From yesterdays Grauniad...
If Blairism was the Man Utd of politics, why is its youth policy so rubbish?
Has Jeremy Corbyn got a campaign song yet? He’s certainly got one in my head. I cannot catch sight of the Labour leadership frontrunner on the airwaves or in print without reflexively striking up that majestic chorus: “Springtime for Hitler and Germany! Winter for Poland and France!”
For lovers of a certain stripe of merriment, there hasn’t been a hit like Corbyn since Mel Brooks’s eponymous producers took “a gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” to Broadway and saw it become a smash. The best laid plans, and so on.
Before we go on, and for the benefit of younger readers already crafting death threats for the failure to precede the above with a SPOILER ALERT, I’m not calling Jeremy a Nazi. In fact, I’m not calling him anything at all, other than a very nice man currently threatening to sweep the board at the political Tony awards.
My synthesised concern is instead reserved for the notional Bialystock and Bloom in this comically unexpected scenario. We can argue about who would take which role, but one thing is beyond debate: if New Labour impresarios Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell had sat down the morning after the general election defeat and attempted to pick the most cast-iron, sure-fire failure of a candidate to make sure they got what they wanted out of the leadership election, then I can think only that they would have alighted on Corbyn. In their eyes, he would have been the equivalent of Springtime for Hitler – a man so wantonly, provocatively at odds with everything they believed experience had taught them, that his campaign could only fail. And not take its time to do so. “Wow,” marvels Bloom, as he reads the script. “This play wouldn’t run a night.” “A night?” scoffs Bialystock. “Are you kidding? This play’s guaranteed to close on page four!”
I’m not sure which page of this riotous romp we’re on now, but we’re certainly past the interval scene in which theatregoers spill into the bar Bialystock and Bloom are in and – to their utter horror and disbelief – begin to rave about the show.
You have to laugh – unless you are a Blairite terminally opposed to self-reflection, in which case you have to get very cross indeed. Which only fans the flames of amusement for many of us. In their half-arsed attempts to probe why any of this madness is happening, you don’t see too many arch defenders of Blairism imagining that what they are watching is perhaps a function of its failings. Those doling out the reproaches may care to look closer to home, certainly when they survey a field of – drumroll, please! – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.
Put simply, if Blairism was so brilliantly done, then where was its second great team? The Blairites can rightly bang on about their trophies, but only meticulous rebuilding was ever going to win them any more, as Alex Ferguson produced three great teams at Manchester United. I’m sure New Labour’s finest will forgive me for considering them in comparison to Fergie’s United – after all, during their intertwined years, the Blair administration was always at pains to suggest that the relationship between that club and themselves was positively symbiotic.
A regular at conferences, Ferguson was feted and flattered by Blair, who asked him for advice on dealing with Brown (ignored), while Campbell used to tell people proudly that Ferguson was in the habit of phoning his then pre-teen son for tactical chats, apparently valuing the uncluttered, pure way in which a kid saw the game. (Yup. For that and the peerage, anyway.) Campbell once gave Ferguson Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s brilliant book on Abraham Lincoln’s skill in managing a cabinet of huge figures and drawing on their skills. Ferguson lapped it up – but was perhaps less in need of its lessons than Alastair’s own boss.
Today, Blairites and non-Blairites may survey the current crop of centre-right candidates and ask: what on earth happened to Blairism’s youth policy? Did it even have one? I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I can’t see Burnham or Kendall or Cooper or any of their generation coming together effectively on whatever constitutes the political equivalent of that night in the Nou Camp (the triumph of Ferguson’s second great team).
And please – don’t even start me on putative super-sub David Miliband. OK, start me on him: he’s wetter and less appealing than that bit of paper at the bottom of a packet of mince. And somehow even more pointless, which is really something. The idea he is some great lost Labour leader is more hallucinogenically ludicrous than the premise of a certain aforementioned Broadway show, and I literally think Ed Miliband would have been a better leader than him. Which is also something, as hardly needs pointing out.
Anyhow. It says so much about the Blairite flame that, for all their confected differences in opinion, there are three people in this leadership election who appear unable to communicate with other human beings. The legacy of the obsessive media management of those years is laid bare: it is no longer android backbench MPs who appear to have no discernible views, but senior figures campaigning for the leadership. To move past Lady Bracknell, this may not be considered unfortunate. It may not even be considered merely careless. It is a failure of the thing itself.
The titanic power struggle at the top of the Blair years sucked the oxygen out of the nursery, and the next generation withered. At times they were forcibly withered by the reigning egomaniacs, who either never heard that great leaders bring on and surround themselves with great potential successors, or did not care to learn it.A friend recalls being in the party conference hall one year when Mo Mowlam made a speech and was given a rapturous standing ovation. On the platform, the strength of the love in the room caught Blair visibly by surprise, and – whaddya know? – the briefing against Mowlam began with little delay.
If the non-favourites in the leadership race want what Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins memorably described as “too much fucking perspective”, they should consider the uncomfortable fact that they’re not currently losing to Clement Attlee; they’re losing to Jeremy Corbyn. If Blairism was essentially a pragmatic sort of progressivism, you’d have thought it would have been pragmatic and progressive enough to perpetuate itself better.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/31/labour-leadership-blairism-manchester-united
