MPs set off on their holidays this week amid a mood of national consensus. Tony Blair’s reputation has never stood so high, and its lustre stretches across all parties. Conservative MPs look at him nowadays with adoration. They laugh when he laughs, and grimace when he grimaces.
One of the main candidates for the Tory leadership, the moderniser David Cameron, has come to base his candidacy on the sublime proposition that he is the natural successor to Tony Blair. Cameron’s supporters openly claim that just as Blair, not John Major, was the inheritor of Thatcher, so Cameron rather than Gordon Brown will take on the gleaming Blair legacy.
Meanwhile, leading figures from all parties have come together to confront the national emergency. Charles Kennedy, Michael Howard and Tony Blair sat around the Cabinet table in Downing Street this week to express their common opposition to terror.
This kind of unanimity is rare, though far from unknown, in politics. Readiness to set aside party difference displays unity and common purpose. As Tony Blair remarked at the Downing Street press conference on Tuesday, ‘When the main political parties present a united front, then it sends an important signal to the terrorists of our strength and our determination and our unity to defeat them.’
Doubtless this is the case. But there are dangers in political consensus, as Britain has learnt many times to her cost. Consensus entrenches intellectual fallacy, and stifles original and honest thought. Politicians of all parties huddle together less for strength than for comfort. They often reassure themselves in error rather than confront the truth in a clear-headed way.
It is an uncomfortable fact that the very occasions when the political establishment has concurred most on an issue have coincided with the times they have been disastrously wrong: the outbreak of the first world war, the economic depression of the 1930s, the appeasement of Hitler.
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