A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

It was the sort of odd, round about thought that often struck AA Milne’s bear – in fact I almost found myself tapping my forehead in a Pooh-like manner.

The chapter was entitled, “In which Rabbit has a busy day, and we learn what Christopher Robin does in the mornings”. I won’t trouble you with all the detail, and since I don’t want Mr Milne’s estate and/or Disney descending on me from the Hundred Acre Wood, I won’t quote from the book either. But basically it consists of Rabbit hurrying around to all his friends because he wants to be busy and feels that it’s a bit of a “Captainish” sort of day.

And the more I read, as Pooh might say, the more I thought: this is New Labour, this is what New Labour do and have been doing for the past 11 years.

Earlier that afternoon, I was interviewed on Radio 2 by Steve Wright who asked me what, with hindsight, was a very clever question: has the Sunday Express been giving Gordon Brown a good kicking and are we going to carry on kicking him?

I must admit that it caught me a little off guard. I blathered something about how we had never had much time for Gordon Brown (for whom nobody has ever voted and who is beginning to look increasingly like an over-stuffed cuckoo in a crumbling nest) but that he was a wily old campaigner who couldn’t just be written off. I also made the point that David Cameron still had to convince voters that he was a little more than just Not Gordon Brown. In other words, I clumsily ducked the “kicking” question.

Thinking about it afterwards, and in the light of my Winnie The Pooh moment, I realised that the reason
I’d grown a little weary of criticising Brown week in and week out was not out of any compassion for the old buffoon but because he, clearly, is not the real problem. The real problem is that the New Labour project does not exist. It isn’t there. It’s a myth.

A figment of the imagination. It’s a lot of Rabbit-like scurrying about trying to be “busy” but the “busy-ness” adds up to nothing at all: no plan, no strategy, no substance.

If any proof were needed of this it arrived, this week, in the unedifying form of Cherie Blair’s autobiography. Flanked by equally grim offerings from John Prescott and Lord “Look At Me, Look At Me” Levy, Cherie’s tome was the third panel in a grisly triptych of New Labour “misery memoirs”. There have already been pages of newspaper comment about these books – how they seem to sum up the hypocrisy and greed at the heart of New Labour. But what the parts of Cherie’s book that have so far been extracted seem to show is the sheer vacuousness of both the Blairs and the Labour Party.

It would have taken a journalist with extraordinary levels of bile to produce a portrait of the Blairs quite as unappetising as the one Cherie has constructed: they come across as self-pitying play actors battered by storms largely of their making. The book’s language is the clichéd, insincere crackle of old Hollywood mixed with Only Fools And Horses mawkishness: “Listen, Tony. This is your moment… who dares wins,” was how Cherie tried to convince Tony to take on Gordon for the party leadership.

Ironically, Gordon – who is the main target of whatever genuine flak that Mrs Blair can muster – comes out of it all rather well. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the Blairs when Cherie moans that Gordon was forever “rattling the keys” of Downing Street: he had, after all, been promised them. And wasn’t Mrs Blair rattling the keys to just about everything from the moment she got her feet on the No11 doormat?

Certainly the keys to whatever coffers of riches the position might open up to her – plum legal assignments, speeches, personal appearances etc.

Flying back from a cycling holiday last weekend with a group of male friends I was amazed when one of them – a fairly dyed- in-the-wool Tory – said Cherie’s memoirs made him “feel sorry” for Gordon. But I (almost) feel the same way – not because Gordon was made to wait so long for the pledged hand-over but because, as Cherie’s book vividly reveals, there was nothing to be handed over.

The New Labour Project was just empty soap bubbles Tony, his simpering wife and their power-blinded acolytes had been solemnly blowing for a decade. No wonder Brown has struggled to make much sense of it since.
Of course, Gordon was as much a part of the smoke and mirrors as the Blairs – he was hurrying to Owl’s and Piglet’s houses trying to be captainish with the rest of them – but perhaps even he didn’t realise quite how false and self-serving the boss and his wife were: how little of what they did was about building New Labour and how much of it was about the Blairs and What They Would Do Next.

He’s certainly found out now.  Unfortunately, as the economy crumbles, schools and hospitals fall apart and our children murder each other for mobile phones, so have the rest of us.