After reading Andrew Rawnsley's article in the Observer today, I suspect that now is the time for newspapers to prepare their political obituaries of A.Blair, if they have not already done so.
Thinking strigently, if only he had followed up his promise to properly reform the House of Lords - if only he had made it 100% elected - he would not be in this mess. By the way, if he had agreed to public funding of political parties, which I think will come, he would also not be in this mess either.
One the of the most staggering things about the loans for peerages affair, as Rawnsley points out, is that Jack Dromey, Treasurer of the Labour Party, knew nothing about the loans. The fact that Mr Dromey is the husband of cabinet minister and Attorney General, Harriet Harman, makes this fact even more gobsmacking. It was an act of incredible stupidity and arrogance that Tony Blair took the Labour Party's finances (insofar as arranging those huge loans) into his own hands and those of his appointed envoy, Lord Levy.
From Rawnsley's article, it seems that the police may well be onto something. Of course, the huge crossover between peerages and donors to the Labour party is one thing. Proving a connection is another. But it seems that Terrier Plod is scenting a bone, in canine terms.
The fact that the trail allegedly leads to Number 10 Downing Street makes the whole thing incredibly incendiary . It promises to be possibly far worse than the sleaze of John Major.
I think we are seeing the exposure of Tony Blair's Achilles heel. He is basically a "toff" and he is impressed by money. It could be his undoing. The Bernie Ecclestone affair was the first crack in the Blair facade and now we may be seeing the whole thing crack up.
If he has any sense, A. Blair should have an exit strategy ready, measured in days. I suspect that he doesn't have any sense, so the Labour party ought to have an exit strategy ready for him. If that exit strategy is measured beyond the party conference this autumn then they may well have done their calculations wrongly.
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I'm not sure if he is a toff, but he certainly seems to be unduly impressed by money. As someone once said, when he is with the likes of Ecclestone, he behaves like a head boy allowed to stay up late with the teachers...
ReplyDeleteBlair is at the very least from the wealthy upper middle class.
ReplyDeleteThen again, that's where socialism originated, it took a while to sell it to the working classes (even then many were never convinced).
It is understandable that the worst excesses of social democracy should be practiced under such a person.
Whatever else he is, Blair isn't a fool. My guess(and I'm just a casual observer of these things rather
ReplyDeletethan an anorak, so I'm almost certainly wrong) is that he thinks Brown would be a disaster as as PM and wants to hang around long enough to take Brown down with him and put in place a credible succession. Let's not forget that for all his many faults, TB is, unfortunately, the most effective politcian in the country.
A credible succession would, IMHAUO (in my humble and uniformed opinion)
would be Alan Johnson PM, Douglas Alexander in the Treasury and Milliband (or maybe the incumbent) in the FO.
But you're right about him being impressed by money. It's all part of the big swininging dick thing that
got us into Iraq and led to No. 10 taking control of Labour finances in the first place. Unfortunately, one
of the wealthiest of Tony's mates is also the Leader Of The Free World.
I had to read the beginning of the
'Yo Blair' thing a couple of times before I realisedthat it wasn't a piss take or a new Spitting Image
script.