What Blair Is Not

Still trying to understand the socio-psychology of Blair rage, I took part (by webcam from home, which is a first) in the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live. The guests in the studio included Francis Beckett, who hates Tony Blair because he is not “Clement Attlee”, and Anne Atkins, a Conservative who called him a war criminal, presumably as an insult rather than because of the meaning of the words, but had to interrupt her own diatribe to praise his achievement in Northern Ireland.

I put Clement Attlee in quotation marks because Beckett’s hero is not the actual Prime Minister who oversaw the creation of the welfare state, the adoption (in secret) of US nuclear weapons and the partition of India in which perhaps half a million died, but the figment of rose-tinted Labourist imagination who didn’t say very much and was very modest.

I didn’t gain much insight there, but suggested that the BBC should reserve the term war criminal for people such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein who committed war crimes or attempted genocide rather than Blair, who stood against them. (Blair Supporter has more on the programme here.)

But it made me wonder about language and its misuses. A striking example last week was Matthew Parris, a good writer with a tendency to exaggeration, which I have found offensive before. Asked by Iain Dale to name the three least impressive figures he has encountered, he replied:

If someone was completely unimpressive, one wouldn’t want to knock them. I think there are a few people who have really significantly increased the amount of evil there is in the world. Alastair Campbell is one of them. I believe he has made a personal contribution to lowering the terms of politics and the media in Britain. I think Tony Blair has actually done more evil, much more evil than Gordon Brown, who is simply incompetent. Tony Blair was a confidence trickster of the worst kind. I’m not going to cast around for a third person!

This is smartaleckry with consequences. Many people might think that, because Parris is clever, he is not using the word “evil” in a facetious or rhetorical sense, but that he means something by it.

Recent Posts on Eagle Eye - Breaking views from Independent commentators -

• A defence of competition in health care
• Prime Ministers shopping
• Bill will survive; Andrew will not
• Names of Wonder
• "Unemployment is the root of all social evil"