Blair's Past Comes Back to Haunt Him

I know this is hard to get across to lots of Americans, especially (and this is kind of strange) American conservatives, but: lots of people in Britain don't trust Tony Blair. Who? Oh, let me count the ways. There's the hard left. There's everybody on the right. There is an increasing share of middle Britain who weren't too keen on the Iraq war, and are particularly upset with continung waiting lists for service in the National Health Service, which is my vote for oxymoron of the century.

Janet Dailey is an American expat and columnist for the Torygraph, aka The Daily Telegraph, and she is always my favorite person to read in the British newspapers. She has an interesting analysis of the ongoing enquiry into the "Intelligence Dossier", and what this tells us about Tony Blair. Actually she doesn't think it tells us anything we didn't know already.

It is clear from reading through the gripping emails that flew around Whitehall that what was at issue was not the counterfeiting of real evidence, but the manipulation of tone and emphasis. To the extent that there was misrepresentation, it seems to have been a question of marginal or tenuous evidential material being overhyped for dramatic impact. And that, in a nutshell, is what the Blair Government is, and always has been, about.

Too right. I have listened to angonized bureacrats over here complain about the Bush Administration's problems with spin and overspin. Oy, vey. These are nice people, but they have no sense of perspective. They have not read, in short, the British papers that much. The fact is that Blair has weakened the President, in just the way that if, say, Bill Clinton was doing the right thing he would still have weakened (and let's go with a crazy counterfactual here) Margaret Thatcher had she still been Prime Minister during the Serbia crisis. Even if Bill was right, it would have been shrouded by his essential inability to tell the simple truth, simply.

Daley concludes:

What will probably remain after all this will be a sense of the Government having been cleared on the specific charge that the BBC pursued with such badly judged zeal, but having been exposed as little more than a team of political conjurors: illusionists who fail to distinguish between content and packaging, who believe that all problems are solved by finding the right form of words.

The risk is that the electorate will lose sight of the distinction, too, and the real good that has been done in Iraq will be confounded...