Kettle logic

Or: Tony Blair and our relation to his unconscious.

Old German joke, as retold by Sigmund Freud. A man borrows a kettle from his neighbour. When he returns it, the neighbour complains that it’s got a hole in it. Don’t look at me, says our man, I never borrowed your kettle. Besides, it was fine when I gave it back to you. I wish I’d never borrowed it anyway – it’s useless, it’s got a great big hole in it.

In other words, Don’t blame me, I wasn’t there. Well, OK, I was there, but nothing went wrong. Well, maybe something did go wrong, but it was nothing to do with me…

In three words: deny, deny, deny. It wasn’t me.

Martin Kettle (you can groan now) is outraged that anyone should even think that the election was won by Labour and not by Tony Blair, when it’s perfectly obvious that the voters chose “to return a Labour government with Tony Blair at its head”. In the same article, he denounces the ludicrous idea that Labour lost votes to the Left rather than the Right, or that there was a swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats – after all, most of the seats Labour lost went to the Tories. He rails against the misconception that Labour depends on working class support, since “the strongest swing against Labour on May 5 was among manual workers” (and hey, they got elected anyway). As for the idea that anyone could want Blair to go because they think he’s a bad leader – inconceivable!

By all means let Tony Blair step down in due course […] But be clear that you understand why you want him to go. To this question there is one right answer and a whole host of seductive wrong ones. If you want Blair to go because you think he is a liar, a liability, a loser, a bad prime minister, has bad policies or is leading the country in the wrong direction, then forget it.

Oh. Right-o, then.

Kettle, in short, is a rich source of unsupported assertions, misleading analogies, begged questions and other logical fallacies. Either he’s a really appallingly bad writer, or (as in Freud’s example) there’s something else going on: something which makes bad arguments look good (to Kettle and, indeed, to his editor).

In the ‘broken kettle’ story, the driving force is a terror of being blamed: the speaker finds it unbearable to admit that something has gone wrong and he is responsible, so clutches at ways of denying one fact or the other. Something similar seems to be lurking under Kettle’s fractured logic. In particular, there’s a real whiff of the broken kettle about this story from two days before the election. Was Labour going to lose seats on May 5th? Well, maybe, but that wouldn’t mean that Blair had failed:

Labour could lose a lot of seats on May 5 and Tony Blair could still come back with a majority of 80 or 90. That kind of result would undoubtedly be written up by many as a bloody nose for Labour. But when Harold Wilson won by a similar margin in 1966, he talked about it as proof that Labour was the natural party of government. If Blair wins by 90 this week you will not find many to dispute the view that he has succeeded where Wilson failed.

If the loss of seats was too big to be ignored, that wouldn’t mean that Blair had actually done anything wrong: the result would be

proof of Labour’s failure to cement the deal with suburban middle-class Britain, and thus of the need to consolidate the party’s Blairite character.

It would mean, in other words, that Labour had failed by not being true to Blair. Even when, stretching every speculative sinew, Kettle concedes for the sake of argument that there might actually be a problem with Blair himself, his conclusion is not that Gordon Brown would make a better leader – or that anyone would make a better leader:

Who among its leaders would speak most directly and plausibly to the lost Labour majority in places like Finchley, Hemel, Dartford and Hove. Would it be Brown or would it be Blair? It may be Blair’s fault – Iraq and lack of trust – if these voters are lost to Labour on Thursday. But it remains to be seen whether Brown can win them back in 2009 in the way Blair captured them in 1997 and 2001.

Perhaps Blair has been a liability to the party, but he has still been the best possible leader – and he remains the best possible leader. If Blair can be criticised, in other words, it can only be in the name of Blair. There really is no alternative…

…because the alternative would be intolerable. The alternative would be to admit that Labour lost votes on May 5th because of Blair. The alternative would be to admit that thousands of former Labour voters looked for a left-wing alternative, because of Blair and what he has done to the party. The alternative would be to admit that Labour lost seats, some to the Lib Dems and others to the Conservatives, because of Blair, and because of Iraq and control orders and tuition fees and PFI, and because of the principles that Blair’s Labour Party now stands for. The alternative would be to admit, among other things, that potential Labour voters had a choice – and that attempting to foreclose that choice for the sake of the New Labour project is shameful.

But the alternative is intolerable. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Blair can’t face it either: he’s listened and he’s learned, and he’s learned that what we want is, by a bizarre coincidence, exactly what he was offering at the start of the election campaign (more cuts to the dole, more privatisation of health and education) plus a bit of rhetoric about immigration and some faintly sinister stuff about bringing back ‘respect’ in schools and town centres. He’s willing to move Right, in other words, but not Left. It’s how Blair works: Left may be where his party wants him to go, but Right is where the votes are – it’s axiomatic. (It may not be true, but it’s axiomatic.) As for Iraq – well, he’s listened and he’s learned, and what he’s learned is that we all want to forget about Iraq and draw a line and move on. So that’s all right then.

In short, bizarrely enough, Martin Kettle was right. Not because his analysis was logically compelling (it patently wasn’t); not because it represented an appropriate response to a mass desertion of Labour to the Left and the Liberal Democrats (what it represented was a slap in the face); but because Tony Blair thinks just the same way. If he was wrong… well, he wasn’t wrong. But even if he did get it wrong… well, he’ll just have to try harder this time round. And if he was actually doing the wrong thing… well, who are they going to get instead, eh?

Besides, what’s all this about being wrong? He wasn’t wrong. He’s not wrong. Ever.