Tony Blair Years: Cut the crap, Mr Milburn
What to say about last week's The Tony Blair Years (BBC 1, 10.15pm), the second of which, featuring interviews by David Aaronovitch, is on tonight.
In many ways, it was quite informative. Enjoyable even. Aaronovitch, accused of being a Blairite pupper, had been predicted to give the ex-PM a soft ride by not asking tough questions. That didn't prove to be the case. He did ask tough questions - but all too often Blair wriggled out of the question and instead of acting on journalistic instinct and asking the same question again, or in a slightly different way, Aaronovitch moved on.
This series has been billed as the definitive look at Blair's time in office. It deals with many of the issues Blair isn't keen on by talking to others, but often he himself isn't featured in those bits. And at times, the first episode, which focussed on the Blair-Brown relationship seemed to be more Get Gordon than insight analysis.
And here's where politicians show their true colours. They all go into parliament representing a party, but many slowly become partisan within the party, incapable of seeing how petty it all looks to those of us in the real world. Hilary Armstrong, a thin-lipped gob from the North East who has that horrible 'wait till I get you home' attitude about her, accused Brown and his colleagues of urging people to vote against Blair's key policies. Alan Milburn, a horribly smarmy individual and a key Blair supporter who quit early on to 'spend more time with his family' (or meddle politically in the background depending on your opinion) also put the knife into Brown. As did many of Blair's unelected key advisors, at least one of whom now has the word Baroness before her name.
What the key aides and the likes of Armstrong and Milburn seem to have forgotten is that while Blair has gone, it's still a Labour government in power. To that end, they should be buttoning up rather than speaking out - or giving answers similar to Blair's, which, although not always ringing endorsements of Brown, certainly weren't enough to send the national press into a tizzy.
None of the above makes the programme less entertaining. Tonight is where we get to the real meat of Blair's Premiership: His fondness for going to war, particularly with a certain Mr George W Bush. It will be intersting to see how many distance themselves from the idea of going into Iraq now. Uniquely, perhaps, both Blair and Bush talk about the decision to topple Saddam Hussein.
According to the blurb: "Blair's belief that nations should act together to tackle threats was born of his experience in the Balkans and reinforced when al Qaeda attacked on the US on September 11th. Blair talks of his failure to keep the international coalition together over Iraq, and for the first time admits he was isolated diplomatically by the time of the invasion in March 2003.
"Blair is dismissive of suggestions that the chaos of post-war Iraq was the result of poor planning and asserts that the war in Iraq is a visceral, profound struggle between what is right and what is wrong which he fears the West may not have the stomach to win."
With a bit of luck, the counter argument will be a bit stronger this week than it was last.
Older/Newer
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Tony Blair Years: Cut the crap, Mr Milburn.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.remotecontrol.merseyblogs.co.uk/cgi-bin/mt421/mt-tb.cgi/64968
1 Comments
Leave a comment
Profile
Remote Control
David Aaronovitch, 2003:
"If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere."