The character of Tony Blair - written in 1999


"In November 1984, the Leader of the Opposition
asked Blair to come to his room. 'Tony was
absolutely shivering,' recalls Charles Clarke, Neil
Kinnock's Chief of Staff. (John Rentoul's biography
"Tony Blair" p161)

"Despite attempts to get to the heart of Mr Blair,
however, Miss Barak found him 'boring' and 'timid'.
'He was like a scared child', she told the
Telegraph last night. ...There doesn't appear to be
a message there. He may be an average politician
but I don't see him as a leader." (Report of an
interview between Blair and Daphne Barak of NBC -
Daily Telegraph 4/2/97 P4)

These two quotes provide the only clues needed to go to
the core of the Blair character; he is by nature very
nervous. The first describes Blair's behaviour as a recently
elected MP; the second shows Blair as the leader of a party
which was shortly to go into a General Election as just about
the hottest electoral favourites ever. Twelve years
experience and the assumption of the highest office in his
party had made absolutely no difference. He was still
incredibly anxious because basic character is forever.
Behaviour may to a degree be learned, but such learnt
behaviour is situational not general. For example, a coward
may gain confidence as he grows older in circumstances to
which he becomes accustomed, but he never becomes naturally
brave.

Even with the office of prime minister to bolster him, two
years experience of government, a largely quiescent media
and no political opposition worthy of the name, Blair is
still extremely unsure of himself and finds it immensely
difficult to handle any setback, for example, his tremulous
response to questions about the 1999 EU election defeat. If
readers wish to discover in an objective fashion how
unconfident Blair is, I suggest that they tape either an
interview in which he is under pressure or his performance
at Prime Minister's Question Time. Then play the tape back in
slow motion. The reader will then see what psychologists call
microexpressions. These are fleeting facial expressions which
are so rapid that human beings pick them up if at all
subliminally. Blair's most common microexpressions are those
of anxiety. Nor does it take much to cause Blair to display
signs of anxiety: it happens whenever he is feels that
people are not wholly with him, for instance at the 1999 TUC
conference. Blair has undoubtedly gained in situational
confidence since the election, but give him one good
emotional belt and he will be back to emotional square one.

This nervousness finds its constant expression in his
obsessive desire to control. Before the election, we saw
that trait primarily in the subjection of his party. Since he
became prime minister it has contaminated all parts of
political life. Indeed, Blair's first days in power confirmed
the view that he is a nervous authoritarian. There he was
in May 1997 as secure as a politician can ever be, yet one of
his first decisions was to attempt to emasculate Question
Time by reducing it to once a week.

Since then, Blair has engaged in a massive exercise of
pacification of opposition through (1) a tightening of the
hold of the Labour hierarchy on the selection of electoral
candidates, (2) by threatening to withdraw the whip from
Labour members, most notably in the case of those who
campaigned against devolution, (3) through the sending of
Labour members away from Westminster on a rota basis to "tend
their constituencies", (4) by unashamed cronyism and the
seduction of his supposed opponents (Ashdown, Hesletine,
Patten, Clarke et al) with a mixture of specious influence
and jobs, (5) by the diffusing effects of devolution, (6)
through the proposed effective abolition of the Lords and its
replacement with second chamber utterly dominated by
political placemen, (7) by the deliberate diminishment of
the importance of the House of Commons through a combination
of his frequent personal absence and the persistent habit of
breaking policy to the public via the media before a
statement is made to the Commons and, not least, (8) by the
adoption of a presidential style and (9) the virtual end of
cabinet government. In addition to these directly political
acts, he has been largely successful in controlling the
media through a combination of bullying and complicity with
those who control the organs of the media. He has now
reached the position of every natural dictator whereby anyone
who disagrees with him is either mad, bad or an extremist,
vide his outbursts against those who do not wish to get rid
of the pound and the extraordinary intolerance he displayed
during his speech to the 1999 Labour Party Conference, when
everyone who disagreed with him was treated not merely as
wrong but in morally defective. Out of his weakness and
paranoia grow megalomania.

In a country without any stable political tradition, where
violence and coup are the staples of political life, such
behaviour might be considered normal even rational. In a
country with the strongest non violent political tradition in
the world it smacks of rampant paranoia. It is also
fundamentally undemocratic.

