Ministers' Fatal Fascination with the Rich
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.
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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