The Second Plane, page 13
So far, the response of the West has been dependably abject. “PC Gone Mad” is of course a cliché—but only because PC goes so mad so often. And Mr. Steyn, as you would expect, has a whale of a time with PCGM (the rebuilding of prison toilets that face away from Mecca, et cetera). But I continue to hope that his admonitions will gain some momentum, despite the efforts of his prose style to impede it. Here is a writer who makes the English language blush at its own vulnerability to pun and play. Two jokes per sentence is the norm, and Mr. Steyn keeps to that ration even when, for example, he is citing the filmed decapitations, in Iraq, of the hostages Ken Bigley and Nick Berg. Why would anyone want a laugh while reading about that? As I closed the book I found myself deciding that Mr. Steyn’s sense of decorum must be almost inhumanly thin.
In the U.S., with some Hispanic assistance, the birth rate is 2.1. If we look more closely we see that it’s Alabama and Wyoming we have to thank for that, not California or Massachusetts: the red states are 12 percent more fertile than the blue. According to Mr. Steyn, the “progressive agenda,” the culture of rights and entitlements, is “a literal dead end.” The unspoken corollary, then, is that societies now need to be more reactionary: patriarchal, churchgoing, majoritarian, and philoprogenitive. America Alone is not a long book, and this is just as well: it winds down, about halfway through, into iteration and circularity, without following up on its numerous and grimly riveting implications—among them the completely unsuspected laxity of the urge to reproduce. A practiced sayer of the unsayable, Mr. Steyn nonetheless fails to ask the central question. Will the culture of choice be obliged to give ground to the culture of life?
Itself profoundly retrograde, Islamism may force retrogression on us all. While we’re at it, we could take a leaf out of the book of revolutionary Communism. After the startling census of 1936, Stalin immediately abandoned the progressivist social agenda. His new measures included mass kindergartenization, the introduction of maternity medals, the legalization of inheritance, the solemnization of the marriage ceremony, the prolongation and complication of the divorce process, and the recriminalization of abortion. It worked for a while. In the twenty-first century, deprived of totalitarian invigilation, Russia is losing Russians at the rate of about a million a year.
APRIL 2007. The Times
Review of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2006)
On the Move with Tony Blair
No. 1, London
It isn’t bad, driving through town with Tony. The car’s steel cladding, as the P.M. points out, is almost comically thick—so thick, indeed, that the interior has the feel of something like a Ford Fiesta rather than a Jaguar; and it takes nearly all your strength to tug shut the slablike door behind you. But then we’re away. The crouched policemen, in their dayglo yellow strip, buzz past like purposeful hornets to liberate the road ahead. We barely brake once between Downing Street and the Westway. The power is ebbing from him now; but for a little while longer we can luxuriate in the present tense. And, yes, it’s a bit of all right, driving through town with Tony.
The best moment comes as we approach Hyde Park Corner. Instead of toiling around it, like all the other fools and losers, we sail across it, diagonally, under the arch and the jagged, power-mad neoclassical statue (Apollo on his chariot with the four horses), and then curve right past that far from unfashionable address—No. 1, London. We are talking about Islamism in Britain, and Tony, when on the move, has this much in common with British Islamists: he habitually jumps red lights. Islamists do it to show contempt for the law of the land (and contempt for reason). Tony does it to thwart Islamists.
Now I notice that the P.M. wears no seat belt. When I tenderly point this out to him, he gives an unemphatic shrug. He is, he says, “embarrassed by the bikes.” I am wondering if that’s why Tony looks so young—ten years in a world without traffic. But it wasn’t always like this. The police escort, like so much else, is a consequence of September 11.
In Conversation
Blair was in Brighton on that day, preparing to give a humdrum speech to the Trades Union Congress. He delivered his speech, a different speech (more urgent, and much shorter), then took the train back to London and started trying to raise George Bush.
“Did you sense at the time that September 11 would…define your premiership?”
“Yes, I think I did. And I was already sure that Islamic fundamentalism would be huge. Infinite demands, to be achieved by any means whatever. That’s quite a combination.”
As we neared the RAF airbase I said cautiously, “Was it realized, in 2003, that a democratic Mesopotamia would give rise to something unprecedented? I mean a Shia Arab state.”