Because of Blair's fetish of control, many assume that he is
a natural leader, yet before becoming Labour leader he had
never occupied a position of prime authority, an
extraordinary fact but true. At his school, Fettes, he was
not even a prefect let alone head boy. At Oxford he took no
leading part in student politics. As a lawyer he never rose
beyond the ranks. His career as a politician was coolly
unremarkable until he became Labour leader. This in itself
suggests that Blair is far from being one of Nature's
number ones.

His frantic efforts to avoid blame also point to a
subordinate character, while his remarkable ageing since he
became prime minister indicates a man under great stress.
Being comparatively young, the effect of ageing is perhaps
more dramatic than it would be in an older man. Yet even
allowing for that, the transformation is striking: an
unnatural gauntness, a face lacking muscle tone, dry hair
and substantial lining of the face - he looks a good ten
years older than when he took office. Interestingly a rumour
was floated in the Sunday Telegraph a few months back which
suggested that he might step down in the foreseeable future.
I would not utterly discount it, although it should be
treated as a very long shot. Plainly he is finding the
business of leading a government a tremendous burden. Why,
it might be asked, did he seek high political office if he
was so unfitted for it temperamentally? I attribute it to a
childlike ego and a failure of imagination. Blair
wanted to be PM because his self-esteem required that he was
in the same way a boy might want to be captain of football.
His ego and the lack of imagination ensured that he
completely failed to understand the massive difference
between being an opposition leader and prime minister. If he
wishes to get out, his problem (and ours) is that he is now
trapped by circumstances and may find it impossible to
relinquish control even if he wishes to. Such a situation
would drive him to ever greater attempts a control.

Most people will say to me at this stage, hold on Robert,
this man was barrister for ten years, how can he be a
profoundly nervous, subordinate creature? Well, that's most
people for you, always looking for the obvious and missing
it. The depressing fact is that the vast majority of
barristers show considerable signs of nervousness before
entering a court. Many do so within court. That is the first
thing to note. The second thing to understand is that a
courtroom is a very structured environment where the rules
are all in favour of the lawyer. He decides what evidence is
to be introduced on his side of the case; he decides what
questions are to be asked; he decides the order of questions;
above all he cannot be questioned. In addition, the majority
of witnesses will be people who will be unaccustomed to
appearing in public and possessed of a lessor education that
the barrister. All in all, the courtroom is the ideal venue
for the nervous person possessed of public ambition, once the
procedural rules have been learned and the environment
learned.

Those are the general advantages of the courtroom for
barristers. However, the barrister can make the environment
even safer by his choice of the field of law in which he
practices. Blair specialised in employment and trade law.
Thus he rarely had to appear before a jury, which is
generally considered within the legal profession to be the
most difficult of legal tests. Perhaps equally importantly,
this area of practice meant that a great deal of his
arguing would have been done in pre-trial submissions rather
than orally before a judge. Blair would also have avoided the
most difficult type of expert witness, namely the scientific
witness. (If the ordinary person wishes to see lawyers making
complete fools of themselves, I suggest that he or she goes
along to a run-of-the-mill murder trial which turns on
forensic evidence. It is a most depressing experience to see
the sheer level of lawyerly incompetence generally on
display). It should also be noted that a barrister cannot be
sued for incompetence.

Why is Blair so nervous? I put my money on a lack of
emotional development and the uncertainties produced by
intellectual mediocrity. In his behaviour, Blair is a
caricature of adolescence. His hilariously bogus attempts at
public emotion; the childlike belief, never better
demonstrated than over Kosovo, that the speaking of high
flown and impractical ideals wills their end, his continuing
uncertainty in public debate and above all his desperate need
to control, all suggest someone who is forever sixteen and
dreadfully afraid that they will not be taken seriously as an
adult.

Blair's speech to the 1999 Labour Party Conference displayed
his adolescent nature beautifully. We had the exhibitionism
of his constant references to how well he had done in his
life and how often he met important people. We had the
equation of conservatives with evil and the designation of
anyone who disagreed with him as conservative. We had the
horribly contrived sentimentality particularly in his
references to children. We had the fifth form PC idealism.
All of this delivered in a language best described as
advanced Mawkish, with his piping fifteen year old's voice
and his usual hilariously inept phrasing. (Incidentally, the
microexpressions during the speech also said he was
extremely nervous.)

