Polly Toynbee
by Polly Toynbee
This highly political funeral was bound to be a battleground, the gun carriage her final political symbol. Over the top? Absurdly. Will tomorrow see her finally laid to rest? Not at all. The Conservative party and the country will be forever riven by her image.
Had Tony Blair known when he wrote his critical New Statesman article that he would clash with her obsequies, might he have paused before following her bad example as a former leader? What delight he gave the enemy press: “The Blair bitch project: Ex-PM and heavyweight pals tear into Red Ed,” whooped the Sun, claiming he “stoked up a growing revolt”.
But there is no revolt. Disappointing Labour’s foes, Ed Miliband has presided over unexpected unity. There is a “Blairite” shadow cabinet faction, but every healthy party needs right and left wings to pummel out its policies: inside Labour neither side is extreme compared with the wilder shores of Torydom. Miliband’s solid 10-point lead within two years of a crushing defeat is remarkable, when the glum thought they’d be out for eons, some still doubting whether Miliband could win. But someone will — and Labour’s glums should listen to the opposite benches, where virtually all of them despair that David Cameron can lead them to any kind of victory. Labour pessimists should recall that in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was 19 points behind cheery Jim Callaghan in personal popularity. Ideas can trump personality.
Politics is a savage god: It eats all its denizens sooner or later. Leaving power is always painful — ask the MPs who fall at each throw of the electoral dice. Ask cabinet ministers suddenly ripped from their desk and forced to watch their successors tear up prized programmes and erase their memory, a life’s work wrecked in a day. Every politician’s departure needs an addict’s cure from Westminster’s adrenaline rush. Blair seemed to manage the break, staying silently away in the Gordon Brown years. He took on gargantuan causes, from interfaith concord to peace in the Middle East. Oddly reckless of his reputation, he also made vast sums through opaque companies and kept bad company with dictators.
But until now he has held his tongue on British politics. Perhaps the departure of David Miliband stirred him and other old warhorses — John Reid, David Blunkett and Tessa Jowell — to join the fray. Yet once out of the game, yesterday’s men and women are like loose horses getting in the way of the riders in the Grand National. Former top players soon lose the pulse of daily politics, and many take on private commerce with strange political bedfellows, shifting their views rightwards. They yearn for the days of their prime, to reprise 1997 and copy the old playbook. Blair warns Labour against returning to its “comfort zone”, failing to have “a modern vision”, becoming a party of protest or imagining that the centre ground has shifted when the “paradox of the financial crisis” is that “it has not brought a decisive shift to the left”.
Ed Miliband replied with patronising aplomb: “Tony Blair has always got important things to say. He is the first to recognise that political parties need to move forwards, not backwards, need to not go back to old solutions and need to adapt to new times.”
Labour will have an economic policy that spells out its precise fiscal constraints and the scope of its investment in jobs, growth and housebuilding. We would all like to know the details, but what imprudence to spell out cuts, tax and spending when every forecast published is wrong on next month’s growth, let alone that of two years hence. Blair had a little card of five small but symbolic pledges — he didn’t announce his economic plan until January 1997. That idea proved not brilliant: it was to hold to Tory spending plans — which Tory chancellor Ken Clark laughed at later, saying he had no intention of sticking to such an “eye-watering” straitjacket.
What different times these are! Small but totemic policies are in place — building homes with the proceeds of bank bonuses, guaranteed jobs for the unemployed, repealing the NHS act, a mansion tax paying for a 10p tax rate... Miliband says he will lead “in my own way”. His policies point to the direction of travel, but how far? In his much-praised Thatcher speech he repeated his riff on the power of conviction: “She believed ideology mattered”, and her ideas “departed from the prevailing consensus of the time”. He, too, means to change the weather of his times, not be a weather vane. Courage has served him well — on Iraq, on Murdoch and on predatory capitalism. No wonder Blair is uneasy, both about the winnability of such an agenda and what it might do to his own legacy.
