The Paranoid Style

The Times carries a leading article today (pay wall), with the headline above, that is worth quoting in full — for the purposes of criticism, review and reporting current events.

Tony Blair’s memoirs have broken sales records, with 92,000 copies sold in the four days after publication. Yet Mr Blair cancelled a book signing and the launch party this week after demonstrators in Dublin confronted him with abuse and missiles.

You can understand Mr Blair’s reasoning while regretting his decision: shoppers, the police and Mr Blair’s guests did not seek the attentions of rowdy protesters. But while the freedom to demonstrate is precious, the furies voiced by the anti-Blair movement should be confronted for the venomous irrationalism that they are.

Like Margaret Thatcher, his predecessor but one as Prime Minister, Mr Blair is a world-class statesman who faces wild vituperation. But the dominant theme of anti-Thatcher invective was barely disguised snobbery (Jonathan Miller, the theatre director, accused her of “catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy”). Blair-hate is more virulent but also drearily predictable.

Mr Blair is routinely castigated as a warmonger, yet the Stop the War Coalition, organisers of the protests, is not itself antiwar: it is pro-war on the other side. It supports the “resistance” to troops reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan under a UN mandate. (And take it from us, comrades: the epithet “Tony B. Liar” falls short of the wordplay of Wilde, Carroll and Asterix the Gaul.) Mr Blair halted Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal campaign in Kosovo. Yet the cartoonist of a national newspaper recently dug deep in his wells of irony and depicted Mr Blair as Radovan Karadzic.

In short, Blair-hate is no conventional political criticism. It is an ugly, visceral reflex that is anti-American, anti-British and anti-democratic, and it is long past time to call it such.

No doubt the comments below will soon conform to Morgan’s Law, as adumbrated yesterday by Peter Morgan, writer of The Deal, The Queen and The Special Relationship:

The anger towards these people is absolutely extraordinary. I looked on The Guardian website and it was just talking about Mandelson. Within an hour there were 450 comments. I scrolled through the comments and the rage … I was like, ‘Somebody has to protect these people from reading these comments.’ What would that do to you?

And it’s the same with Blair. Within a minute, the anger. And we haven’t actually yet engaged with the rage because we’re still 10 years behind. Even with this, we’re just beginning – how did Blair stretch from Clinton to Bush? We’re just beginning to create the monster …

The compromises, the disappointments, the bartering, the realisation, the inevitable disappointment, the inevitable heartbreak, the betrayals, the fighting, the rivalry, the hatred, the anger. We haven’t done that bit yet.

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