Your whites whiter

Tony Blair’s ability to arouse emotion in so many people, who even when combined mean less to the prime minister than a tin of shoe polish, is his greatest, and most intriguing quality.

A significant section of the population today are moved enough to wish all sorts of unholy things on Mr Blair. Yet go back nine years or so, and some of these, as well as some others yet to fully turn on the leader of Her Majesty’s government, were getting ready to canonise him, viewing him as some sort of cross between Mother Theresa and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Today, you can’t stumble across a political discussion without finding at least someone who believes that Blair is a malicious war-criminal, more corrupt than Berlusconi and more evil than Ant and Dec. He should, his bloodthirsty detractors cry, spend the rest of his days locked in a room full of murderers, terrorists and paedophiles.

Nine years ago, more people than now seems sensible believed Tony Blair’s administration really would be, as he claimed, “whiter than white”. Above corruption. The first government in the history of the world that wouldn’t succumb to the venalities of power. No one believed this more than Tony Blair himself.

Although I obviously can’t be certain, I’m confident that the prime minister did genuinely think he would oversee an honest, competent and noble government. But then coming into my last year at university, I, like pretty much everyone I knew, honestly and innocently believed that I would do some work. Not just some work. Lots of work. It was never going to happen of course, not when it was so much easier not to.

It probably took Blair about the same amount of time to abandon the idea of being an angelically pure PM as it takes your average student to rescind any well-intentioned and well-meaning promises to never ever drink ever again. And if there’s one thing that unites every criminally rampant hangover, it’s that it’s never the bearer’s last.

Since professing to behave himself, Tony has, undoubtedly, told a few porkers. He’s bent the truth in more ways than Uri Geller has bent cutlery. He’s given jobs to his friends and benefactors ahead of others with greater merit. He’s almost unfailingly put himself before the country. He has, in short, acted in exactly the same way that any of the rest of us would have in the same obscure and ugly set of circumstances.

Yet focusing on the fact that Blair is just like everybody else, only with the talent and industriousness to actually achieve something in life isn’t nearly as much fun as treating him like the devil, an egregiously evil man who has the audacity not just to lie, but to lie to us. But people who treat Blair as the antichrist and concentrate on his civic calumnies would do well to read, aptly, The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically aphorism 55.

The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one’s self; to lie to others is relatively exceptional.  Now this refusal to see what one sees, this refusal to see a thing exactly as one sees it, is almost the first condition for all those who belong to a party in any sense whatsoever: the man who belongs to a party perforce becomes a liar.

Discussion over Blair’s betrayal of his party (for good or ill) has wasted more oxygen and more trees than discussion over any other facet of his character. Apparently he operates apart from the party, above and beyond the party, even against the party. He is not a party man but a presidential figure, helpfully elevated into power by the willing minions below. This is, however, complete tosh.

Blair may not think along the same lines as the inferior members of his party, but the last thing political parties are about is thinking. Blair’s a party man because, like nepotism, it’s easier that way. It institutionalises all that we know, love and won’t admit about being human, like taking sides, always being right and imposing our will upon as many other people as possible. The human psyche, forever in thrall to power impulses, is the most fertile ground for corruption it’s possible to imagine.

Actually being whiter than white is thus rather tough. It’s decidedly inhuman. It requires combating all sorts of innate internal biases. To run a government in such a paradisiacal, eirenic way would require some sort of robot. Somewhat ironically, the nearest thing we have to such a thing – an unemotional monster with a heightened sense of patriotic duty – is precisely the person we’ve in effect transferred power away from.

But that’s a tale for another day. What the disappointment of Blair’s reign should tell us is quite how important having an effective array of checks and balances on governmental power is. But then that’s been the clear message of the reign of all of Blair’s predecessors too, who all fell, only to be replaced by the next whiter-than-white, well-meaning and well-sounding fellow.

It’s a cycle that’s unlikely to be broken. Nevertheless, it always pays to remember that any politician that claims to be whiter than white will always first and foremost be human, all-too-human.