How bright is Blair? Obviously he is not a complete dimwit.
Indeed, I suspect that he would score respectably in an IQ
test. But equally there is solid evidence that he is at
best an educated dullard, able to spout the odd piece of
learning and capable of shallow superficial analysis, but
devoid of any deep understanding of anything and
originality of thought. He gained only a second at a
university (Oxford) notorious for its generosity in granting
good degrees in a subject (law) where hard work will get you
most of the way to a first. Moreover, Blair achieved this
middling degree despite having no great undergraduate
distractions such as serious involvement in student politics.
I think we can say that was mediocre performance. To that we
may add his performance in the Bar Examination, where
according to his biographer John Rentoul he "achieved an
undistinguished Third class". That was an indication of pure
laziness which points to the debilitating disease of
intellectual idleness. It is probably that fault rather than
an innate lack of intelligence which is the biggest stumbling
block to Blair's ability to understand.

Intellectual idleness is a big, big problem, because the
intellectually lazy will, in the nature of things, generally
fail to comprehend a complex problem adequately. In
government that can be very expensive in terms of sins of
omission and commission as the intellectually lazy politician
acts recklessly or fails to act, both out of ignorance.

Time and again Blair gives evidence that he does not
understand the consequences of his policies, vide devolution,
the social chapter and the single currency. Worse, he
appears driven by ideas that are suited to student debates
but not government. His stance on Kosovo provides the most
vivid demonstration of these various weaknesses.

During the Kosovan war, Blair constantly behaved in a most
uncontrolled manner. He urged the use of ground troops,
including a very substantial British contingent, he agreed to
take in unlimited numbers of Albanian refugees, he said that
cost was no object, he was willing to commit a large
proportion of our military forces as "peacekeepers" for what
would certainly be years and could be generations and gave
no heed to the cost either of that or of reconstructing the
damage caused by Nato military action (and this at a time
when cuts to British welfare are very much on the agenda).
Yet all those massive commitments did not come at the outset
of hostilities. Rather, they were the consequences of a
miscalculation of Milosevic's resolve and a threadbare
military strategy. Not content with those irresponsible
commitments, Blair has maintained a reckless aggressiveness
towards Milosevic since the formal end of hostilities which
has virtually ensured that he stays in power. In the longer
term, Blair has stored up resentments against Britain, not
least amongst the Russian political class, for seemingly
driving Nato's hardline approach which effectively humiliated
Russia by treating them as of no account. All these things
were done gratuitously and without apparent thought for the
consequences and we have no indication that Blair understands
the consequences.

Most worryingly Blair has shown himself to be an unashamed
warmonger. I would like to believe that his public words
were simply a cynical manipulation of the public to promote
his reputation and were made in the certain knowledge that
Clinton would not commit troops to a land war. Unfortunately
I think that Blair was anything but cynical in his
belligerence. The Observer reported on 18 July (1999) that
Blair had
agreed to send 50,000 British troops to take part in an
invasion force of 170,000 if Milosevic had not conceded
Kosovo to Nato. Incredible as this may seem, (and it was not
denied by Downing Street) such recklessness fits in with
Blair's general behaviour. So there you have it, our prime
minister would have committed the majority of Britain's armed
forces to a land war in which we have no national interest,
regardless of the cost, deaths and injuries. The danger
remains that Blair will find another adventure which does
result in a land war. Over Kosovo, he behaved like a
reckless adolescent and nearly came a fatal political
cropper. Yet Blair appears to have learnt nothing from the
experience, vide the unpleasant and malicious fanaticism in
Blair and Cook's declarations of their intent to both unseat
Milosevic from power and bring him before an international
court, vide the humiliation of Russia, vide the ever more
absurd declarations of internationalist intent since
hostilities ceased. That adolescent idealists' mindset could
lead Britain down a very dark path indeed. It is also
incompatible with a foreign policy that supposedly encourages
elected governments (however imperfect they are) over
dictatorships.

