[Media-watch] Crisis of Barrister Blair - Evening Standard, London, 11 July 2003

[Sigi D]

Dear Media Watch friends,
this is an article from the PRINT EDITION of the
Evening Standard (London).
A nice analysis of the present PM's personality.
I promise you it’s a very good read!
(Sorry about typos)
Best wishes
Sigi

Evening Standard Friday 11 July, 2003 (print edition
page 11)
Today the PM makes his case for a third term, just as
the electorate’s trust in him is faltering

by ALISTAIR BEATON (writer of the political satire
Feelgood)

THE CRISIS OF BARRISTER BLAIR

One of the great mysteries of our age is Tony Blair’s
relationship to the truth.
Is our Prime Minister a man who calculatingly misled
the nation in the run-up to the war with Iraq?
Or is he basically an honesty man, a decent bloke,
struggling to act out his Christian principles in the
grubby world of politics, where nobody’s hands can be
entirely clean?

Although a strong case can be made for either view,
they both somehow fail to satisfy.
There is something simplistic about reducing this
complex man to either saint or sinner.
To unravel the mystery that is Blair, we mustn’t
overlook the obvious clues.
The one big, huge, clunking clue that most observers
disregard is Blair's first chosen profession: he is a
lawyer. Trained as a lawyer, he retains the instinct
of a lawyer. Not just a lawyer but a barrister.

In our adversarial system, barristers want outcomes.
To achieve their outcomes, they have to make the best
of the evidence available. Sometimes that evidence
won’t be very strong. That’s all right; with the right
advocacy, the right presentation, the right spin, the
case can still be won, provided the facts are
assembled and emphasised  correctly.
What the case is not about is a forensic search for 
truth. The barrister starts with the conclusion - that
the accused is innocent, or that the accused is guilty
- and argues back from that.

Using this analogy, Blair’s relationship to George W.
Bush can suddenly be seen in a new light. Barrister
Blair is approached by a very prestigious, powerful
and rich American client who’s involved in a dispute
with a bloke in Iraq and has come up with the idea of
a pre-emptive war. Will Barrister Blair accept the
brief? He ponders. 
It’s quite clear that British public opinion doesn’t
much like this American client, so there’s a strong
chance the jury will be unsympathetic. 
What’s more, the case for going to war is not exactly
watertight. Many are expressing the view that without
a second UN resolution such a war would be a clear
breach of international law.
Barrister Blair decides to fly to the United States to
talk with his client (this client is much too powerful
to wish to come and see the barrister).
Barrister Blair finds himself liking the client. Very
different on the surface, they actually share quite a
number attitudes and values.
They are both devout Christians. They both see the
world in simple terms, as a struggle between right and
wrong, good and bad, light and dark. They are both
profoundly ignorant of history.
And although the barrister is undoubtedly brighter
than the client, he’s not actually that bright.
Starry-eyed at the thought of winning this most
prestigious and important of cases, Barrister Blair
accepts his brief.
Confident of his ability to sway others, Barrister
Blair flies home, decides not to say much to any of
his senior colleagues, preferring to share his
thoughts with a tiny group of junior barristers whom
he has personally hired to look after his interests at
all times.
The most important and trusted of these juniors -
purely for the sake of argument, let’s call him
Alastair- goes to a bunch of highly qualified
researchers and asks them to come up with some telling
arguments as to why the bloke in Iraq needs to be
removed from power.
By this stage, many of Barrister Blair’s senior
colleagues are getting thoroughly alarmed. How come a
mere junior is dealing with such important matters?
(If they had known at the time that the final
documentation included chunks of a 12-year-old student
thesis downloaded from the internet, they would have
been even more alarmed.)
Undeterred, Barrister Blair goes into action. It’s not
his job to ask awkward questions about the source of
his material. And anyhow, if the worst come to the
worst, he can always blame the junior for misleading
him.
Barrister Blair proves to be a consummate performer.
He wins his case because his advocacy in
breathtakingly successful. He holds his audience
spellbound with his rhetoric, his passion, his
clarity, his obvious commitment to the truth. It’s
like watching a great actor on the stage. And like any
great actor, he starts to believe in what he is
saying.
This is where method acting meets politics, this is
where the performer has to live the emotions of the
character he’s playing. And Actor Blair has had lots
of practice in method acting. Famously, there was the
trembling emotion of the “people’s princess” speech.
And there was the deeply moving conference speech
following the tragedy of 11 September, when Actor
Blair was damp-eyed with emotion as he called for
action to end poverty and injustice in Africa.

Vicars can be impassioned too, of course. Sometimes
Barrister Blair and Actor Blair drop their guard and
you catch a glimpse of Vicar Blair. Vicar Blair knows
he is right, because God told him so. Vicar Blair is
affronted, genuinely hurt and outraged when he is
accused of being a liar.
Intoxicated by pulpit rhetoric and an intimate
relationship with the Almighty, Vicar Blair is ready
to drop cluster bombs on children if he thinks it is
the right thing to do.
Vicar Blair thinks everything he does will have good
outcomes. This is worrying. There is a growing sense
of unease in the parish.
Put together Barrister Blair, Actor Blair and Vicar
Blair and you get a Prime Minister who is a
self-deceiver, a man who believes in his own goodness,
a warmonger who believes he is a man of peace.
One day soon, the barrister will fail to impress the
jury, the audiences will stop coming to see the actor,
and the parishioners will rise up and get rid of the
vicar.


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