“Mr Blair is still in public life, but he is not bound by its principles,” said Andrew Bridgen, MP. “That needs to be changed.”
Mr Bridgen is mistaken. Tony is bound by the principles of public life hand and foot. What he understands, and Mr Bridgen doesn’t, is that principles mustn’t be confused with ideals.
The ideal of public service is just that – to serve the public. The principle of public service, as it has evolved over the last few decades, is to serve the chaps lording it over the public.
Every giant modern enterprise, be it a major charity, a global corporation or indeed the state, is operated mainly – and increasingly solely – for the benefit of the operators.
Politics no longer has anything to do with service. It’s about self-service, a goal towards which a modern spivocrat unswervingly strives in office or thereafter.
When in office, the spivocrat enjoys immense power, both for its own sake and as the launch pad it provides for skyrocketing into private life.
Out of office, the spivocrat parlays his political clout and connections into personal wealth.
Such is the principle, and shame on Mr Bridgen for confusing it with the risibly obsolete ideal of public service.
What raised his ire was not so much the nine-digit fortune Blair has amassed since leaving office as his client list. More and more it begins to resemble a Who’s Who of World’s Tyranny.
Having been rewarded with millions of pounds by the Kazakh dictator Nazarbayev, Blair now stands to earn considerably more millions from the despotic regime of Azerbaijan. Seems like the ruling Mafiosi can’t even conceive of building a £45-billion oil pipeline to Europe without Blair’s advisory services.
One wonders exactly what he advises them on. I doubt Blair knows the difference between a pump and a compressor, or between either of them and a word processor. I also suspect that what he means by ‘flange’ has nothing to do with pipes.
What Blair no doubt offers is mediation between the Azeri bribers and the bribees in the European governments involved. The bribes may be a straight cash transfer, a barter of services or simply an IOU. That doesn’t matter either in moral or in practical terms.
It helps an essentially criminal enterprise (all state-sponsored, and most other, enterprises in Azerbaijan are essentially criminal) to have a spiv on the go who can pick up the phone, call, say, the Turkish PM and be put through straight away.
This kind of access is worth millions, and millions is what Blair is going to get – at a time when his past activities in office are increasingly coming under scrutiny. The details needn’t detain us here, but they do provide a lesson in geography.
From dubious dealings with IRA chieftains to dragging Britain into foolhardy military adventures, to his mysterious dealings with Putin’s thugs and their Italian cronies, Blair’s record in office is questionable at best.
But even if he never faces trial, which many of his critics are demanding, even his legit activities as PM re-emphasise the real principle of public life.
While succeeding in beggaring (I hope this is the correct spelling) the country over 11 years in office, Blair laid the foundations for personal enrichment beyond the imaginings of any previous prime minister. He is also the first former prime minister openly shilling for other states, all of them unsavoury.
Like priest, like parish, as the Russians say. It turns out that Blair’s capable disciples Ed Miliband and Ed Balls knew about the impending 2008 crisis a year before it happened, but kept that knowledge to themselves.
The Eds, who both held key economic posts in the last Labour cabinet, were begging Gordon Brown to call a snap election in 2007 because “the economy was about to fall off the cliff”, with Labour losing power as a result.
That by itself is perhaps a lesser crime than having driven the economy to the cliff in the first place, an undertaking in which the glorious trio so ably assisted the Prime Spiv Tony.
Still, at least they could have warned the public they were supposed to serve that a disaster was imminent. There would have been much both individuals and corporations could have done to soften the coming blow.
Alas, the principle of public service came into play, and the two Eds chose to protect their careers rather than their country.
When queried about this disgrace, Miliband’s spokesman didn’t even bother to deny it. “It’s ancient history,” he said. “We are concentrating on the 2015 Election.”
The cynicism is truly refreshing, and exactly what we’ve come to expect from our ‘leaders’. Rather than turning red with shame and immediately resigning from all public offices, this lot want to reach for the brass ring again.
And the scary thought is that they just may get it. In that case the two Eds will be neighbours at 10 and 11 Downing Street, and there has to be a role for the balsa man Peter Mandelson.
Nothing can drag him to the bottom; that chap just doesn’t sink. Sacked twice from Blair’s cabinet for failing to live up to its stratospheric moral standards (see above), he then embarked on a career similar to Tony’s, if on a smaller scale.
That involves extremely shady contacts with Russian gangsters, such as Oleg Deripaska, who has entertained Mandelson on his yacht. To prove that the principle of public service doesn’t vary from party to party, our present Chancellor also partook of Deripaska’s hospitality.
I’d pay serious money for a recording of the festivities, but even in its absence one could venture a reliable guess. After all, I doubt that Deripaska’s interest in Mandy was romantic. Mandy is already happily married to another man and, as far as I know, Deripaska isn’t that way inclined.
No, it was just more of our spivs putting into practice the current principle of public life: feathering their own nests while befouling ours.