Jonathan Foreman, in defense of Tony Blair:
You don’t have to be a devoted fan of Tony Blair to see that the mockery he has received concerning his resignation as Middle East peace envoy is unfair....
Blair could come across as imperious and entitled in his dealings with local politicians on both sides, but he clearly understood that quiet, consistent work would achieve more on the ground than the kind of grandstanding that is all too common when Europeans try to get involved in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
As the Middle East commentator Tom Gross says, “Blair had the right idea much more than he is given credit for. He wanted to build peace from the ground up rather than just make grand gestures or take part in photo-ops”...
To the extent that he has always lacked gravitas and often comes across more as a capable performer than a man of profound conviction, Blair was a rather unlikely candidate for the job. He was never able to overcome the impression that he had taken it partly because he did not know what to do after leaving Downing Street at the age of 54, and partly to restore a reputation that at least at in the UK seemed to be as bad as a politician’s can be short of an accusation of child molestation.
Indeed Blair’s unpopularity in the UK, especially among the political and media class, is such that Britons wrongly assume that he is equally disliked abroad. In fact, when Blair left office he was a figure of high repute in the United States, in Eastern Europe and much of Asia. In some places, like Kurdistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, he was and is considered a liberator and hero: his photograph graces mantelpieces and children are named after him.
His subsequent PR work for Central Asian autocrats certainly disillusioned those who had admired the way Blair had put the promotion of democracy and “liberal interventionism” at the heart of British foreign policy.
Well, yes.
It will be interesting to see what Tony Blair does now, if he will throw himself even more forcefully into moneymaking by means that are likely to earn him yet more opprobrium. If he does do that it will be sad, given that Blair is hardly the demon he is often made out to be in the UK.
Indeed the fact that he is so loathed by people on both sides of the British party spectrum makes you wonder if there isn’t some complicated psychology at play, if Blair-hatred isn’t a kind of British self-loathing.
This is especially true in party politics. After all, it is no secret that Prime Minister David Cameron and his circle consciously modeled themselves on Blair and have aped (and even exceeded) his use of modern branding and marketing techniques; or that some in the Labour party are now desperately trying to rediscover the Blairite values that made it an election winner.
Blair of course remains the only Labour leader to have won a British general election in 40 years, yet after 2007 he went from being perceived as the savior of the Labour movement to a hate figure on the level of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Emmanuel Goldstein.
On the other hand, it’s hard to warm to what Blair has become today. His reaction to what is in essence a forced exile from his own country has not been attractive. Although he’s hardly the first former premier to be excited by the company and amorality of what once was called the jet-set, Blair has pursued wealth and glamour with extraordinary intensity.
Perhaps he is as disillusioned with politics as his former supporters are with him, and has become a ruthless cynic. It would help explain the Clintonesque sleaze of his PR efforts for the kleptocrats of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, the strange cultish nature of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, and the business relations with sinister Russian and Gulf billionaires. But it would not explain his taking — or giving up — the job of Middle East Peace Envoy. Blair worked hard at it for eight years, but it was an inherently hopeless and thankless task.
Seems a pretty fair summary to me.
As an aside, I'm looking at the Labour party's feed on Facebook, and seeing the commentary about Ed Miliband.
This is about a party leader that not only led Labour to its worst electoral defeat since 1987 (against a mediocre government), and which has also lost its support base in Scotland, but who demonstrated a disgusting degree of cynicism over the Syrian Sarin attacks and the August 2013 parliamentary vote (a squalid action best examined here).
https://whiskyandtea.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/not-in-my-name-why-i-left-the-labour-party/
What do the majority of FB comments show about Labour supporters' attitudes towards Ed?
They love him. They absolutely fucking love him, and some of them even want him back.
I despair. The British left is dead.
Posted by: sackcloth and ashes | May 30, 2015 at 09:42 AM