Nicolas Leonard: Ghost of Tony's Christmas past won't disappear
The British Chancellor, Alistair Darling: he has learned a lot about Brian Lenihan in the last week
Monday December 14 2009
Tony Blair could "dance on the head of a pin and smile while he's doing it", says his former deputy prime minister, John Prescott.
Blair is getting ready for some of the most nimble dancing of his life as he prepares to be questioned early in the new year by the public inquiry into the invasion of Iraq.
Yesterday, in a pre-recorded interview about his religious beliefs for BBC television, he astonished former colleagues by claiming that if he had known back in 2003 that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, he would have used "different arguments" to justify going ahead with the invasion.
Prescott, like almost all of Blair's cabinet colleagues, voted in favour of the invasion but now confesses that he wonders how he came to go along with it.
He says he listened in to some of the video links between Blair and the US president, George Bush, and recalls that they could be "hair-raising because Bush has got his own kind of approach". In the years since then he has often thought that Blair could have said to Bush, "Sod you, we're not doing it".
Blair infuriated his numerous critics last week by picking up a reputed £90,000 (€100,000) for a 20-minute speech at the opening of a factory making formaldehyde in Azerbaijan, a country where the phrase "human rights" is twinned with "hollow laugh".
In an echo of the legendary one word of advice about plastics in the film, 'The Graduate', Blair said he would tell his son, Leo, to "stop all other studies and concentrate on formaldehyde and you will be fine".
Nine-year-old Leo was named after Blair's father, whom he described in the BBC interview as a "militant atheist".
Blair, who refused to "do God" during his time as prime minister, has since become a Catholic and launched his own Faith Foundation.
His friends and colleagues have therefore been surprised that his Christmas cards are determinedly non-sectarian and simply say "Season's greetings".
Two years ago, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, said it was "insulting tosh" to stop wishing people 'Happy Christmas' for fear of causing offence. This month, however, his party's website had no 'Happy Christmas' cards on offer until it was contacted by the media and then limply claimed that this was due to "an oversight" rather than political correctness.
While Blair and Iraq were once again capturing the weekend headlines, Gordon Brown was in Afghanistan trying to improve his difficult relationship with the country's president, Hamid Karzai.
Only last month, Brown described Afghanistan as a "byword" for corruption. Karzai retaliated by calling the criticism "extremely insulting".
Now that the US and Britain have committed more troops, however, the rhetoric has been rapidly adjusted. Brown claimed that he had the "best of relations" with Karzai.
That suggestion is almost as implausible as his denial of a rift with his chancellor, Alistair Darling, over the best way to deal with the current financial crisis at the Treasury.
Both Brown and Darling have learnt a great deal about Brian Lenihan in the past five days, none of it flattering to them.
Economists and media commentators have been unanimous in contrasting the chancellor's strategy most unfavourably with that of Ireland's Finance Minister.
Egged on by his closest cabinet colleague, Schools Secretary Ed Balls, Brown succeeded in forcing Darling to raise government spending for 2010 in order to try to gain an advantage over the Conservatives at the general election. There is speculation that an election could be called as early as March 25.
The reaction to Darling's decisions in the financial markets has been extremely negative.
Both the cost of insuring UK government securities against default and the required rate of interest have gone up.
However, the insurance rates imply that investors are still willing to accept odds of almost 200 to 1 against the UK going bankrupt and the Bank of England is still able to rig the market in government debt by 'electronically' creating money, as required.
- Nicolas Leonard
Irish Independent
