There are those who refer to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, as the United States President, George Bush’s poodle. When you reflect on how faithfully Blair obeys the regular choke-chain training he’s received from the White House, it’s not hard to understand why he’s seen as a submissive dog. But why drag in the fine poodle breed? A far better comparison would be to liken Blair to another canine species; call him George Bush’s shih tzu. If only by its pronunciation the word locates Tony closer to his favourite political pantry, the Bush cloaca.
A fortnight or so ago Blair again demonstrated how hungry he is. Shortly after another visit to the White House — for a top-up of the republican coprophagic diet — he was up and reiterating faithfully the Bush message. This time Blair was addressing the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, a body which narrates its initiatives in paternalistic gobbledegook: ‘[The World Affairs Council] promotes greater understanding of current global issues and their impact on the people of Southern California by inviting authoritative, influential people to LA and providing them [with] an open forum.” Blair used the forum to promote a greater understanding of what he has recently come to believe is an urgent need for a re-appraisal of British foreign policy.
Even to those still bewildered, indeed sustained, by the Blair myth, the stated subject of the speech promised much more than the speech itself delivered. To cynics, the occasion showed a British prime minister yet again proposing that British foreign policy, as regards the Middle East, anyway, should as closely as possible emulate that of the US. Or, to put it crudely, while seeming to expound on world affairs in some new and dramatically British way, all Blair did was once again swallow, re-digest and re-excrete Bush’s political waste products.
By judging his speech harshly, the cynics would seem not far off the mark. No more than a couple of paragraphs in and Blair was showing how, when it comes to the Middle East, all that his bowels have done with George’s dung is give it a poncey accent. First came the obligatory rhapsody about the ‘extraordinary courage and commitment of our armed forces who risk their lives and in some cases tragically lose them, defending our country and the wider world”. Here Blair was only copying Bush, who is clinically incapable of speaking about his country’s military interventions, wherever they occur in the world, without casting American armed forces in the role of saviours of all that is gracious and undefiled by foreign influences in Western civilisation.
Shortly after that example came the next bolus. With this one Blair didn’t even try to disguise the origin of his notions. ‘There is an arc of extremism, now stretching across the Middle East and touching with increasing definition countries far outside that region. To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian; Arab and Western; wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace in harmony with each other .. etc.”
In redrafting Bush’s well-known ‘axis of evil” into an ‘arc of extremism” Blair revealed neither himself nor his office as capable of imaginative, let alone independent thought. Bush twitched the leash and said ‘Sit!” And Blair sat. A line later he also reshaped another of Bush’s threadbare pronouncements, the one about ‘the coalition of like-minded nations” into his own, ‘an alliance of moderation”. And so the speech went on, with little hints of whence Blair had drawn his inspiration. ‘Unless we bend every sinew of our will.” What did Shakespeare’s Henry V say before Agincourt — ‘stiffen the sinews”?
The copy-cat examples followed, one atop the other. ‘And we have a great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world towards values that will bring lasting peace” — George W Bush, January 2002. ‘This [war] can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternatives” — Tony Blair, January 2006. Is that Bristow-Bovey fellow now working in Downing Street?
And so Blair rattled on with more allegiance to a Bush latterday crusade hell-bent on installing US-style democracy in whichever country appears in need of it. In one of his recent ‘Diaries”, the playwright, Alan Bennett, dumped on Blair’s habit of using supplementary adverbs: ‘I honestly believe” and ‘I really think”, and how these have the effect of diminishing his credibility. In Los Angeles we had ‘tragically lose their lives”, and adjectives also coming in for their fair share of dressing-up: ‘root causes are supremely indicative” and ‘absolutely essential”, along with verbal distortions like ‘deliberatively” and ‘contemporaneously”.
Is there any sight quite as pitiful as that common television shot of Bush and Blair advancing towards their lecterns at a White House press conference? Bush with his swagger and Blair with that bogus clown-grin sprawled all over his face. If you’re going to be a stoepkakker, Blair, for God’s sake try to find a better grade of owner.
A reader has e-mailed me a sardonic little teaser: ‘In upper-class Beirut homes, are the towels marked Hizbollah and Herzbollah?”