All prime ministers need to be sustained by one necessary but reassuring myth: the illusion that they are in control. Some, exceptionally lucky, prime ministers are able to leave office with that illusion intact. But Tony Blair is close to the horrifying moment, which can be the psychological equivalent of a car crash, when that
There has always been something of a Jesus complex about Tony Blair. It suits him, temperamentally, to evangelise, to parade the passion of his belief, and to accept the devotion of his followers. It would now appear that he is approaching his political Calvary. As the hymn says, ‘Sometimes they strew his way, and his
Having had a peek through the gates of Downing Street, the next item on a tourist’s itinerary is a short stroll across Horse Guards Parade to the Cabinet War Rooms, from where Winston Churchill directed operations in the second world war. We don’t yet know where tourists of the future will be going to view
The prospect of war now eclipses everything at Westminster. To use the narrow, though reassuring, boundaries of the English racing calendar, hostilities are unlikely to break out before the final day of the Cheltenham Festival on 13 March. But they will probably have ceased, at any rate as far as the initial stage of the
The Tory party is like some particularly gloomy man going through a mid-life crisis. His wife has left him, to universal applause. As so often in these cases, he seems unable to talk about anything except himself, thereby making his position worse. He takes a girl out to dinner, and she is prepared to give
There are many symptoms of contemporary decline from the healthy and robust democratic politics of the mid-20th century. They include the death of public oratory, the rise of the leadership cult and the use of mass-advertising techniques to manipulate voters. But most telling of all is the rise of a narrow, exclusive, metropolitan elite of
Modern-day wizards in the laboratories of the world’s pharmaceutical companies should take a day off from tending their test tubes and concoct a new word for ‘profit’. It is needed because the existing word has been demonised to the point at which Western businessmen hardly dare utter it in public. At the World Trade Organisation
The government has a thing about the mediaeval period. Charles Clarke complains that universities ‘have governance systems that stretch back to mediaeval times’. David Blunkett complains that the law takes ‘a mediaeval view of marriage’. The Ministry of Agriculture apologises for using ‘mediaeval’ pyres during the foot-and-mouth outbreak. The implication, one presumes, is that mediaeval
There is a moment in the Uncle Remus stories when Brer Rabbit is finally cornered by Brer Fox, who genially informs his victim ‘I’m going to barbecue you today, for sure.’ Then Brer Rabbit started talking mighty humble. ‘I don’t care what you do with me, Brer Fox,’ says he. ‘Just so you don’t fling
Everyone knows that the National Health Service employs too many managers and too few nurses. Enter any saloon bar in the land and you will be told as much. But this popular wisdom finds shockingly emphatic confirmation in a new pamphlet, Resuscitating the NHS, written by Dr Maurice Slevin, a cancer consultant, and published by
In the aftermath of September 11 we all instinctively felt that the world had utterly changed. In Britain at any rate that turned out not to be the case. After the initial shock, things carried on to some extent as before. But the return to normality was illusory and short-lived. September 11 indeed created new
There are some for whom George W. Bush – or any other Republican president, for that matter – will always be a gun-slinging cowboy bursting through the swing doors of some saloon and firing off for the hell of it. For them, the American President is an irredeemable warmonger intent on attacking Saddam with the
The announcement that Michael Trend, Tory MP for Windsor and formerly chief leader-writer of the Daily Telegraph, is to step down was slipped out late on Tuesday afternoon. The news made no more than a couple of paragraphs in one or two of the morning papers. Trend seems set to sink without trace. But before
It is probably some time since even the keenest student of politics focused on the future of the House of Lords. Most people will remember that day the hereditary peers were expelled from the red benches, amid the horrible glee of Baroness Jay and others. Some may dimly recall a row between William Hague and
War with Iraq, previously a nebulous prospect, has come sharply into focus in the first two weeks of this year. Much has been resolved. In Washington Donald Rumsfeld has lost the argument. His original idea that a light and fast raiding party would, with the aid of an uprising from grateful Kurds and Shiites, be
Looking at the wan, pathetic face of Pete Townshend, the rock musician arrested for possessing child pornography from the Internet, it is hard not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for him. He has not yet been convicted of any offence, and it may turn out that he has not committed one – but his
David Blunkett has once again shown his unfailing instinct for making a bad situation worse. His declaration, after the shooting dead of two young women in Birmingham, that the courts will be told to sentence anyone caught with an illegal firearm to at least five years in jail, was typical of the Home Secretary’s ill-considered
Those who mistrust the new biotechnology have always argued that if it is technologically possible to do something, sooner or later it will be done. As far as the fundamentals of human existence are concerned, the Promethean bargain is a bad one. It is not necessary to deny the potential benefits to humanity of the
A Cambridge geography graduate in search of solitude was recently found starving to death in a hikers’ bothy in the Scottish Highlands surrounded by KitKat wrappers. No one from the anti-globalisation lobby has yet blamed the manufacturer of KitKat bars, NestlZ, for causing her death, but perhaps that is just an oversight. NestlZ has been
Most of the human catastrophes that have overtaken Africa since decolonisation have been the result of bad policy rather than of geographical disadvantages; and bad policy is the inevitable consequence of bad ideas. If there is one commodity in which Africa has not, alas, been lacking in the past 40 years, it is bad ideas.