ISN'T THE MAN WHO BURIED SOCIALISM AUTOMATICALLY GREAT?:

Not too great. Just too greatly liked: a review of Blair By Anthony Seldon (The Economist)

[S]ome of the verdicts which Mr Seldon reaches about his subject should be seen as more provisional than the author suggests. It is still not clear whether Mr Blair's efforts to modernise Britain's creaking public services will be seen as a partial success or as proof that the whole enterprise was doomed from the outset without more radical reforms and a different approach to funding. Similarly, despite the currently fashionable consensus that Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster, it is conceivable that by the time Mr Blair quits the scene the decisions that he took in the run-up to war will appear in a better light than now.

Mr Seldon's conclusions about Mr Blair's place in history occupy only a small part of this weighty book, but they are important because they set what precedes them in an almost elegiac light. His judgment that Mr Blair, while not a bad prime minister, cannot claim a place in a first rank that includes Asquith, Attlee, Churchill and Thatcher, is both hard to disagree with and unlikely to alter. But whereas Mr Seldon appears to see this as an almost tragic denouement, an example of limitless promise, if not betrayed, at least unfulfilled, this is both too harsh and too grand.

At least three of the four “greats” of the last century had mandates to remake Britain as a different place. For all the size of Mr Blair's majorities in 1997 and 2001, he was elected as an ameliorator rather than what the management consultants call a “change agent”.

It may not outlast his own leadership, but isn't there nearly as much greatness in Mr. Blair making Labour a Thatcherite party as there was in her making Britain a Thatcherite nation? Britain's socialist party is now led by an anti-union, crypto-Catholic, conservative, moralist who, along with George W. Bush, is imposing liberal democratic capitalism on Islam. That seems rather significant.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 26, 2004 4:48 PM