Tony Blair supported George Bush throughout the Iraq war, but now Bush faces being booted out by John Kerry. Torcuil Crichton considers how Blair might handle a Kerry triumph
They pointedly do not pray together but George W Bush and Tony Blair are so bound together in the world’s eyes that their political fates might be joined too. While Blair’s political stock continues to decline in the United Kingdom because of the nagging problems of Iraq, that of John Kerry begins to overtake the Prime Minister’s wartime ally. If the euphoria of the Democratic convention in Boston translates into a Democrat White House, Tony Blair will be left as the loneliest war leader on the planet.
Dealing with a British Prime Minister that supported the Iraq war will be no problem for a Democrat president. In America, Blair is seen as an ally and an asset. Democrat strategists, as much as Republicans, realise the realpolitik that cornered Blair in the early part of 2003 as diplomacy in the United Nations ground to a halt. Blair has told friends since that if he had not continued to back Bush after the collapse of the second resolution at the UN he would have been seen as being a fair-weather friend who was in the pocket of the Europeans. Weighing up the options, it was better to be onside with America than have the 50-year special relationship torn up on his watch.
Blair’s decision to back Bush was a personal one and not an entirely lonely one. Whispering in his ear was his old friend Bill Clinton, who assured him that sticking close to the US was the right thing to do. The price for that loyalty was unenviable unpopularity.
At home Blair would be left highly exposed by a Kerry win in November. He would be the proverbial last man standing if Bush is vanquished by a popular backlash against the Iraq war. José María Aznar, the former Spanish Prime Minister, and the other member of the Azores triumvirate that invaded Iraq, was thrown out office by the Madrid train bombing in a spectacular demonstration of al-Qaeda pulling the strings of democracy.
With Bush gone, the eyes of the world would focus sharply on Blair as the last man who believes that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. Although the links between the Democrats and the Labour Party remain strong, can Tony Blair really relish the day he stands beside the Massachusetts senator, who declared of the threat from terrorism that “there has been an exaggeration”?
The best guess is that Blair would welcome a Democrat president. A President Kerry would have to see mission accomplished in Iraq, including the nation-building and the continued presence of a large number of US troops in the most strategically important part of the Middle East. But by broadening responsibility for Iraq, probably through Nato, Kerry offers Blair and British troops an honourable exit strategy from the Iraq quagmire. Bush, having alienated all support in western Europe apart from the UK, finds this a difficult task to accomplish, hence the notion of a Muslim peacekeeping force that has emerged in the past few days.
Come the hour of a Democrat presidency, few expect Blair to engage in anything less than a quick-step change – a quick flight to be the first to congratulate the new President and a White House lawn promise to work with the new incumbent for world peace. For Blair it is whoever is in power that is important; political ideology, as he has so often demonstrated, is just baggage.
There are signs too that the Democrat door is wide open to Blair. Two weeks ago, John Edwards was in Iowa calling on President Bush to show the kind of “courage” that Blair had in accepting responsibility for the intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war. No sign of an unbridgeable gap there.
When Kerry and Blair, meet they might find they have a lot in common – both are liberal, guitar-playing ex-lawyers after all. Right now, both sides are cautious about such a meeting, although both insist that they are dying to get to know each other. A planned handshake in April fell through because of apparent scheduling difficulties. The truth is that Blair is so closely tied to the Bush war effort that Kerry’s advisers are wary of how a joint appearance would play with their Bush-loathing Democratic party base. Conversely Blair is hedging his bets knowing that the outcome of the November election is far from certain.
However there are already strong connections between the Labour Party and the Democrat camp followers. Bob Schrum, Kerry’s media adviser, helped team Blair during the 2001 election and is in close contact with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. He does not think significant numbers of Democrats were angered by Blair’s “shoulder-to-shoulder” stance with George W Bush. “My reading is that Democrats understand what Blair has to do,” he said recently.
Labour backbenchers feel that Blair’s lack of backing for the Democrat will be taken as an endorsement of Bush and are chomping at the bit in order to get across the Atlantic to help the Democrats. Blair warned Ministers not to attend the convention. That said, around 10 Labour MPs were expected to be in Boston, but the party has no list of who is doing what on their holidays.
Matthew Doyle, Labour’s senior press officer and something of an American political addict, attended the convention under his own steam, but more senior figures in the party also crossed the Atlantic in an indication of how seriously Tony Blair is preparing for a Democrat presidency.
Cabinet Office minister Douglas Alexander and one of Blair’s special advisers, Pat McFadden, stole silently into Boston last week along with Ann Taylor, the former Commons Leader and Ross Cranston, the former Solicitor-General. They form what ought to be a cross-party delegation, but which, for the first time, is made up entirely of Labour figures. A Tory MP and Democrat supporter, Simon Burns, had applied to join the group but was told he could not. The Labour Party said that the Democrats had called for an all-Labour delegation this year because the Republican Party had invited only Tories to their convention.
