MARTYR TO OFFICE
Internet rumours that British Prime Minister Tony Blair's 16 year-old daughter Kathryn had attempted suicide in the spring add to the image of the office as a martyrdom. Blair's wife Cherie revived this picture of suffering with her book about Prime Minister's wives called 'inside the goldfish bowl', co-written with Cate Haste, the wife of novelist and TV presenter Melvin Bragg. It was Bragg who lent his insider's authority to speculation about the state of the Blair's happy family, when he said on a television interview that the Prime Minister had had a wobbly due to 'intense family pressure' in the spring. Bragg's interview, promptly disowned by Cherie, resurrected the story that under pressure over the Gulf War Blair had had to be persuaded not to resign by senior colleagues - with even 'rival' Gordon Brown joining in the unlikely chorus of 'don't go'. Though the press are sufficiently intimidated by Cherie's litigious threats, the World Wide Web is a hothouse that quickly turned Kathryn's woes from exam nerves, into weight problems, before settling on bullying at school over her father's responsibility for the Iraq War. The only thing that anyone who is not in with the Westminster gossip can deduce is that the Labour administration is hampered by an excessive self-obsession that has precious little to do with politics.
'THE LAST REFUGE OF THE SCOUNDREL.
.is patriotism', said Dr Johnson. But in our times, the last refuge of the scoundrel is a sudden interest in climate change.
· Margaret Thatcher made her first speech on climate change at the Royal Society in September 1988, just as her government had exhausted its political programme of curtailing organised labour, and preparing to introduce the poll tax.
· Democratic Senator Al Gore announced an 'ozone hole over Kennebunkport' (home to then President George H Bush) in 1992, in an attempt to revive the fortunes of the paralysed party. Trying to enlarge his role in the Clinton Administration, Gore's 're-inventing government' policy of September 1993, fired off in every direction, including a '$2 million government programme to clean the air by cutting bovine flatulence' (George Stephanopolous, All too Human, 210).
· That same year British Prime Minister John Major - his party riven by dissent over Europe - helped kick the Rio Summit into gear, inviting other world leaders suffering from the post-Cold War blues to 'a vast international summit to discuss hot air' (John Major, The Autobiography, p 510).
· On 27 August of this year, George W Bush - up till then a sceptic - embraced the argument that global warming is caused by man-made emissions, in a move widely understood as an appeal to swing voters at a time when his bid for a second-term was in the doldrums.
· In September of this year, ailing opposition leader Michael Howard, thrashing around for an issue, castigated the Prime Minister for not signing up for the Kyoto agreement on emissions, promising that the Conservatives would take the lead on climate change.
· And finally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned on 14 September that 'time was running out' to check the effects of climate change. Most observers think that it is Blair's government that is running out of time in its efforts to convince the electorate, and indeed the historians, that Blair is more than just a liar.
The issue of climate change is one that draws out the worst in people. If anyone really believed the arguments that industrial emissions were killing the planet, they would take drastic action to reverse the course of human history.
Instead the imagined problem is sufficiently vast to preclude any real action, so global warming activists feel at liberty to jet to conferences all over the world, adding to the hot air, rather than reducing it.
For politicians, climate change is an attractive issue precisely because it allows them to avoid real problems in the here and now. No doubt the activists will take comfort from the fact that all of the world's great powers now agree with them over global warming. But instead, that ought to give them pause for thought. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040921/abf7962d/attachment.htm>