The Spectator’s Notes | 19 February 2005

Tony Blair (who has introduced the most divisive law in modern times) thinks that George Bush ‘owes him one’ for his support over the Iraq war. But what form could the payment of the debt take? Bush’s backing, after all, might make Blair even more unpopular among those thinking of voting Labour. I think I know the answer and, not surprisingly, one detects the hand of Peter Mandelson in it. Bush is coming to Europe next week and will visit the institutions of the European Union in Brussels, the first American President to do so. I gather that early drafts of his speech for this occasion get him to endorse the European constitution. If he does this, of course, he will flatly and disastrously contradict his wider strategy of developing a world order different from the blocs of the Cold War era; but never underestimate the love of policy elites for doing deals with other policy elites. For Mr Blair, the endorsement would be perfect — isolating the Tories while not getting President too close to Prime Minister for electoral comfort.

When Harold Macmillan was lying in hospital in 1963, wondering whom to recommend to the Queen to succeed him, he wrote a memo whose first draft is particularly interesting, both querulous and perceptive. He was considering the claims of Lord Home, who shortly afterwards got the job. He wrote that Home represented ‘the old governing class at its best’ — people who ‘think about the question under discussion and not about themselves’. ‘It is thinking about themselves that is really the curse of the younger generation,’ Macmillan went on, ‘they appear to have no other subject which interests them at all …Lord Home is free …from many of the difficulties that beset modern people today. But the very fact that he is free from them makes him in my mind at a disadvantage …because this strange people, tortured by material success and affluence, are seeking release by some teacher who is himself subject to all those pressures and is not ashamed to break the ordinary rules and conventions suitable to more settled intellectual periods.’