In Which Further Effort Is Made to Understand Blair Rage

The fury that greeted an unusually generous donation to a popular charity said something sad and profound about British journalism and possibly about the British character. But what?

Tim Lott had a go at answering that question in The Independent on Sunday yesterday:

Why do so many people spend so much of their energy on a target who is entirely indifferent to the effects of their dislike? This raises a further question, not so much about Blair as about human nature and its capacity for hatred.

I have always felt that the most interesting thing about hatred is that the person it punishes is always the hater – not the intended target. For as anyone knows who has felt the sting of real loathing – not from others, but directed from themselves towards others – such a feeling is deeply toxic.

A good point, which rhymes with my notion that Blair rage is, at root, a form of self-hatred. But it does not feel like the whole explanation.

David Aaronovitch could not be bothered with trying to understand the phenomenon in his brilliant rage against the rage on Thursday (pay wall). Ian Leslie, citing Aaro, tried

to move beyond bewilderment to diagnosis. It strikes me that there’s a lot of anger, resentment and dissatisfaction in the country generally at the moment, about all sorts of things. Tony Blair – or rather the media’s confused and contradictory caricature of him – seems to have become a lightning conductor for it. He is our Emmanuel Goldstein, and this week we’ve had our regular Two Minutes’ Hate.

That parallel  with George Orwell, 1984, gives another clue, but it is all wrong. The Two Minutes’ Hate, during which citizens of Oceania were required to watch a film about the Party’s enemies, was a description of the use of propaganda in a totalitarian system. What we have here is an intense form of not just groupthink but group emotion afflicting the majority of the journalistic class in a free press in a democracy.*

Before the current fuss, I came across a couple of obscure blogs in the hope of enlightenment. One was called Why I Hate Tony Blair, which seemed a promising start. Sadly it ended in swearwords and contained as much reasoned argument as a typical comment on this website from the army of Blair-hating trolls who seem to have nothing better to do all day than wind themselves up by reading things with which they disagree.

The other was by Peter Eyre, a “Middle East Consultant”, writing in something called The Palestine Telegraph, based in Australia, which asked, “Why did Tony Blair receive a hero’s welcome in Kosovo?” Which is not a difficult question for most people to answer, but Eyre thinks that the Kosovo people have inexplicably overlooked the contamination of “the entire region and beyond with both uranium and depleted uranium” by the Nato campaign against Slobodan Milosevic of 1999.

There seems no difference in the knowledge, quality of analysis and emotional depth between these examples and this more “cultured” expression of Blair hatred, but they offer no explanation. I’ll keep looking.

Alex Massie could not make much more sense of the phenomenon in his short essay for The Beast. But he did come up with a consolation of the latest spittle-flecked outburst:

The British press is the loser here, and the wounded soldiers who will benefit from Blair’s generosity are the winners. That, at least, is something.

Previous baffled posts in this series here and here. You can sign the Ban Blair Baiting petition here.

*Although the phrase “two minutes’ hate” seems to have predated Orwell, and to have been current in the trenches in the First World War, which suggests an association with the spontaneous need of soldiers to reinforce each other’s hostility to the enemy.

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