WHO'S THE BRAKE ON BLAIR? :

The people's party...where have I heard that before? (Robert Harris, 25/06/2002, Daily Telegraph)

Sitting at my desk last week, preparing to write a column about the Black Rod affair, I found myself leafing through Ian Kershaw's massive biography of Adolf Hitler.

Something had stirred in my mind - something to do with Tony Blair's assertion that his officials had made all those phone calls without his knowledge. What was it?

Ah yes. Here it was. Page 529. A speech made in 1934 by the chief civil servant at the German ministry of agriculture, trying to explain to his colleagues how they should cope with the country's charismatic new leader: "Everyone with opportunity to observe it knows that the Fuhrer can only with great difficulty order from above everything that he intends to carry out sooner or later.

"On the contrary, until now everyone has best worked in his place in the new Germany if, so to speak, he works towards the Fuhrer."

Professor Kershaw believes this phrase is crucial to understanding what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Ambitious officials fell over one another to "work towards the Fuhrer", trying to give the Boss what he wanted before he even asked for it, and in this way the whole sophisticated system of Prussian government, far from acting as a brake on Hitler (as most observers had expected) became an accelerator.

The comparison does seem unfair, but the analysis is interesting and Mr. Harris is a terrific conservative novelist. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 25, 2002 1:50 PM