TWO TONIES, ONE TORY:

A tale of two Tonies (John Gross, March 2003, New Criterion)

Social life in London has become a dangerous business. You are at an apparently relaxed dinner party, and someone suddenly launches into an anti-American diatribe-as often as not, to general
applause. You are having a friendly conversation, when out of the blue there is a crack about the utter impossibility of Dubya or the evil ways of the Washington junta-and the assumption is you'll agree.

The occasion for these outbursts is usually, of course, Iraq. But when the subject comes up it is striking how little time is spent talking about Saddam Hussein and what should be done about him. There is a ritual
acknowledgment that he is not a nice man, and then the real denunciations can begin. America is a rogue state; don't let them fool you, it's all about oil (or alternatively all about Dad); George W. Bush is a cowboy, a simpleton, a recovering alcoholic, a madman, a usurper... . But readers of The New Criterion hardly need to be taken through the whole litany.

According to Günter Grass, "the president of the United States embodies the danger that faces us all." Grass speaks, alas, for a large slice of European opinion. And if you have read the recent effusions of John Le
Carré ("the United States of America has gone mad") or Harold Pinter, you will know that British calumniators of America can be every bit as shrill as their Continental counterparts.

No one who is exposed to current British anti-Americanism as it is exhibited on the BBC, for instance, will want to underestimate it. (The night before writing this I tuned into a BBC program about Iraq and found the narrator happily harking back to the days of American "hysteria about Commies": par for the course.) Still, there is one consolation. For the moment, at least, the disease is probably less virulent and widespread in Britain than it is in France, Germany, or most other parts of the world.

British anti-war sentiment also concentrates much of its fire on a local target-the obvious one, Tony Blair. He is scorned as a poodle and excoriated as a jackal. A tabloid switches to red ink so that it can devote its
front page to portraying him with blood on his hands. "Obscene," if it still means anything, is the only word for some of the hideous cartoons about him in The Guardian and The Independent.

Above all, there is disaffection in his own party. At present, it is fairly muted. Most of his critics still cling to the hope that he can persuade Washington to hold back. But if war comes, open rebellion seems inescapable. [...]

Given the contradictions, it is tempting to draw a distinction between Blair himself and the Blair government-and there are times, indeed, when he seems strangely isolated. But no, he is prime minister, and he can't be absolved from responsibility. His office is where the buck stops and where the big initiatives begin.

The contradictions are a function of his being a Tory temperamentally. If this split with the Franco-Prussians would only cure him of his EUphilia, he'd be an ideal leader for a revitalized British conservatism, which is hardly the same thing as American conservatism, but would be a vast improvement over what they have now. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 9, 2003 9:53 AM