I do not subscribe to the view that Blair has no political
policies: rather, he has all too many drawn from the
ragbags of
political correctness and internationalism. What he lacks is
any constancy of thought in his attachment to the detailed
political ideas needed to achieve his general ends. He has
detailed ideas, but not for long. All politicians change
their views to a degree: Blair has most comprehensively
altered his. Some time ago I went systematically through John
Rentoul's biography of Blair noting his varying positions
at different times on all important areas of policy.
Incredibly, there is not a single one on which he has not
described a 180 degree turn. For example in 1988 he said this
about the need to protect British industry: "Without an
active interventionist industrial policy...Britain faces the
future of having to compete on dangerously unequal terms."
(Iain Dale: The Blair Necessities P57). Compare that with his
present hardline free trading stance in government.

Equally noteworthy is the manner in which he changes his
mind. Blair does not do what any normal man would do in his
position, namely gradually inch towards a new policy. No,
with Blair it is X one day and Y the next with damn all
meaningful explanation of the change. All he ever says is
that some such nonsense as "time has moved on" or "those
were yesterday's ideas". Such behaviour raises a most
pertinent question, how does one distinguish between a man
who continually changes his mind without warning and a
calculating liar? There is in principle no objective test
to decide between the two circumstances. In effect, Blair is
saying that he should never be held to account for anything.
In fact, one of his strongest traits is a desperate
determination to avoid blame.

This inconstancy of principle takes us neatly to the
discrepancy between what he says and does. Blair presents
himself as Mr Compassionate Morality. Yet his public and
private actions (and increasingly his words) persistently
belie this. The lines "The more he spoke of his honour, the
faster we counted the spoons" come to mind.

In his domestic policy Blair has adopted a tone of aggressive
intent against those least able to fend for themselves: the
poor, single mothers and the disabled. This comes as no
surprise to those who remember his words before he became
prime minister on the subject of beggars, whom he represented
in an interview in the magazine "The Big Issue" as aggressive
and unworthy of help. The mixture of disgust and exaggerated
fear in that interview was wonderful and ancient. On being
asked whether he gave money to beggars he said he did not.
And this from a man whose life is comfortable going on rich.
It was the mentality of the selfish aristocrat who is
utterly divorced from the lives of the masses and is both
revolted and scared by them.

So much for Blair's self advertised compassion, but he also
likes to portray himself as the Common Man. His lifestyle and
that of his wife are a bit of a barrier to this. Most
notably they failed to send their children to nonselective
state schools despite Blair's public decrying selective
schools in accordance with Labour Party policy. Actually that
little piece of business is very revealing. Blair effectively
changed one of the Labour Party's most cherished policies -
non selective education - by personal fiat for once the
leader had crossed the selective Rubicon the Party had to of
necessity follow. Shameless hypocrisy allied to utter
egotism.

So what do we have? A man who is essentially a megalomaniac
adolescent; a weak authoritarian who is nervous, paranoid,
cowardly, intellectually lazy, hypocritical, morally
vicious, without fixed principles and seemingly oblivious to
shame. A man who is never in the wrong. A man whose is highly
manipulative. A man who is the most tremendous egoist. Put
all that together and the word psychopath comes to mind.

What is a psychopath? The term does not mean, as is popularly
thought, someone who does not understand the difference
between right and wrong. In fact the psychopath is as aware
of the moral rules of a society as the next man. What
distinguishes psychopathic behaviour from the norm is the
perpetrator's ability to break moral laws without
experiencing the normal emotional pain of doing so. In other
words, these are actions without conscience.

All human beings are capable of psychopathic behaviour. But
most people will only engage in such behaviour in exceptional
circumstances, such as times of extreme stress or where a
society's morality is tribal rather than general. The classic
instance of both types of behaviour may be found in war,
which on the one hand produces a willingness to kill through
fear of attack, and on the other creates a state of mind
which allows the ordinary man to kill even when not
immediately threatened, and to accept as reasonable killing
by his fellow countrymen and allies which is to all intents
and purposes murder. All bombing of civilians falls into the
latter category.

What distinguishes the psychopath from the mass of men is
that the psychopath's normal behaviour is psychopathic. Blair
meets this criteria. His common actions include the
following: he breaks his word as a matter of course but
exhibits no signs of emotional discomfort when doing so. He
changes policy from one day to the next. He lies without
compunction, for example the pledges he made to persuade the
Ulster Unionists to accept the "peace" Agreement which have
subsequently been dishonoured in the breach utterly as
hundreds of convicted IRA terrorists have been released
without a single weapon being handed in. He behaves without
regard to the consequences of his actions on others. He is
the most consummate hypocrite. He refuses to accept blame.
He constantly attempts to manipulate others. Most tellingly,
he claims a high moral position whilst committing all these
immoralities.

