It was fascinating, after such a long break, to hear Tony Blair on the Today Programme this morning. AS you will know I'm no great fan of his, but this morning he reminded us of the qualities a politician needs to survive. Qualities he was able to acquire in spade loads, while his successor, presumably, had his head buried in books.
Blair was typically diplomatic when pressed on what Gordon Brown should be doing to turn his fortunes around. He wasn’t going to be bounced into giving advice over the airwaves; though it's difficult to imagine quite what advice he could give, even in private.
He was at pains to point out that Brown is to some extent the victim of circumstance. If Blair had had to deal with Northern Rock, the credit crunch, record oil prices and the prospect of stagflation in his first year in charge, he too would have found his honeymoon rapidly curtailed. But he would also have made a better fist of persuading the electorate to trust him, and that things would turn out alright in the end. And, however unrealistic those assurances might have been, they would have satisfied enough people to stave off the kind of unprecedented electoral meltdown that Labour suffered at Henley last night.
And, of course, Blair could have sacked his chancellor. One of his cleverest tactics as PM was to spread the idea that he had little understanding of economics; and that it was therefore sensible to leave responsibility for the economy entirely in the hands of the man next door.
Blair’s grasp of economics may have been patchy, but I suspect he was at least aware of one enduring truth: that in economics, what goes around comes around. While Brown was boasting that he had achieved what none of his predecessors had managed, and cracked the secret of the boom-bust economic cycle – an idiotic claim that sections of the media and academia were grossly negligent in their failure to question – Blair kept his counsel.
As I wrote here just before Brown became prime minister, with his rather unbelievable apparent naivety of economic realities, he spent most of his time at the Treasury setting himself up for a massive fall. Nonetheless, Blair is correct to suggest that his successor is to some extent a victim of circumstance. That circumstance is globalisation, or rather the way in which the process of economic globalisation has removed from politicians most of the traditional tools of economic policy. Their hands are now tied in ways that those of earlier generations of policy makers never were.
According to Blair, therefore, we should cut Brown some slack. But whenever politicians talk of the new global economic context it's as if that context has mysteriously emerged from undetectable cosmic dust particles, and been foisted upon governments while their backs were turned. Nothing could be further from the truth. This new and troublesome context is the direct result of a purposeful project that began with Reagan and Thatcher, and has been consolidated, largely by governments of the so-called centre-left, in the years since.
That process of consolidation continues each time a senior minister makes a speech calling on us to celebrate the growth in the number of millionaires. And it continues each time the former prime minister ask us to look kindly upon his struggling successor, while conveniently ignoring the fact that neither of them have ever seen fit to question any aspect of the economic revolution of the last three decades.
Brown is a poor politician; and while the electorate is unlikely to forgive him that, I can. What lost him my support was his failure to understand that a just society can never emerge until governments recognise the social consequences of the economic changes of the last three decades, and have the courage to strike out in a quite different direction.
