( 11 votes, average: 4.27 / 5 )
Loading ...I am in New York for professional reasons, at an NGO, and at my office there is a large format photograph of Tony Blair, mid-oration and in full liberal interventionist swing, hanging on a wall near the director’s office. The photograph is technically perfect: a low angle gives Blair the impression of speaking to the sky, his mouth syllabically articulate so that Americans swoon, his arms spread open to encompass his global theme, but the hands tense and half-clenched, holding power in his grasp. And arching above him, the NGO’s logo frames the shot.
But there is a problem with the photo: Blair’s autograph, written over his white dress shirt in thick black marker. The personal touch would be welcome, were it not for Blair’s assertion that he shall “cherish” the evening - this, surely, is disingenuous. Statesmen speak at many such events; they cannot be expected to cherish all of them, or indeed any of them. It is akin to asking a pediatrician to cherish every single running eight year old nose.
And so Blair’s emptiness as a politician is evident even here, in New York, even as I watch his dog days from across the Atlantic. They used to say about the young British generation that the Conservatives (and Thatcher) had been in power for such a long time, they had never known anything different, and that Labour in 1997 and Blair in Downing Street was a huge upset of the status quo. For me, this sound backwards.
I moved to Britain three years before the 21st century, but in truth, Britain’s new millennium started three years early. I arrived the day Princess Diana was killed, three months after Blair’s ascension, and so my Britain - the green, pleasant land that completely re-wrote me - has always been post-Tory and post-Diana. I am one of the few true Blairites of the world: and I am sensitised to his impending quietude. I regret watching it from afar. It seems I am missing a closing circle.
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How are there seven votes yet no comments? Why is this so electorally popular?