I used to think I understood the Blair creature. Now I am not so sure. Was his rebellion last week against Net Zero madness a real change of mind, or just the result of spending more time with oil producers in the Gulf?
Who can be sure? But it obviously made the Labour leadership very cross, for they forced him to issue a sort of retraction. So maybe something important is happening. What if the whole Blair project now unwinds?
I first met him before he was famous, at some legal dinner in the old Great Western Hotel at Paddington in London, one of those bright-eyed, bright-voiced people who seems to be enthusiastic about everything but has little original to say.
I once tried to interview him a few years later when he was Shadow Home Secretary. Gosh, it was dull. I had to pester him to get anything out of him that was not boring or scripted.
The only new fact I learned was the name of the student rock band for which he had once sung, Ugly Rumours. He fought so hard not to tell me that you might have thought I had asked him for some nuclear launch codes.
Sir Anthony Blair wears full Knight of the Garter regalia in 2013
I heard it rumoured elsewhere that when he was Labour’s shadow employment spokesman he had once actually run away from a TV crew rather than give an opinion on a train strike.
For an entire election campaign, in 1997, he doggedly refused to take questions from me rather than discuss his choice of school for his own children, as contrasted with what he planned to inflict on everyone else’s.
I tried to find out about his wife Cherie’s little-known attempt to become an MP, in Margate in 1983, and had the New Labour attack dogs set on me, as if she had stood for Parliament in private.
What were they afraid of? In her election leaflet she referred to him as ‘The barrister, Anthony Blair’, and I have ever afterwards used his full name instead of the matey ‘Tony’.
I was convinced the couple were far more Left-wing than we were being told, not least about Ireland. I’ve always thought his surrender to the IRA in 1998 rather confirmed this suspicion.
I enjoyed Michael Heseltine’s exposure of his membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, after he denied it. One biographer ludicrously describes Blair’s 1980s activity in the hard-Left Labour Co-Ordinating Committee (LCC) as if it was a moderate organisation.
The real mystery must surely be why a young lawyer, newly living in west London, should have joined the (then inactive) Redcliffe branch of the Chelsea Labour Party in 1975. Labour in those days was nearly dead. Many of its branches were empty, thanks to death and desertion. At that time, many enthusiastic socialists had wandered off to the revolutionary Left.
Labour was in government – always bad for recruiting because it has to take unpopular decisions.
Former prime minister Tony Blair and now Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, pictured together in 2018
This was the era of ‘entryism’, when members of Trotskyist groups joined empty Labour Party branches undercover, planning to take over the machinery and (above all) the selection of MPs. It would bear fruit ten years later when the Left surged into power in much of the party.
But surely Blair was not involved in any such thing? There’s certainly no direct evidence of it, so I cannot possibly accuse him of it.
But there is this curious thing. In an extraordinary interview with Professor Peter Hennessy, on BBC Radio 4, in August 2017, Blair revealed something which would have wholly destroyed his political career if it had come out in, say, 1995. He recalled that his first reading of an admiring biography of Leon Trotsky, the most militant of all the Russian Bolsheviks, had been ‘like a light going on’ and had ‘changed his life’.
Then, giggling, he said that, yes, for a while he was actually ‘a Trot’, that is to say a follower of the same Leon Trotsky. This, he said, was for ‘not longer than a year’.
Well, maybe. Who’d have any record now?
MI5’s once huge files on ‘subversives’ for that era were destroyed while Blair was in office. But when Prof Hennessy asked Blair what happened next, the former premier began to say ‘When I was in the, in the…’, and suddenly changed course to ‘In the early Seventies’. This was plainly not what he had been about to say. It sounded much more as if he was about to name the Marxist sect to which he had belonged.
Well, what was he in? Why did this apparently unpolitical leader of a college rock band go out of his way to join Harold Wilson’s stodgy, middle-aged Labour Party, as soon as he left Oxford?
‘Is it possible that the apparently naive, open-faced Bambi-like Blair has all along been a cunning Marxist-Leninist, cynically pretending to take positions he didn’t really hold, while concealing his true objectives?’
At the time, revolutionary students utterly despised the Labour Party as a sell-out.
I know all this because I, too, was a Marxist at university and for some years afterwards, a fact I do not conceal and readily discuss, unlike the many members of Mr Blair’s Cabinet who also had Marxist pasts.
So is it possible that the apparently naive, open-faced Bambi-like Blair has all along been a cunning Marxist-Leninist, cynically pretending to take positions he didn’t really hold, while concealing his true objectives?
Has his hard, realistic Marxist training now kicked in to warn him that Net Zero is a danger to his own cause?
If so, I have to say, as an ex-Marxist myself, that he is dead right. Trotsky would have done the same.
‘Overmighty’ police are too big for their boots
Back in the 1970s people started to say that the trade unions had become ‘overmighty subjects’ of the realm. They had got too big for their boots. There was some truth in this.
Today I think it is the police who have grown too powerful for their own good and for the good of the country.
If the unions could be curbed, then the police need the same treatment. I’ve had recent brushes with them myself, over the Letby case. It was clear that they would have liked to shut me up.
Now I note that, in the recent case of a columnist on another paper who was interviewed on her doorstep by police officers, over something she had written, the Essex Police press office actually advised the paper involved that its approach was ‘dangerous’ and added: ‘I would very strongly urge you not to publish anything on this.’ This is not what the police are for.