Blair waited. Interviewing the P.M., I was often disconcerted to find that I was doing most of the talking. I said,
“The insurgency is partly a spoiling operation. The Sunni elite think the Shia are scum. They say, ‘We rule. They wail.’ The equivalent here—and there’s no inoffensive way of putting this—would be having the Travelers’ Party in power. You know: the nut-rissole artists.” And you wouldn’t like that, would you? “The Sunni are more legalistic. The Shia are dreamier and more poetic and emotional. Are you talking to Iran?”
“There are feelers about opening a back channel. But in my experience back channels to Iran always turn out to be bullshit.”
We got on the plane and flew to Germany. When it comes to the consumption of alcohol, George Bush, of course, makes Tony Blair look like Boris Yeltsin. But in truth Blair hardly touches the stuff. On the roof of the vast Chancellery (six times the size of the White House), in Berlin, I did see him nurse a glass of beer during his tête-à-tête with Angela Merkel—a measure, perhaps, of how charmed and stimulated he is by her. And Angela is known to like a drop.
“Germany is obsessed by transparency,” I had said to him. “Some think it’s because what it fears most is itself.”
“That view’s old-fashioned,” said Blair.
Edinburgh
We were at the Corn Exchange, where Tony would soon denounce the Scots Nats (its separatist policy he characterized as “disastrous in its consequences and reactionary in its soul”). During the pre-speech lull he strolled over and said,
“I had a shock this morning.”
Yes, I thought: I should just about say you did have a shock this morning. I almost said, “I saw it, mate.” Because there it stood on the front page of The Independent: the shadowy photograph (making him look haunted, hunted—isolated, above all) and the banner headline, “BLAIRAQ.” “An exclusive poll reveals that 69 percent of Britons believe that, when he leaves office, his enduring legacy will be…” But it was, of course, laughably inexperienced of me to think that this was the shock Tony hoped to discuss. He’s not about to raise the subject of Iraq. Everyone else on earth can be depended on to do that. It is impossible to exaggerate it: the white-lipped and bloody-minded persistence of the subject of Iraq.
“I went on GMTV,” he continued, moving his head about stiffly in mock indignation, “and Kate Moss’s models were on it too. Five or six of them. And all of them amazingly beautiful.”
“Wearing?”
“Not much. They were all about six foot three. In incredibly short skirts. And someone said, ‘Did you notice how short their skirts were?’ And I said, ‘No! No!’”
“Bit early in the day,” grumbled my colleague (and exact contemporary: closer to sixty than fifty).
“Oh,” said the P.M., “it wasn’t too early in the day.”
One should be careful not to misrepresent our famously uxorious Prime Minister. His manner wasn’t lewd or even laddish; it was merely youthful. Tall, but not imposingly tall, slightly pigeon-toed in gait, with surprisingly full, clean, kind blue eyes, Blair makes you think that the words “boyish” and “buoyant” must have a common root. As you get older, it’s not just the policemen who get younger: it’s also the prime ministers. And I’m being ruled, I suddenly think, by a prefect.
“No,” he concluded, shaking his head. “It never is too early in the day.”
And it never was too early in the day. Too early for me—but not for him. That morning, after a long speech (and Q and A) at the King’s Fund on the gripping theme of the NHS, and then the appearance on GMTV, Tony showed up for a raucous bash at Labour HQ—and it was barely 8:30. Disco music on the turquoise boombox! The coffees! The teas! That exclusive Independent poll also revealed, much more quietly, that 61 percent of Britons believe Blair to have been “a good prime minister,” including 89 percent of Labour supporters. This ardor was palpable. The warm-up act came courtesy of Old Labour, in the person of that battered sensualist John Prescott (“A decade of delivery!”); then the crowd, audibly gurgling with adoration, feasted its senses on the P.M.
The smart open-plan office they were standing in represents a further concretization of what Blair has done for the party. Until 1995, Labour was stationed in Walworth Road, SE17, a facility described at the time as “crap” by Blair and as “fuck-awful” by Alastair Campbell. From the old HQ—remote, poky, dank with lumpen defeat—the foot soldiers got their upgrade: to Millbank Tower, just across the river from Parliament. Then came the mighty computer, “Excalibur,” primed for lightspeed rebuttal of all Tory boasts and smears. The symbolism was unambiguous: here was electoral modernity, and the party machine.
