot-tempered and strong-willed wife, sought it in the influence of the Catholic Church. But how far was it possible to distinguish that Church from Cherie, who, as a working-class ‘Scouse’, had been brought up with regular visits to Mass and confession? Throughout his period in office, indiscreet Roman Catholic priests liked to hint that Blair was some form of crypto-papalist. The bizarre Father Michael Seed, a congenitally indiscreet Capuchin friar, said Mass in the house at Number 10 Downing Street, after Tony Blair was spotted receiving Holy Communion at RC altars and Cardinal Hume, the RC Archbishop, wrote to him telling him to desist. (Blair wrote back assuring the Cardinal that he would desist, but added–‘I wonder what Jesus would have made of it.’ Interesting question.) The ecumenism of the Blair marriage seemed to go only one way. The Blair family never attended the Prime Minister’s parish church near Chequers, preferring to attend the RC service at Great Missenden where the clergyman, a figure named Father Russ, speculated to the newspapers about t
he probable or likely date of Tony’s ‘reception’ into that Church. And not merely reception. Blair had, claimed Father Russ, discussed with him the possibility of becoming a Roman Catholic deacon, a minor order only one down from the priesthood itself. After Blair’s resignation, Sir Anthony Kenny remembered that ‘The Emperor Theodosius was refused communion by the Bishop of Milan until he had done public penance for a massacre for which he was responsible. It is rumoured that in their farewell audience Pope Benedict rebuked Blair for his part in the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps his appointment as the quartet’s [UN, US, EU, Russian] ambassador [to the Middle East] is meant to be his public penance. If so, we must hope that it has a favourable outcome.’ After his resignation, Blair did formally submit to Catholicism. Lady Marchmain, the pious chatelaine of Brideshead in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, explained to the puzzled narrator, ‘When I married, I became very rich. It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realise that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and his saints, but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included.’5 Once he was able, as a fully-fledged Catholic, to tap into this source of Grace, Blair lost no time in augmenting his prime ministerial pension. He took a post estimated at £2.5 million with the American bankers JPMorgan Chase; and another worth £500,000 per annum with the Zurich Financial Services Group to advise them on global warming issues.6 This came on top of the seven-figure advance which he had collected for his autobiography, the seven-figure advance collected by his wife for hers, as well as her pay as a high-profile human rights lawyer, who could also command sums as high as £75,000 for speaking engagements. Christ taught that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven; but with the Blairs, all things were possible.
For some years previous, both Blair and Cherie had appeared to become more dependent upon the Catholic faith. Both the Blairs, however, were ever eclectic in their spiritual beliefs. Their generous souls accommodated not merely the theological complexities of the Nicene Creed, but also the sweet incense and mental aromatherapy of the New Age religion. For an exciting period, the Blair court had as its captivating Rasputin figure a former nude model named Carole Caplin. She first met Cherie at a fitness class in 1992 and by 2003 Cherie was paying her £3,500 for ‘assistance with dress, fitness, and “lifestyle”’.7 Carole’s mother, Sylvia, introduced them to spiritualism. According to one source, in Mexico, ‘the Blairs visited a “temazcal”, a steam bath enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met Nancy Aguilar, a new age therapist. She told them that the pyramid was a Mayan womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs saw the shapes of animals in the steam and experienced “inner feelings and visions”. They smeared each other with melon, papaya and mud from the jungle, and then let out a primal scream of purifying agony.’8
Like Father Russ and Father Seed, Carole was happy to blab to the greater world about the Blairs’ dependency upon her spiritual counsels. Not only did Carole become Cherie’s masseuse, but she gave details to the newspapers of her shared showers, and ‘pampering’ sessions to the newspapers. Within weeks of meeting Cherie she had persuaded her to divulge details of her life with Tony–‘Toblerone’, as Carole soon came to call the Prime Minister.9 Cherie, who had put her emotional energy into her career at the Bar and into her marriage, possessed few personal friends and was susceptible to Carole’s charms. When Cherie’s dependency upon Carole was at its height, the style guru accompanied the Blair family on their summer holidays. When Cherie, her own mother Gale Booth, Tony and the children borrowed a holiday villa near Le Vernet in the south of France from Sir David Keane, Carole came, too, bringing her sixty-seven-year-old mother with her. Carole came to dinner one day wearing a loose skirt and a diaphanous blouse. Cherie’s mother, Gale, burst out at dinner with the comment, ‘I don’t think that outfit is appropriate dress at a family meal.’ Sylvia and Carole protested that they could see nothing wrong with it, and both women continued to sunbathe all but naked by the pool, which so embarrassed one of Blair’s sons that he and his friends were unable to use the pool.10 Nobody supposed that Caplin had actually been the lover of either Cherie or Tony, but her public boasts that she chose Tony’s clothes, even his underpants, and that she gave therapeutic massage to both the First Lord of the Treasury and to his wife caused inevitable titillation in the press. Poor Mr Major’s indiscretions with Edwina Currie were an embarrassment to his admirers, but no Prime Minister in history had ever entertained such a figure as Carole, as not merely a spiritual helper, but by extension a financial adviser. Tony Blair even offered Carole’s very welcome services to President Clinton during one of his visits to Chequers. Her massage technique had clearly made an impression on the susceptible President. When he visited the Labour Party Conference a little later in the year, Clinton told Blair, ‘I wish I could have Carole again for that exercise.’11
As he came into office, Blair had made few specific commitments other than to keep to the same spending plans as the Conservatives over the first few years of government. The economy, about which he knew nothing, was handled, on the whole with admirable skill, by Gordon Brown, whose Treasury team extended more and more control over domestic policy and over the actual machinery of government, throughout Blair’s decade in office. The largely right-wing press awaited, as did the defeated cohorts of the old left, to see whether, once in office, Tony Blair would show himself to have been Old Labour in disguise. But he had never had any interest in Old Labour, and his wary adversaries on right and left slowly began to realise he did not have any interests in right or left either.
One of the reasons that New Labour felt so modern was that the decline of the Tories under John Major, and the rise of the Blairites in the Labour Party, happened to coincide with one of the most prodigious changes of our times: personal computers became part of personal life. When the geeky, bespectacled Bill Gates (born 1955) started Micro-Soft (the hyphen was dropped when it registered as a trade name in November 1976) computers appealed to very limited sections of the world’s populace. They were of use in speeding up scientific research. They were super-counting machines. Only nerds would have wanted one in the home. Bill Gates changed that. By 1997, when Tony Blair came to power, most offices, libraries, hospitals and institutions in Britain were wired up to personal computers. The laptop swiftly followed, and it would soon become eccentric for private householders not to so be connected to the rest of the world. So rapid was the advance in computer technology that soon e-mail became the normal method of communicating with one another; and, whether in pursuit of pornography or scientific facts, of a cheap air flight or the time of the next train to Scunthorpe, the British, like everyone else in the world, ‘surfed’ the Web. The world became linked up, and yet separated, in one sweep. Anyone anywhere could tap into their laptop and communicate with anyone else, often with people they had never met, in ‘chat rooms’. At the same time, those old-fashioned means of human communication–the arrival of the postman, the visit to the post office, the penning of a letter, the picking up of the telephone–became less necessary. Many became addicts–some to ‘chatting’, others to pornography, which was abundantly and mysteriously wafted to anyone who wanted it on the ether, some–children–to computer games. Many people wondered, as they watched their children with noses almost glued to the screen, their ears stopped with headphones, whether a profound shift in human experience was occurring, or whether Gates and the other boffins had invented the most perfect device for shutting children up. It is certainly questionable whether the universal availability of the Internet extended human liberty. That it changed life, however, cannot be questioned, and in the era when it became old hat to be socialist, it also became old hat to write a letter or look something up in a book, i
f you could hunch instead over the laptop.
The characteristic artists of the age were Damien Hirst (born 1965) and Tracey Emin (born 1963). Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living sold for a sum which would previously have been considered expensive for an Old Master. It was a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde. (In 2007 he beat his own record, when Lullaby Spring sold for £50 million.) One mentions the money first, in relation to BritArt, since the sums commanded were an essential part of the phenomenon. Although he severed connections with Charles Saatchi in 2003, it was through Saatchi, the godfather of BritArt, that Hirst became a commodity. The Saatchi brothers, Baghdad Jews, had set up in business in the 1970s and been of invaluable help, as Britain’s most colourful advertising agency, in promoting Mrs Thatcher, with the election poster ‘BRITAIN ISN’T WORKING’. Saatchi and Saatchi became the world’s largest advertising company, and the extent to which Charles Saatchi’s prodigious collection of art was an extension of his work as an advertiser would always be a matter of discussion. Hirst’s dead creatures (the shark in formaldehyde eventually leaked and had to be thrown away) were not metaphors for British dead past, nor for Labour’s dead principles, but they came at an apposite time. The later work he did, in which arrangements of giant pharmaceuticals make allusions to Christian iconography, the white pill of healing with the Eucharistic host, ask to be jeered at by scoffers, but give the thoughtful pause.