Just a query: Is anyone else finding it slightly unnerving living in a country where we know our leader, elected to serve his whole term, is about to step down? It's quite a strange reality and slightly unsettling in these dangerous times.Gordon Brown will be our leader within the next few weeks. Fact. And all the Labour Party can do is pray that the Iraq legacy dies with Blair. I personally feel this is totally unfair and as ever, the mob is fickle and loves a scapegoat.
He has been our leader for 10 years and is definitely the politician of our times. I don't profess to love all he has done, but by God he has done well. His oratory skills are phenomenal, diplomacy brilliant (the special relationship has not seen such good days since Reagan and Thatcher) and his capability to seem to genuine in the face of all adversity, is unique.
Testament to all this was the eagerness of the people to meet him last week on his tour of the UK. Suddenly the outrage of the Iraq war was forgotten and the British general public were clamouring for a look.
We will miss Blair whether we realise it or not.
1 comments:
My across-the-pond-casual-judgment about Tony Blair will have to wait some years after he's left office. He's certainly worn many derisive labels in the ten years he's been Prime Minister: "Bambi", "George Bush's Poodle", "People's Princess", "Spinmeister" among others. No leadership tenure is ever perfect.
Blair, very clearly shed many of those contemptuous perceptions from his Torry and media critics a few days after September 11, 2001. Before he logged the thousands of miles to help establish a coalition to attack Afghanistan, he very eloquently stated to the British people........"We believe in reason, democracy and tolerance. These beliefs are the foundation of the civilized world. They are enduring, they have served us well and history has shown we have been prepared to fight, when necessary, to defend them. But the fanatics should know: We hold these beliefs every bit as strongly as they hold theirs. Now is the time to show it."
He's obviously met the demands of leadership. For that alone, the west will revere him.
In the coming months, and it has yet to be perceived or foreseen much if at all by the American media, Tony Blair's exit from office will essentially leave George Bush and his administration twisting in the hurricane force winds of criticism all the way into the next Presidential election that's not to take place until November 2008. In an unrelenting manner sight unseen, the remaining tenure of the Bush administration and his political associates will suffer the drone of a thousand cuts until then.
It won't be a foxhunt, it'll be more like shooting at fish in a barrel.
*!*
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