A modern Briton
One of Blair’s motives for going to war might have been
an eye to his post-retirement value on the very lucrative American lecture circuit.
Blair, Dalrymple notes,
shows a greater avidity for vulgar high living than any recent holder of his office.
Dalrymple says Blair
presents us with a special puzzle. Although by no means an interesting man, in the sense that Doctor Johnson was an interesting man, we all find ourselves thinking about him at frustrating length. He is like a tune, neither loved nor lovely, that one cannot get out of one’s head.
In some ways
he appears to resemble that product of the diseased communist imagination, particularly beloved of Che Guevara, the New Man, at least in the sense that he does not resemble previous generations.
Blair
is neither honest nor dishonest: he escapes entirely the criteria by which such a judgment of him could be made. To argue with him that what he says or does now is incompatible with what he said or did yesterday is about as fruitful as arguing a paranoid man out of his belief that the secret services of many countries are after him, or that his neighbours are listening to his thoughts through a screening device that they have invented. In short, Blair, having been born with Original Virtue, suffers from delusions of honesty.
Leaders, Dalrymple notes,
grow out of societies and a social context: they do not fall like bolts from the blue. Blair both represents, and is a cause of an acceleration in, a change in character of the British people. He is far from unique in his ability to find the happy coincidence between his thirst for money and power and the highest moral principles.
Anyone who has had dealings with the British public service, Dalrymple points out, will know that the principal qualities required for advancement within it are
- unceasing sanctimony
- brazenness
- a craven dedication to orders from on high
- an ability to justify a complete change of direction at a moment’s notice
- a capacity for bullying those lower down the feeding chain, or those jostling for a place at the trough
- a rigid self-control, to suppress any independence of mind or a tendency to consider the ethics of orders to be implemented
What is required in the civil servant is the ability, for example,
to present cancelled operations as an inestimable benefit to the patients concerned, while at the same time spotting niches for a little commercial activity of his own, whether it be by using the rules of employment to his own financial benefit or setting up a consultancy to advise his former employers.
Dalrymple recently met a public servant
who had risen up the ranks and had about him the air of a successful revolutionary. He travelled to London on the train first class every week (a ticket costs the equivalent of an annual working-class holiday in the sun), and attended sumptuous functions there attended by others such as himself, under the impression that by so doing he was working.
Here was the voice
of militant mediocrity, who expressed himself even in private in the language of Health Service meetings, believing that his large salary and high living at public expense were all for the good of those who paid for them. Just as the countries of Eastern Europe once had their little Stalins, so every department of every branch of the British public service has its little Blairs.
Today the ruling characteristics of the British are
- deviousness
- ruthlessness
- an eye fixed on the main chance
- sanctimony in the midst of obvious wrongdoing
- toadying
- bullying
As late as 1979, the British people, including administrators in hospitals, were largely upright. Some of the old virtues were seen, such as
- stoicism
- honesty
- fortitude
- irony
- good humour
These can still be found,
but only in people who are of no importance,
for in Britain, good people
Dalrymple says that
when words become the test of virtue, they also become the masks of vice. That is why sanctimony and ruthless self-interest are such powerful allies.