Blair “chose” Labour, but reinvented himself as its antithesis. A mutant: something like an upper-middle-class German-American Christian Democrat. Compared to him, Gordon Brown is all fish-and-chips and Woodbines. But the party loves the P.M., not least because he is the P.M., and goes on being the P.M.: he is their redeemer, their awakener, their landslider.
“I know what TV stands for,” I said to an aide. “But what does GM stand for? I’ve been away.”
“Good Morning.”
“I see. Thanks,” I said. It was ten to nine.
At the Point Conference Centre in Edinburgh, during another lull, Tony strolled over once again and said, “What have you been up to today?”
“I’ve been feeling protective of my Prime Minister, since you ask.” For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious. “You’ve had reverses in the midterms before. And in the European Parliament. But this will probably be your first…rejection.”
“This won’t be my first rejection. 2004. 2002.”
“Cheriegate? That was bullshit, right?”
“Oh, complete bullshit. But what about you?” he typically asks (no reader himself, he is, nonetheless, habitually or even instinctively empathetic). “If your books get attacked, you don’t let it throw you.”
The P.M. had earlier confessed that it wasn’t just the miniskirts that gave him a turn on GMTV. There was also the contrast between his face on the monitor and all that bright and breezy footage from 1997: “The ageing process on screen,” he said. It wasn’t a before-and-after such as Abe Lincoln’s—the handsome frontiersman completely desiccated by the Civil War. Whatever way you look at it, though, ten years is a long time, and not just in politics.
“There’s also an ageing process within,” I said. “You don’t get tougher. You get tenderer. And certain phrases come into your head. Like ‘life’s work.’” Yes, or like “legacy.” “But you’ve got steel. Like your car.”
“Mm. Armor-plated.”
It was hardly necessary to point to the differences of scale. I suppose that Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, and others, have been reluctantly obliged to gain an inkling of how politicians sometimes feel. But more generally a book review is not a plebiscite, a million-man march, a flag-draped casket, a country—perhaps a region—consigned to the flames and the sword.
The Den
Number 10 Downing Street, broad, tall, and deep, has the appearance of a country hotel, with the furnishings of a Harley Street waiting room; and there is a mid-stairs feel to it. You go past the discreetly burping doorman, and for every striding or trotting secretary (“Is the P.M. still in there?”), for every spin doctor and dreamily cruising technocrat, there’s a bloke trundling past with a rubbish barrel or a porter’s trolley.
You feel at once that the atmosphere is also palpably civil and tolerant and quasi-egalitarian. “Tony,” a staffer told me, “is a great non-belittler.” Downing Street, after all, is presided over by a man who answers to a diminutive (and will go down in history with that forename). This may have been notionally true under Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan, but not under, say, Dai Lloyd George, Andy Bonar Law, Stan Baldwin, Nev Chamberlain, Winnie Churchill, Harry Wilson, or, for that matter, Tony Eden.
“There it is,” said Tony. “You can sit on it. The famous sofa.”
“Ah yes. The famous sofa. Do you mind if I don’t use a tape recorder?”
The Tony administration, some say, deploys a “sofa” style of governance: the normal channels of influence are largely bypassed, and the P.M. depends on his inner circle of brainstormers and media-wise myrmidons. In May–June 1997 it was decided that the regulation of interest rates should be depoliticized and become the responsibility of the Bank of England; when Tony was forewarned that such a momentous change should be discussed with Cabinet, he said, “Oh they won’t mind. We’ll ring round.”
Today I was allowed into the Den to witness “Denocracy” (another name for it) in action. The subject was climate change and exploratory talks on the creation of a “carbon market.” Tony listened to six or seven voices (“Those two are still slagging each other off…Chancellor Merkel wants a deal…The meeting with the Indians was positive…The Japanese was extremely touchy…The American was extremely difficult”), before weighing in with his summary and conclusion: “We need to make it clear what it means for American business—that they won’t leach contracts to the Chinese. I will work it through with him. With Bush.”