What do Blair's character defects mean for his (and our)
government? Shortly before he died, the historian Max Beloff
wrote a piece for the Times newspaper entitled "Third Way or
Third Reich?" (9/2/99) in which he charted the similarities
between New Labour's tactics and those of the Nazis, such
behaviour as the enticement of political figures from other
parties to camouflage New Labour's purpose, the tacit
concordat with business whereby donations and support were
traded for an understanding that a Blair government would not
be radical in its treatment of the economy and the
obsessive party control. Beloff also suggested that Blair
might eventually be enticed by the attractions of the Fuhrer
principle.

Beloff's views were met publicly with a mixture of outrage
and derision. But they are based on objective facts coupled
to hard arguing. Moreover, Blair's language and views are
often remarkably similar to those of fascists, in particular
to the views of Oswald Mosely. Consider these startlingly
similar sentiments taken from Blair (The Blair Necessities -
BN) and Mosley (Varieties of Fascism - VoF):

I believe we have broken through the traditional
barriers of right and left; that we are developing
a new and radical economic approach for the left
and centre 1996 BN P14

Above all it is a realistic creed. It has no use
for immortal principles in relation to the facts of
bread-and-butter; and it despises the windy
rhetoric which ascribes importance to mere formula.
VoF P170.

One Britain. That is the patriotism for the future.
BN 1996 P13 LC

It must be absolutely clear to the British people
that we are a political arm of no one other than
the British people themselves BN 28 1996

We need a new social morality. BN 19 1996

We seek to establish a new ideal of public service,
and a new authority based on merit Albert Hall
April 1934 VoF

The case advanced in these pages covers, not only a
new political policy, but also a new conception of
life. In our view, these purposes can only be
achieved by the creation of a modern movement
invading every sphere of national life. VoF P171

The new establishment is not a meritocracy, but a
power elite of money-shifters, middle men and
speculators...people whose self-interest will
always come before the national or the public
interest. BN P42 1994

Many more instances exist of such echoes.

Any authoritarian is bad enough, but with Blair one gets the
worst of all possible worlds. He is not a strong, able man who
brooks no argument because he believes that he knows best and
has a record of achievement to support his pretensions.
Rather he is a weak, fearful character who suppresses dissent
because he doubts his own capacity. Incompetent
authoritarians are always the harshest enemies of free
expression for the very good reason that they keep creating
ever greater crises which can only be publicly hidden,
albeit temporarily, by ever greater repression of dissent.

The dangers of Blair's authoritarian tendencies are amplified
by the nature of those about him. Forget all the
protestations of a change of Labour heart. These are
cavorting prigs harnessed from the same stable as
previous Labour governments. Mencken's 'Show me a puritan and
I will show you a sonofabitch' comes readily to mind. The
exact foci of their meddling may have changed, the desire to
meddle has not. They will feed Blair's natural dictatorial
instincts.

Instances of Blair's fascistic desire to control grow by the
day. These range from the risible such as his seemingly
insatiable desire to formally comment on such great affairs
of state as spats in football and golf (vide the Ryder Cup)
and the downright dangerous such as the planned testing of
all criminal suspects for drug use.

Most forms of government are institutionalised gangsterism.
That is what I foresee Blair creating in Britain if he is
given ten years in power. Far fetched? What would we call
the behaviour of a Third World leader who appointed close
personal friends to two of the three most senior positions in
a country's legal ministry. (Question. How would a person
taking legal action against the Blairs be assured of
impartiality? Answer. You tell me.) All the indications are,
from cronyism to Blair's unhealthy attitude to any form of
dissent, that a Blair government will be one based on the
primitive idea that justice is for one's political friends
and injustice for one's political foes.

Blair controls because he fears dealing with the consequences
of the unpredicted. He is a weak egotist who will behave
both incompetently and viciously should he come under real
pressure. He lacks courage and that is always a fatal lack in
the long run.