Alexander, an election strategist and McFadden, who sat ringside with Blair throughout the Iraq war, are young Scots who are hot-wired to the Prime Minister’s inner circle and can do effective work without carrying the burdensome profile of high office. More formal contact will be made in the autumn when Peter Hain, leader of the House, will meet the Democrat leaders.
Publicly, 10 Downing Street insists Blair is neutral on the US elections and that the outcome is the responsibility of the American people. The Prime Minister will also be very wary of interfering in the domestic politics of another democratic country where others have had their fingers burned. When John Major’s Tory party tried to dig up dirt on Bill Clinton’s Oxford undergraduate days for the George Bush Sr re-election campaign in 1992, it backfired badly.
The public show of mutual admiration between Bush and Blair makes it hard to picture Blair rooting for a Bush defeat behind closed doors, but everyone else around the Prime Minister certainly is. Anthony Seldon’s recent biography of the Prime Minister posited that the only close friends Blair had left in politics are God, and wife Cherie. Support from the Almighty is regularly claimed by both sides in US elections, but Cherie Blair we know is distinctly lukewarm, to say the least, towards George W Bush.
The Prime Minister’s wife maintains that Bush stole the White House from Al Gore in the last election and, when the Bushes visited in 2001, Cherie is said to have lectured the President over dinner on the immorality of the death penalty.
For whom or for what prayers are being said at the Downing Street bedside will remain between Blair and his maker, but the overriding signal is that the discomfort of losing Bush will be quickly overtaken by the relief of having an internationally-minded Democrat President.
Apart from the fundamentalist Christians in America, there will be one other group of devoted adherents who will be praying for a Bush victory. The al-Qaeda-linked Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claimed responsibility for the Madrid train bombing, sent a direct message to George Bush in the aftermath of the outrage.
In a taped message, the group hoped that he would win in November as it would not be possible to find a leader “more foolish than you [Bush] who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom”.
Al-Qaeda sees Bush as its best bet for a continuing jihad and would only launch another terrorist atrocity in the US this year if the president looked like losing the election. By rallying Americans around the flag, George W Bush might be bombed back into office, but that is not an outcome for which anyone in 10 Downing Street will be praying.
01 August 2004
Sunday Herald Online
They pointedly do not pray together but George W Bush and Tony Blair are so bound together in the world’s eyes that their political fates might be joined too. While Blair’s political stock continues to decline in the United Kingdom because of the nagging problems of Iraq, that of John Kerry begins to overtake the Prime Minister’s wartime ally. If the euphoria of the Democratic convention in Boston translates into a Democrat White House, Tony Blair will be left as the loneliest war leader on the planet.
Dealing with a British Prime Minister that supported the Iraq war will be no problem for a Democrat president. In America, Blair is seen as an ally and an asset. Democrat strategists, as much as Republicans, realise the realpolitik that cornered Blair in the early part of 2003 as diplomacy in the United Nations ground to a halt. Blair has told friends since that if he had not continued to back Bush after the collapse of the second resolution at the UN he would have been seen as being a fair-weather friend who was in the pocket of the Europeans. Weighing up the options, it was better to be onside with America than have the 50-year special relationship torn up on his watch.
Blair’s decision to back Bush was a personal one and not an entirely lonely one. Whispering in his ear was his old friend Bill Clinton, who assured him that sticking close to the US was the right thing to do. The price for that loyalty was unenviable unpopularity.
At home Blair would be left highly exposed by a Kerry win in November. He would be the proverbial last man standing if Bush is vanquished by a popular backlash against the Iraq war. José María Aznar, the former Spanish Prime Minister, and the other member of the Azores triumvirate that invaded Iraq, was thrown out office by the Madrid train bombing in a spectacular demonstration of al-Qaeda pulling the strings of democracy.
With Bush gone, the eyes of the world would focus sharply on Blair as the last man who believes that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. Although the links between the Democrats and the Labour Party remain strong, can Tony Blair really relish the day he stands beside the Massachusetts senator, who declared of the threat from terrorism that “there has been an exaggeration”?
The best guess is that Blair would welcome a Democrat president. A President Kerry would have to see mission accomplished in Iraq, including the nation-building and the continued presence of a large number of US troops in the most strategically important part of the Middle East. But by broadening responsibility for Iraq, probably through Nato, Kerry offers Blair and British troops an honourable exit strategy from the Iraq quagmire. Bush, having alienated all support in western Europe apart from the UK, finds this a difficult task to accomplish, hence the notion of a Muslim peacekeeping force that has emerged in the past few days.
