Well, Tony has announced the day of his resignation. I think it is about six weeks in the future. This will give time for the clunking fist to slug it out with all comers to decide who is to take his place.
The news coverage is blanket. Tony, ever the 'performance politician' has stage managed a resumption of power sharing in in Northern Ireland to coincide with his announcement. We must all hope that it continues for longer than his farewell tour.
I am of course intensely jealous of such a successful near contemporary. Like most Oxbridge types, I cannot understand why someone who seems so ordinary should be so feted. I especially cannot understand why qualities which he has, which I don't have and that I set at no value, are so praised and so important to everyone. The most outstanding of these is the famous reaction to the Death of Diana.
My own feelings at the time were that she was a rich, spoiled woman, who had entered into a contract to be a properly-behaved wife of an ornament of our constitution and that she had broken that contract and brought the whole institution of the monarchy into disrepute. Even I could see that she was behaving in a vindictive and provocative way towards her former husband.
That a major part of Tony's legacy should have been the success he had in reflecting the mood of the country after her death shows how remote I am from ever understanding the mood of the average voter. Alistair Campbell was, and probably still is, a major influence on Blair, and I suppose it is the attitudes of the tabloids (or 'red tops' as I now must call them) that I cannot, or will not, understand.
There are endless verdicts on Blair. The consensus seems to be that he was OK apart from the fact that we picked the wrong side in the USA vs The Rest of the World argument about Iraq.
Neil Kinnock described TB as a 'performance politician'. I heard that his speeches are brilliant and that he learns them by heart. My own feeling is that he is more of a matinee idol than an intellectual and has therefore made many policy errors. Certainly almost everything he has touched which has involved deploying any kind of computer system has turned to dust. From the ID Card Scheme, Biometric Passports, CSA, Family Tax Credits, Rural Payments Agency, Connecting for Health, PAYE, IR Self Assessment, MoD Helicopter training, railway safety systems, NATS, Government Gateway, Land Registry, virtually all the departmental websites, even to David Milliband's blog. The Public Accounts Committee regularly identifies gross mismanagement of these practical government projects, but HMG always prefers to listen to Accenture and the other IT-building consultants who are the beneficiaries of these huge overspends. But I suppose what is a cost of twelve and have billion pounds spend on connecting a few hospitals together electronically compared to the national benefit that results from TB leading the nation's mourning for the loss of Diana?
