A Cherie and Tony Blair postscript

From an op-ed piece "Wifely delusions of Churchillian grandeur" in The Independent:

"What will we do for amusement once Cherie Blair wanders off the world stage? Talking to Vanity Fair in a publicity interview to promote the US publication of her memoirs, she pondered the question of how good a prime minister her husband had been. "He was fantastic," she said. "I'm sure history will judge him very well. I think he'll be up there with Churchill."

American politicians are of the unbreakable habit of mentioning Churchill's name whenever they fall into the public company of their British counterparts. But there is a hideous, car-crash quality to a British ex-premiere's spouse making a direct comparison of this sort. The claim doesn't even need rebutting, so ludicrous is the idea of any kind of similarity between the two.

Blair was a competent manager and a very skilful political operator, prone to some horrible misjudgements and one catastrophic one over Iraq. "Fantastic" is truly the word for much of his foreign policy, and that is what history will really remember him for.

He stayed as long as he did because there was really no plausible alternative leader within his party – just how implausible the main alternative was, we are now painfully discovering. Nothing he did could be compared even to Attlee or Thatcher in vision, scope or novelty. He wasn't a disaster as prime minister, but the apt comparison, really, is that of Harold Wilson.

And as for his wife – as Attlee wrote to Harold Laski just at the end of the war, "a period of silence on your part would be welcome".

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