Last night I started reading Ian M Banks' novel Inversions[1]; this evening I finished it. In between, I heard Tony Blair make what everyone hopes, and he seemed to suggest, was his last speech[2] to a Labour Party conference as party leader and British prime minister. It was an interesting conjunction.
Tony Blair's long drawn out fall started when he insisted on following US coat tails into Iraq, against the over whelming wishes of his electorate. While I was part of that opposition, I accept that popular will is not always right and that we elect leaders who must sometimes act in ways which loses them our support. But lose support he certainly did.
The trajectory of that fall steepened when he staved off calls for his resignation before the last general election by saying that he would go before the next one. From that moment, he was fatally wounded. The demands for a date of his going have never gone away. Time is needed for a new leader to be elected and bed in before s/he fights the next general election; how long does he plan to allow for that? Blair's plummeting popularity (or, less generously, his rapidly escalating unpopularity) will be a liability in next May's round of local government elections; will he be gone by then? How much weight can be given to anything he says or does, when he may or may not be around to pick up the tab? As he struggles on the hook, the Conservative Party (previously giving a good impression of a party on the brink of extinction) has resurged on the tide which he has generated. He is obsessed by the need to secure his legacy; but that legacy was strongest before the last election, has steadily unravelled since, and can only decline further as long as he remains in power.
He has always argued the point which I conceded above: that leaders must, in his words, be prepared sometimes "to make hard choices". That argument has been cited in support of the Iraq invasion and also of his continued tenacious refusal to cede power to a successor.
Banks' novel opens with a prologue and, one page in, my eyes were snagged by two sentences (the emphasis is my own):
We never like to think of ourselves as being wrong, just misunderstood. We never like to think that we are sinning, merely that we are making hard decisions and acting upon them.
The book ends with the prolonged fall of a powerful leader who, unable to see the need for his own departure, is brought down by his own past actions and presides over the destruction of his own legacy.
1. Banks, I., Inversions. 1998, London: Orbit. 1857237633
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