The Airs of Blair

The Blair interview with Andrew Marr last night was excrutiating.

Blair continues to come across as a self-deluding lunatic with no remorse for the disaster he made of government. I have always thought that he felt that becoming Prime Minister was unexpectedly easy. I suspect the former lead singer of the 70's band 'Ugly Rumours' always found it rather surprising that he had become PM.

Certainly he followed a path that was likely to lead him to government; law at Oxford, working as a barrister, fought an unwinnable seat and then managed to talk himself into a safe one.. But to have reached No 10, and for such a long time was extraordinary - and when all the time he had only really being going through the motions.

I think you find a commonality between people who substantially exceed their own expectations - they become ego centric, self serving, have trouble taking responsibility for things and basically go a bit mad.

I guess it works like this.. In the beginning they are constantly hounded by the thought that they really shouldn't 'be here'. At a deep level they know that their own talents, efforts and skills are not adequate to justify them being in the position that they are in so they 'decide' they must be a bit 'special', that they are different. This ego trick protects them from their own insecurity but it also insulates them from the consequences of their own decisions. As their own life becomes ever more surreal the sharp impact of poor decisions is blunted - they don't feel it and don't even take responsibility for them. It's a self-created delusion.

There was one particulat instance that illustrated this last night:

At one point Blair was talking about the period before John Smith's death and said suddenly 'he knew' that he was going to become leader of the Labour party (and therefore in all likelihood PM). A fairly extraordinary claim given that John Smith was not expected to suddenly die a month later by anyone. He defensively told Marr that it wasn't a premonition or 'anything silly like that'... So what was it then? I don't think it was Blair admitting murder, so he must have been saying that he has developed the ability to look into the future - a fairly 'special' quality.

And he then went on to explain the total mess he had made of the Fox Hunting legislation and really illustrated his true incompetence. He said that he really should have looked into the whole thing a bit more first and that there was "more to it than a bunch of toffs running around killing foxes'..

Quite. And similarly Blair there's a bit more to going off to war in the middle east than shouting 'Yeehar' - there are mothers and fathers who lose sons, children maimed and killed etc. But fortunately you, unlike them, are insulated from that.