Then it was upstairs to the White Room for a podcast with Bob Geldof on Africa—Africa, a quarter-century compulsion of Geldof’s and a solid ten-year enthusiasm of Blair’s. Then it was downstairs to the long table and a multinational convocation of bishops. Power has been described as a drug, an aphrodisiac, a “filthy venom” (in the words of Maxim Gorky); it is also, for much of the time, carcinogenically boring. Like all politicians, Tony has seven or eight kinds of smile. Smiles two and three would do for the bishops (and for the convocation of bishops, I thought, well, he has his religion to help him through it). More generally, when he is making the rounds of a crowded room, his smile, toward the end, is a rictus, and his eyes are as hard as jewels.
All the boredom is what the world doesn’t see—the hidden toil of dosing and humoring, of giving face and jollying along. It is this that keeps politicians halfway honest, and impedes the process that Bob Geldof alluded to, up in the White Room: “It’s a bit naff, isn’t it? What happened? The politicization of celebrity or the celebritization of politics?” And the question arose: What will Tony be, when he quits? An ex-politician?
“No,” he said. “I’ll be a former celebrity.”
Belfast
Riding in the convoy—from George Best Belfast City Airport to Stormont Castle—was, as usual, no fun at all. Sometimes you are doing seventy miles an hour, and the breaking distance between you and perdition falls well below the eighty-odd yards recommended by my Highway Code: it is ten or twelve feet. The convoy drivers are trained to dispense with peripheral vision, and fixate on the hideously proximate backside of the jeep in front. It is an obsession that the passenger soon learns to share.
And there was the castle, a thrillingly emotive sight on this day—the great dripping edifice of intransigence. But now what? As the motorcade came up the mile-long Stormont Road, flailing figures twirled out at us, with impressive menace and address, and there was a bit of warm work for the sweating policemen: a bit of buffeting, bear-hugging, and rugby-tackling. Were these flailers and twirlers the representatives of all the diehards and bitter-enders who want a return to the Troubles? No. They were here for Iraq.
Within, Blair knocked off some interviews before the historic addresses in the Great Hall. And I spent the time trying to parse the anarchy of his accent, a dog’s breakfast of Durham, public-school Edinburgh, Australia (years one to four), and estuary Essex. “Wanted” is wantud, and “destructive” is destructuv. The terminal t is regularly swallowed (“it’s nok clear”) and there is a candid glottal stop in his wha’ever (in contrast to his prissy use of the archaic whilst). Blair was reminiscing about his childhood holidays in Donegal and his first “half” of Guinnuss when, ineluctably, the interviewer said, “One last question, Prime Minister. This is a huge achievement, but it seems your main legacy will be…” And Blair’s blue eyes minutely flinch, and seem to cancel themselves.
I watched the swearing-in at the Assembly by TV link, and it was something to see. The faces of the hoary politicos, rendered scalene by ancient stubbornnesses—but now uncertainly smiling. The old zealot Paisley, still cake-in-the-rain handsome in his eighty-first year. The affectless Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, a ringer for Conrad’s “Professor,” the meager megalomaniac in The Secret Agent whose “thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction.” But there we had it, the convergence of the twain, in an atmosphere of long-compressed agitation and near-hilarity, the hilarity of the unreal.
Meanwhile, outside, a reminder of local concerns: NO SHRINE AT THE MAZE and JUSTICE FOR PROTESTANTS and several capitalized gripes about the water rates. But the big banner, and all the energy, proclaimed: BLAIR LEGACY 600,000 DEAD IN IRAQ. And at the next stop, a courtesy call at the venerable daily The News Letter, there was a raggedly thrashing figure on the street with a policeman sitting on it and a police dog barking at it, and BLIAR. WANTED. WAR CRIMINAL.
We are witnesses to the triumphal speeches and we hear the applause, but we don’t usually see the moment of fierce political relish, the deep and durable gloat of vindication: I was right all along! At another castle, Hillsborough (the Queen’s Belfast bolt-hole and Bush’s occasional crashpad), there was one such, when Blair had a quiet half-hour with the tottering Teddy Kennedy and the redoubtable Peter Hain. History—the remorseless unforeseen—had for once in its life colluded with their desire, and it was all very understated, this forgivable preen, all very hushed and husky and hard-won.
