I’ve written at LabourList about the content of Tony Blair’s speech to Progress on Friday. I thought I should just sound a note of warning about the mood in the room. I’m as guilty as anyone of whipping myself into a frenzy when Tony speaks but I think we need to be self-aware and careful about quite how fired up we allow ourselves to getwhen the old master returns to the political fray. It reminded me of a famous passage about Napoleon Bonaparte by the historian Hendrik Van Loom:
‘Here I am sitting at a comfortable table loaded heavily with books, with one eye on my typewriter and the other on Licorice the cat, who has a great fondness for carbon paper, and I am telling you that the Emperor Napoleon was a most contemptible person. But should I happen to look out of the window, down upon Seventh Avenue, and should the endless procession of trucks and carts come to a sudden halt, and should I hear the sound of the heavy drums and see the little man on his white horse in his old and much-worn green uniform, then I don’t know, but I am afraid that I would leave my books and the kitten and my home and everything else to follow him wherever he cared to lead. My own grandfather did this and Heaven knows he was not born to be a hero. Millions of other people’s grandfathers did it. They received no reward, but they expected none.’
Now clearly Tony isn’t Napoleon (though he did get undone, like Bonaparte, by invading one country too many) because he only ever asked us to go out and canvass, not march into the a hail of cannonballs.
But for Labour activists of a certain age, me included (and ones too young to have experienced his finest hour judging by the youth of the audience at the Progress speech), he has a similar charismatic appeal to that Van Loom attributes to Bonaparte. The 1997 general eection was our Austerlitz (Napoleon’s classic early victory), 2001 and 2005 our Wagram and Borodino (his later more costly, less finessed and more attritional wins) and listening to Blair at rare events like last Friday’s we can’t help wishing we could recreate those glory days. We even close our ears and pretend not to hear when he occasionally drifts into utter codswallop, such as his pronouncement that we shouldn’t have reflated the economy in the face of the financial crisis.
The problem is that Blair isn’t coming back from political exile to lead us once more any more than Napoleon was able to come back from St Helena. 2007 was final. It was Waterloo, not 1814.
If we carry on seeing everything through the paradigm of the lost and undefeated leader we run the risk of becoming the political equivalents of the Old Guard veterans who kept their moth-eaten full dress uniforms in the wardrobe in the vain hope that the ‘little man on his white horse’ would reappear.
We’ve been here before: the Gaitskellites our predecessors on the right of the party spent much of the Wilson years getting maudlin about their lost leader, and they had more right to do so because he was prematurely dead and thus unable even to give occasional provocative speeches.
It’s very important that Labour’s right starts thinking about the future without Blair, and doesn’t sink into a comforting role as keepers of the one true flame or a historical re-enactment society.
The risk of hoping for a rerun of Blair’s glory years is that by virtue of the simple fact that he is not Blair, we blind ourselves to the very real merits of Ed Miliband as our leader in the here and now – merits that have been amply demonstrated in the last week in his handling of the News International scandal.
Worse still we might actually get a rerun, but as Marx said, when history repeats itself it is often ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’
Marx was writing about Louis Napoleon, Napoleon’s incompetent nephew, whose rule as Napoleon III was a comic opera attempt to recreate the past glories of his uncle, and ended in the military catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian war. An attempt to recreate the Blair years without Blair would be a political disaster for Labour of equivalent proportions.
Our task as Labour’s modernisers and moderates is to contribute to the development of a new Labour politics for 2011 – we should celebrate our great past leaders and our great past triumphs and learn lessons from them but not see them as the blueprint for future victories in a very different era.
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