John Kampfner :: author, broadcaster & commentator

Blair dithered because his confidence has gone
Monday 10th January 2005

John Kampfner suggests the PM's best plan was to have come home and directed relief tasks quietly, without announcing it to the media.

Which Tony Blair will emerge from the tsunami catastrophe? Having roused himself from his sunbed, the Prime Minister has a perfect opportunity to turn his much-vaunted rhetoric into reality. But will the man in search of his legacy seize his chance finally to inject an ethical dimension into his foreign policy?

Just as the world was made aware, by the events of 9/11, not just of the horrors of terrorism but also of its causes, so this natural disaster has opened a broader public debate about the deep-rooted inequalities between the developed and developing worlds. Blair made much political capital of the attack on the twin towers. He promised not only to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with the Americans, but also to "reorder the world". I, for one, believed for a moment that his party conference speech that year might presage some good.

In the subsequent 18 months, Blair exposed himself as an international idealist of the more shallow variety. His misconceived war with Iraq was born of three naive intellectual constructs: that he could influence George W Bush; that he was making the world safer; and that he was helping to democratise the Middle East.

None of these hopes came to pass, leading to natural scepticism about his more recent crusade to improve the plight of Africa. As John Pilger points out (page ten), the record of the rich and powerful nations in their spending on the Iraq war and on arms sales, and in their plundering of developing countries through removing local tariffs and insisting on debt repayments, suggests nothing more than a renewed bout of state-sponsored hypocrisy when it comes to long-term help for countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka.

For all the talk in recent months of debt write-offs for selected states, Britain's international development budget still lingers well below the UN average. In terms of government spending, it would have taken virtually nothing to bump it up to the required level. Instead, what money is spent is partly requisitioned for Iraq and now, one fears, will be diverted into the total sum spent on the devastation in south and south-east Asia.

Blair, at least in his early incarnation, was one of the world's most media-savvy politicians, first pressing emotional buttons with consummate ease over the death of Diana. How desperately trivial that event and the national conversation that followed now seem. That was the age, the late 1990s, when politicians told us we had little serious to think about.

Some, although not all, of the discussion about Blair's protracted holiday has missed the point. Blair's supporters are right to lament that he is damned if he does take a high profile, and damned if he does not. It would not, however, have taken a genius to devise a strategy for the PM to break his trip and direct the relief tasks without milking it in the media. He would not have needed to "do a Diana" to earn some respect - just quietly got on with the job back home in London. Other world leaders such as President Chirac (who was stung by criticism of his failure to respond to deaths in France during the 2003 heatwave) and Chancellor Schroder (who proved adept at dealing with floods in Germany in 2002) got quickly into gear over the tsunami.

Blair's problem is more fundamental than a little tardiness. His trust ratings are so low that families of hostages in Iraq beg him not to speak out, and Labour's election literature in last summer's European and local elections contained few references to him. He is not what he was. The war shattered his self-confidence. Many of his words and actions of the past 18 months have been hesitant and defensive.

While he stays in power, Blair has two options - to continue his attempts at a low profile, which for a PM is an oxymoron, or to try one final time to salvage some credibility on the international stage. He remains hampered by the war and by a long-held British hubris about our importance in the world. He has little clout in Europe to address the absurdities of the Common Agricultural Policy: partly because of Iraq, partly because of Britain's posturing on a variety of EU issues.

But the British government could still achieve something. It will never have a better chance. The PM and Chancellor - competitively more than co-operatively, given the state of their relations - were planning to make their Africa initiative the highlight of the UK's chairmanship of the G8 and its presidency of the EU later in the year. Gordon Brown's debt suspension plans for the tsunami-affected countries marked a good start, although internationally he was by no means the first out of the blocks. Bilaterally and multilaterally, much more can and should be done for Africa and elsewhere. By the end of 2005, it will be possible to make a full assessment of Blair and his contribution to greater equality and justice around the world. I am not holding my breath, but I look forward to being proved wrong.

This article first appeared in the New Statesman and may not be reproduced without permission.