There was a particularly good article on Tony Blair in the Sunday Times yesterday.
For those who have not been paying attention, Blair’s main activity since being forced to resign as prime minister has been making money. Thanks mainly to the apparently inexhaustible desire of the US rich to pay to rub shoulders with the famous, he has become the world’s highest-paid public speaker, pulling down millions. He has also become an advisor to two large financial services groups: JP Morgan and Zurich Financial.
But his other activities have defied parody. The two main ones have been: Middle East envoy, and the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. It is hard to think of two roles for which he is less well-suited.
The idea that Blair is the right man to bring peace to the Middle East is truly bizarre. He became prime minister with a knowledge of foreign affairs rather similar to that of Sarah Palin. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for the UK, he was shielded from the kind of dumb statements that she became famous for by the well-oiled No. 10 briefing machine. But he appeared to cut himself off from advice that he did not want to hear and remained astonishingly ignorant of basic facts about Iraq until we were hopelessly committed to a spectacularly stupid policy. There is little evidence that he is any better briefed on the far more complex situation of Israel and its Arab neighbours.
On the other hand, after a token visit, he appears to have done almost nothing in the role. In a way, that is a blessing – at least he has not made the situation worse. But I cannot help wondering whether he ever wanted the role as anything more than a useful peg when he came to be introduced and advertised as a speaker at $1,000/plate lunches.
The Faith Foundation is equally bizarre. He was received into the Catholic Church on Friday 21 December 2007 (six months after his resignation as prime minister on 24 June 2007). Blair does not believe in doing his homework and certainly appears to have done the strict minimum to be accepted as a Catholic – the norm would be about half-a-dozen weekly sessions with a priest, each lasting an hour or so, in which he was taken though basic catachetics. I have not seen any evidence that he knows anything about Catholic doctrine beyond the absolute basics. Cardinal Murphy O’Connor was indulgent, but his successor is not and reprimanded him fairly sharply when he started criticizing the Church’s sexual ethics.
Here is an extract from the video on the front page of the website. The video is just Blair talking:
… While many academics and sociologists have maintained for years that religious faith would die out in an increasingly globalized society, today we know the opposite to be true … The goals of the Faith Foundation are to promote understanding of, and between, the major religions. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Judaism. We will make the case for faith as a force for good. To that end the Tony Blair Faith Foundation will focus its initial efforts on four different programmes …
My goodness! Those faiths must be mighty relieved that Blair is riding to the rescue. They would never have managed without him.
But the Sunday Times article was about a third activity which I had somehow failed to notice: the Climate Group. A group of large businesses has got together to lobby for contract from the global warming mania. Arnie and Tony are the front men. Today saw the launch of its report: Technology for a Low Carbon Future. The idea is that given enough subsidies and contracts, these generous-hearted, public-spirited businesses will ride to the rescue and save us all.
Most of the text is about the need to insulate them from all risk and guarantee them super-profits. That way these paragons of capitalism will be able to do their bit for the planet. Well, they did not put it quite that way, it was wrapped up in tedious financial jargon. In many ways I preferred Smedley Butler’s plain speaking in his book, which seemed curiously apt for the new War on Global Warming.
I think the generous interpretation would be that Blair has not bothered to read the report. He just knows that he wants to be leading from the front in this important cause.
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