Come the hour of a Democrat presidency, few expect Blair to engage in anything less than a quick-step change – a quick flight to be the first to congratulate the new President and a White House lawn promise to work with the new incumbent for world peace. For Blair it is whoever is in power that is important; political ideology, as he has so often demonstrated, is just baggage.
There are signs too that the Democrat door is wide open to Blair. Two weeks ago, John Edwards was in Iowa calling on President Bush to show the kind of “courage” that Blair had in accepting responsibility for the intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war. No sign of an unbridgeable gap there.
When Kerry and Blair, meet they might find they have a lot in common – both are liberal, guitar-playing ex-lawyers after all. Right now, both sides are cautious about such a meeting, although both insist that they are dying to get to know each other. A planned handshake in April fell through because of apparent scheduling difficulties. The truth is that Blair is so closely tied to the Bush war effort that Kerry’s advisers are wary of how a joint appearance would play with their Bush-loathing Democratic party base. Conversely Blair is hedging his bets knowing that the outcome of the November election is far from certain.
However there are already strong connections between the Labour Party and the Democrat camp followers. Bob Schrum, Kerry’s media adviser, helped team Blair during the 2001 election and is in close contact with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. He does not think significant numbers of Democrats were angered by Blair’s “shoulder-to-shoulder” stance with George W Bush. “My reading is that Democrats understand what Blair has to do,” he said recently.
Labour backbenchers feel that Blair’s lack of backing for the Democrat will be taken as an endorsement of Bush and are chomping at the bit in order to get across the Atlantic to help the Democrats. Blair warned Ministers not to attend the convention. That said, around 10 Labour MPs were expected to be in Boston, but the party has no list of who is doing what on their holidays.
Matthew Doyle, Labour’s senior press officer and something of an American political addict, attended the convention under his own steam, but more senior figures in the party also crossed the Atlantic in an indication of how seriously Tony Blair is preparing for a Democrat presidency.
Cabinet Office minister Douglas Alexander and one of Blair’s special advisers, Pat McFadden, stole silently into Boston last week along with Ann Taylor, the former Commons Leader and Ross Cranston, the former Solicitor-General. They form what ought to be a cross-party delegation, but which, for the first time, is made up entirely of Labour figures. A Tory MP and Democrat supporter, Simon Burns, had applied to join the group but was told he could not. The Labour Party said that the Democrats had called for an all-Labour delegation this year because the Republican Party had invited only Tories to their convention.
Alexander, an election strategist and McFadden, who sat ringside with Blair throughout the Iraq war, are young Scots who are hot-wired to the Prime Minister’s inner circle and can do effective work without carrying the burdensome profile of high office. More formal contact will be made in the autumn when Peter Hain, leader of the House, will meet the Democrat leaders.
Publicly, 10 Downing Street insists Blair is neutral on the US elections and that the outcome is the responsibility of the American people. The Prime Minister will also be very wary of interfering in the domestic politics of another democratic country where others have had their fingers burned. When John Major’s Tory party tried to dig up dirt on Bill Clinton’s Oxford undergraduate days for the George Bush Sr re-election campaign in 1992, it backfired badly.
The public show of mutual admiration between Bush and Blair makes it hard to picture Blair rooting for a Bush defeat behind closed doors, but everyone else around the Prime Minister certainly is. Anthony Seldon’s recent biography of the Prime Minister posited that the only close friends Blair had left in politics are God, and wife Cherie. Support from the Almighty is regularly claimed by both sides in US elections, but Cherie Blair we know is distinctly lukewarm, to say the least, towards George W Bush.
The Prime Minister’s wife maintains that Bush stole the White House from Al Gore in the last election and, when the Bushes visited in 2001, Cherie is said to have lectured the President over dinner on the immorality of the death penalty.
For whom or for what prayers are being said at the Downing Street bedside will remain between Blair and his maker, but the overriding signal is that the discomfort of losing Bush will be quickly overtaken by the relief of having an internationally-minded Democrat President.
Apart from the fundamentalist Christians in America, there will be one other group of devoted adherents who will be praying for a Bush victory. The al-Qaeda-linked Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claimed responsibility for the Madrid train bombing, sent a direct message to George Bush in the aftermath of the outrage.
In a taped message, the group hoped that he would win in November as it would not be possible to find a leader “more foolish than you [Bush] who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom”.
Al-Qaeda sees Bush as its best bet for a continuing jihad and would only launch another terrorist atrocity in the US this year if the president looked like losing the election. By rallying Americans around the flag, George W Bush might be bombed back into office, but that is not an outcome for which anyone in 10 Downing Street will be praying.
01 August 2004
Sunday Herald Online