The Guardian
by Polly Toynbee
This highly political funeral was bound to be a battleground, the gun carriage her final political symbol. Over the top? Absurdly. Will tomorrow see her finally laid to rest? Not at all. The Conservative party and the country will be forever riven by her image.
Had Tony Blair known when he wrote his critical New Statesman article that he would clash with her obsequies, might he have paused before following her bad example as a former leader? What delight he gave the enemy press: “The Blair bitch project: Ex-PM and heavyweight pals tear into Red Ed,” whooped the Sun, claiming he “stoked up a growing revolt”.
But there is no revolt. Disappointing Labour’s foes, Ed Miliband has presided over unexpected unity. There is a “Blairite” shadow cabinet faction, but every healthy party needs right and left wings to pummel out its policies: inside Labour neither side is extreme compared with the wilder shores of Torydom. Miliband’s solid 10-point lead within two years of a crushing defeat is remarkable, when the glum thought they’d be out for eons, some still doubting whether Miliband could win. But someone will — and Labour’s glums should listen to the opposite benches, where virtually all of them despair that David Cameron can lead them to any kind of victory. Labour pessimists should recall that in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was 19 points behind cheery Jim Callaghan in personal popularity. Ideas can trump personality.
Politics is a savage god: It eats all its denizens sooner or later. Leaving power is always painful — ask the MPs who fall at each throw of the electoral dice. Ask cabinet ministers suddenly ripped from their desk and forced to watch their successors tear up prized programmes and erase their memory, a life’s work wrecked in a day. Every politician’s departure needs an addict’s cure from Westminster’s adrenaline rush. Blair seemed to manage the break, staying silently away in the Gordon Brown years. He took on gargantuan causes, from interfaith concord to peace in the Middle East. Oddly reckless of his reputation, he also made vast sums through opaque companies and kept bad company with dictators.
But until now he has held his tongue on British politics. Perhaps the departure of David Miliband stirred him and other old warhorses — John Reid, David Blunkett and Tessa Jowell — to join the fray. Yet once out of the game, yesterday’s men and women are like loose horses getting in the way of the riders in the Grand National. Former top players soon lose the pulse of daily politics, and many take on private commerce with strange political bedfellows, shifting their views rightwards. They yearn for the days of their prime, to reprise 1997 and copy the old playbook. Blair warns Labour against returning to its “comfort zone”, failing to have “a modern vision”, becoming a party of protest or imagining that the centre ground has shifted when the “paradox of the financial crisis” is that “it has not brought a decisive shift to the left”.
Ed Miliband replied with patronising aplomb: “Tony Blair has always got important things to say. He is the first to recognise that political parties need to move forwards, not backwards, need to not go back to old solutions and need to adapt to new times.”
Labour will have an economic policy that spells out its precise fiscal constraints and the scope of its investment in jobs, growth and housebuilding. We would all like to know the details, but what imprudence to spell out cuts, tax and spending when every forecast published is wrong on next month’s growth, let alone that of two years hence. Blair had a little card of five small but symbolic pledges — he didn’t announce his economic plan until January 1997. That idea proved not brilliant: it was to hold to Tory spending plans — which Tory chancellor Ken Clark laughed at later, saying he had no intention of sticking to such an “eye-watering” straitjacket.
What different times these are! Small but totemic policies are in place — building homes with the proceeds of bank bonuses, guaranteed jobs for the unemployed, repealing the NHS act, a mansion tax paying for a 10p tax rate... Miliband says he will lead “in my own way”. His policies point to the direction of travel, but how far? In his much-praised Thatcher speech he repeated his riff on the power of conviction: “She believed ideology mattered”, and her ideas “departed from the prevailing consensus of the time”. He, too, means to change the weather of his times, not be a weather vane. Courage has served him well — on Iraq, on Murdoch and on predatory capitalism. No wonder Blair is uneasy, both about the winnability of such an agenda and what it might do to his own legacy.
The Guardian
