Smuggo: A Prophet Without Honour
that shall he also reap
He no longer stops the traffic here and may never do so again unless it be in the back of the Black Maria on the way to the Bailey for his trial. Of this fact he complains to The Sunday Times:
He’s all but given up trying to convince people in Britain he means well. “I’ve got a problem with the UK media. They don’t approach me in an objective way,” he says. “Their first question is how to belittle what I’m doing, knock it down, write something bad about it. It’s not right. It’s not journalism. They don’t get me and they’ve got a score to settle with me. But they are not going to settle it.”He gets a better hearing abroad these days, which is one of the main reasons he spends so much time overseas. “It’s not true that nobody likes me! Reading the papers in Britain, you’d end up thinking I’d lost three elections rather than won them. There is a completely different atmosphere around me outside the country. People accept the work that you are doing, as it is. They don’t see anything wrong with being successful financially and also doing good work. If I did what these people who criticise me here wanted, I’d end up sitting in a corner, but that is never going to be me.”
Aw, Diddums! Here is the authentic voice of the man who has been found out for what he is.
Some of us, of course, never fell for Blair or Blarism, or the clever addition of the word 'New' to Labour. New Labour was merely Old Labour wearing an expensive Armani suit. That we know for sure given the way in which Old Labour has re-emerged under Gordon Brown: they never went away, you know.
Others, notably the gullible middle classes (who had lost their collective folk memory of how Labour governments always end up by trashing the UK economy and always end up siphoning off the resources to prop them up from the pockets of that self-same middle class) fell for Blair in a big way.
The Tories too fell under his spell, indeed to some extent the Old Sorcerer is still wielding his wand over them, though these days it is mostly by proxy through the Sorcerer's Apprentice, one Lord Mandelson. That any Tory leader should think of himself, even vaguely, as 'the heir' to Blair is shocking but now that we know a lot more about David Cameron, perhaps unsurprising. Perhaps too such admiration is reflected in the hesitation many true Tories feel in embracing Cameron.
It was the Ecclestone affair which should have alerted the swooning masses as to the true nature of the little crook they had actually installed as Prime Minister.
Labour had pledged to ban tobacco advertizing in its manifesto for the 1997 General Election, supporting a proposed EU Directive banning tobacco advertising and sponsorship.
At this time all leading Formula One Teams carried significant branding and loot from Big Tobacco.
The Labour Party's stance on banning tobacco advertising was reinforced following the election by tough statements from the Health Secretary Frank Dobson and Minister for Public Health Tessa Jowell (wife of convicted businessman David Mills who was corruptly bribed to perjure himself by Silvio Berlusconi who is, in turn, one of Blair's best friends).
With some serious money at stake, Ecclestone appealed 'over Jowell's head' to Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff, who arranged a meeting with Blair. Ecclestone and Mosley, both Labour Party donors, met Blair on 16 October 1997, where Mosley argued:
"Motor racing was a world class industry which put Britain at the hi-tech edge. Deprived of tobacco money, Formula One would move abroad at the loss of 50,000 jobs, 150,000 part-time jobs and £900 million of exports."
On 4 November 1997 the "fiercely anti-tobacco Jowell" argued in Brussels for an exemption for Formula One. It was a shameful and disgraceful turn-about.
One might point out that tobacco sponsorship of F1 is now long gone. F1 is still here, as storng as ever. It reminds us in microcosm of the big lie that is put about by Europhiles about the Uk losing jobs if we we ever managed to extract ourselves from that appalling institution.
Media attention initially focused on Labour bending its principles for a "glamour sport" and on the "false trail" of Jowell's husband's links to Benetton. But then the newshounds caught the scent.
On 6 November correspondents from three newspapers inquired whether Labour had received any donations from Ecclestone.
Lo & behold, he had donated £1 million in January 1997. He had read the writing on the wall for tobacco sponsorship of sport and was quick off the mark to ensure he had an ear to bend in new Labour.
On 11th. November Labour promised to return the money on the advice of Sir Patrick Neill. On 17 November Blair apologised for his government's mishandling of the affair and stated "the decision to exempt Formula One from tobacco sponsorship was taken two weeks later. It was in response to fears that Britain might lose the industry overseas to Asian countries who were bidding for it."
In 2008, the year after Blair stepped down as Prime Minister, internal Downing Street memos revealed that in fact the decision had been made at the time of the meeting, and not two weeks later as Blair stated in Parliament.
Thus was exposed the fact that from the word 'Go!' Blair was wont, whenever the mood took him, to lie through his back teeth. Astonishingly the media and the public allowed him to get away with this piece of knavery and this huckster remained in office until 2007. We now know that Blair awoke every morning with a lie on his lips and delivered himself of untruths morning noon and night.
Now, of course, after the grave matter of taking the nation to war with Iraq on a false prospectus, after 'cash for peerages', after his debauching of Cabinet government, after his poisoning (along with Alistair Campbell, the most controversial Propaganda Chief since April 1945) of the well of political discourse in the UK, after gifting us Gordon brown, the once-deluded public knows better, a lot lot better, the true nature of this veritable mountebank.
I advocate a careful read of the Sunday Times piece. It lays bare so much of the man and how he has proved to have been a deeply malignant cancer at the heart of british public life.
There is one particulalry telling quote. Had Alistair Campbell been at his side, he might have been prevented from informing us:
I’m a social entrepreneur now,” he says defiantly. “I can engineer social change on my own terms, outside of a big government bureaucracy.”
Social engineer? Who, pray, anywhere in the world, let alone in the UK, has given Blair a democratic mandate to indulge in some social engineering?
This is, of course, the true nature of the man. He has never cared for the accountability thingy and is now able to indulge his meddling without interference from anything so obstructive as an electorate. Here then is the anti-democrat at work.
In theory the Chilcot enquiry ought to put this shyster firmly beyond the pale for ever and a day. Sadly that enquiry lacks the teeth of any proper cross-examination. I had been looking forward to Blair being turned over good and proper but instead he is to be interviewed by an establishment club. They might just as well have poured the whitewash over it all now and saved us the money.
Still, we may have the odd bit of pleasure from this process. The fact that Blair knows that he is now a prophet without honour in his own land and that it rankles is something which brings a warm glow.
