Ministers' Fatal Fascination with the Rich

15 Nov 2006

Evening Standard

Police sources have been quite open about the reason for the increased security surrounding Assistant Commissioner John Yates's inquiry into the cash-forpeerages affair. "It could topple a government, so people have to think of every contingency," one officer told the Standard. But Number 10's fury is not just over the length of the inquiry, but its focus on Tony Blair's great weakness: his fatal fascination with the very rich.

Any sensible party leader has to court wealthy businessmen. Politics is an expensive business. And leaders of Left-of-centre parties often feel a need to demonstrate they can get on with business people. The resolutely proletarian Labour leader Harold Wilson had his inner coterie of businessmen. Most of them featured in his secretary Marcia Falkender's notorious "lavender list" and obtained peerages thereby. But Wilson was a brilliant working-class Yorkshire boy who became one of the youngest Oxford University dons of the century. He never gave the impression he felt inferior to his business chums or envied them their lifestyle. By contrast, Blair has always appeared dazzled by the very wealthy. Wilson holidayed happily in the Scilly Isles the entire time he was prime minister. Blair prefers Sir Cliff Richard's Barbados villa, the Tuscan villa of Prince Guicciardini Strozzi, and other boltholes of the rich and famous.

A media executive once described to me taking Blair to lunch at a top London restaurant soon after he became leader of the Labour Party. Those of us who worked in TV in the expense-account Eighties got a little blasÈ about smart restaurants. So he was genuinely surprised at how overawed Blair was. It seems odd that the public schoolboy Blair should be more impressed with rich people than Labour leaders like Wilson, Kinnock and Callaghan -- who all came from much humbler backgrounds. And Blair gives the strong impression of believing, not just that the rich have more money than the rest of us, but that they are actually better people. A strange moral compass for someone who makes much of his Christianity. Blair also venerates raw power. Diplomats and journalists searching for an explanation as to why he never used what little leverage he had with George Bush over the Iraq war put it down to the fact that he was simply overawed by the sheer might of the "imperial presidency". Some commentators argue that "cash for peerages" is an inappropriate issue for Blair to be brought down on. But in fact it would be curiously fitting if his Achilles heel, an excessive veneration for the very wealthy, did for him in the end.



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