Henry Porter: Labour must come clean about Iraq and spurn its Blairite legacy
[Henry Porter writes commentary for the Observer.]
Being Tony Blair is not so hard. This time last year I had the enlightening experience of playing him for an hour while helping a friend prepare for an interview with him on stage in New York. We assembled a list of questions after reading and watching every available interview with him, but we needed to know how they would work live and so filmed a dummy run with me taking the part of Tony Blair.
When Blair did the interview later that evening we realised that he answered in almost exactly the same way as I had done in about 40 to 50% of his responses. This seems like a boast, but actually it says more about Blair than me. After absorbing his voice and the formulae of his responses you know that when asked if he has regrets about the Iraq war/the failure to discover WMD/the loss of life in Iraq/the al-Qaida insurgency, he will reply that he believed he was right at the time and as prime minister it was his responsibility to make a judgment on the evidence before him.
Watching the Labour leadership candidates interviewed I've had the same experience of knowing more or less how they would answer before they replied (Diane Abbott is the exception). None of them has a distinct political voice or character, because while they are not all Blairites they were all moulded by the Blair years. A process of de-Blairification is required, which three years of Gordon Brown oddly never achieved, and one of those candidates needs to make the breakout speech that spurns the worst of New Labour's legacy. By this I don't mean a return to fundamentalist unelectability but rather a definite sense that the party is reverting to proper standards of conduct.
The problem of New Labour, so evident in the news of the last few weeks and in Peter Mandelson's book (now vanished in a blizzard of publicity) was essentially not ideological but one of principle and values. The candidates persist in talking about their own distinct values simplistically as a matter of brand management, but in reality they offer only what the Italians call sfumato, a blurring and blending of the old and the new, a seamless modification. None has reached the stage, vitally important to alcoholics and repeat offenders, of recognising and admitting to a room of glum faces that they have got a problem.
They believe they can finesse the record, yet some things are so serious they cannot be forgotten or ignored – Iraq, for example. Who doubts the truth of what Nick Clegg said when he classed the Iraq invasion as illegal, while being needled by Jack Straw as he stood in for David Cameron at prime minister's questions?..
Read entire article at Observer (UK)
Being Tony Blair is not so hard. This time last year I had the enlightening experience of playing him for an hour while helping a friend prepare for an interview with him on stage in New York. We assembled a list of questions after reading and watching every available interview with him, but we needed to know how they would work live and so filmed a dummy run with me taking the part of Tony Blair.
When Blair did the interview later that evening we realised that he answered in almost exactly the same way as I had done in about 40 to 50% of his responses. This seems like a boast, but actually it says more about Blair than me. After absorbing his voice and the formulae of his responses you know that when asked if he has regrets about the Iraq war/the failure to discover WMD/the loss of life in Iraq/the al-Qaida insurgency, he will reply that he believed he was right at the time and as prime minister it was his responsibility to make a judgment on the evidence before him.
Watching the Labour leadership candidates interviewed I've had the same experience of knowing more or less how they would answer before they replied (Diane Abbott is the exception). None of them has a distinct political voice or character, because while they are not all Blairites they were all moulded by the Blair years. A process of de-Blairification is required, which three years of Gordon Brown oddly never achieved, and one of those candidates needs to make the breakout speech that spurns the worst of New Labour's legacy. By this I don't mean a return to fundamentalist unelectability but rather a definite sense that the party is reverting to proper standards of conduct.
The problem of New Labour, so evident in the news of the last few weeks and in Peter Mandelson's book (now vanished in a blizzard of publicity) was essentially not ideological but one of principle and values. The candidates persist in talking about their own distinct values simplistically as a matter of brand management, but in reality they offer only what the Italians call sfumato, a blurring and blending of the old and the new, a seamless modification. None has reached the stage, vitally important to alcoholics and repeat offenders, of recognising and admitting to a room of glum faces that they have got a problem.
They believe they can finesse the record, yet some things are so serious they cannot be forgotten or ignored – Iraq, for example. Who doubts the truth of what Nick Clegg said when he classed the Iraq invasion as illegal, while being needled by Jack Straw as he stood in for David Cameron at prime minister's questions?..