Tony Blair and the Twilight of the Third Way

Remember the Hosannas when the Third Way rode into town in the 1990s? How the media loved Bill Clinton, who was going to show us a middle way between the extremes of right and left.

And then the British got to have their very own Bill Clinton in the person of Tony Blair, and the British people fell in love too.

What was it all about, really? The Clintons threw away all the good will in a disastrous two years that ended up with a Republican Congress. And now Tony Blair, who promised “education, education, education,” is shuffling into the sunset with a pathetic Education Bill that changes nothing, that leaves the “bog-standard” comprehensive schools in place to level the school kids of Britain down to mediocrity (Of the 100 best schools in Britain, one is a comprehensive school).

What was it all about? Well, it was about sleaze, for one thing. Remember the Sleaze Factor with which the media regaled us here in the US in the 1980s? The British media went chasing Tory Sleaze in the early 1990s.

But then when Blair and his New Labour got into office, the media weren’t interested in sleaze. And that’s odd, points out Matthew Parris in the London Times, because there was plenty of it from the start. “Mittal, Dr Kelly, Scarlett, Caplin, Campbell, Hutton, Butler, Berlusconi, Cherie, Patel, Garrard, Townsley, Levy,” the roll of the Blair scandals is long and sonorous, just like the Clinton scandals from the White House Travel Office to the White House silver. But nobody was interested.

But now they are. Now finally Blair has got everyone’s attention.

Parris has decided to put it out “delicately.”

I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster.

And then he goes on to liken Blair to that notorious cad in David Copperfield: “the engaging, handsome and popular James Steerforth,” the well-born man that scarred his governess when a boy and in his adulthood despoiled Little Em’ly, the childhood friend with whom David had innocently played on the beach by the old boat in which Em’ly lived with Mr. Peggotty, Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge.

It is occasionally reported that some poor woman falls in love with a professional fraud and remains his wife for years without realising what she has married. The British electorate are such a woman. Mr Blair’s misdeeds are persistently overlooked, and his excuses credited. By the time we wake up he may have torn his party and its programme apart.

In the last week it came to light that Tony Blair had received several loans from rich benefactors to help finance the last election. Blair had not reported the loans to the Labour Party. Now he is all contrition and wants to reform party funding.

But why should Blair want to reform fundraising now and not earlier. “You know why. He never meant to put matters right. He has been caught out.”

We, who always had our questions about the Third Way and its immaculate conception, are left to wonder. Both Blair and Clinton were so gifted, how could it have come to this?

What exactly was the Third Way all about, apart from being a marketing ploy?