Amid all his present troubles and with more to come, look carefully at Tony Blair-Blair-Blair. He is the future, a future of media-manipulation and image-burnishing, of hacks and hacks' whores, his spin doctors. Phoney Tony even performed the necessary prostrations before the marsupial eminence of Rupert Murdoch so as to win a syphilitic kiss of approval from the Sun. How is such endorsement given? Is there a price to be paid? Will there be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow beneath some future Sky? We shall know one day: for the moment it is enough to know that Tony Blair deployed his hacks' whores to good effect through the media, pimping, streetwalking, seducing and sometimes engaging in a bit of S & M.
And now the hacks are biting into Blair's neck, and he and his courtiers are baffled. Why? Do they not remember Aesop's fable of the frog and the scorpion? The scorpion wanted to cross the river, but he could not swim, so he asked the frog to give him a ride across. The frog agreed to carry him over the river, provided that the scorpion promised not to bite him. The scorpion gave his promise and the frog bore him to the far side of the river.
As he dismounted, the scorpion raised his tail and fatally stung the frog. "Why did you do that?" gasped the frog. "I gave you a lift. You promised not to harm me."
"Why?" said the scorpion carelessly as he sauntered away from the dying frog. "Because it is in my nature."
British media
Biting beasts is as incorrigibly in the nature of the British media as stinging is in the instincts of the scorpion. No friendship, no affection, no personal regard, will protect those who are biteable, for they will surely be bitten, and bitten by the very people the Labour Party has cuddled up to in order to win power. Image-makers, not policy-makers, became the centre of the political heart of Labour, and that is why damage done to those image-makers - the Mandelsons, the Whelans - is damage done to the Labour Party's most vital part.
Stripped of those individuals, of the glitter and the glitz of turning words around so that they mean all things to all people, what is the Labour Party? On Europe it dithers, like the Tories dither, apparently out of some absurd attachment to a declining and marginal currency which today can buy a quarter as many deutschmarks as it could in 1959. Its primary domestic policy seems to be the preposterous Millennium Dome. Its policy on US air-strikes on Iraq is Tory. Where has it achieved something where the Tories failed? In one area: Northern Ireland. The Blair-Mowlam axis was undoubtedly successful there, and for the Good Friday Agreement we should all be grateful.
Original sin
But we can all hear the clock ticking. In a classic example of Blairism, the desperate prime minister gave the unionists a written assurance on terrorist decommissioning; he might as well have given one on Jupiter's moons or Pluto's orbit for all the power he has in the matter. Decommissioning before the formation of a Northern Executive is not within his gift to give; it was not within the terms of the Good Friday Agreement; not part of the pan-insular mandate which that agreement was given. But unionists point to the Blair letter as proof that decommissioning is a prerequisite to participation in government; that letter was, is, the original sin of the infant peace born last April.
Show, style, poise, polish: we saw these qualities at their hammiest during Blair's reading at Princess Diana's funeral service, and they are the shallows upon which he has built his prime ministry. Phoney Tony merely waves a wand and superficiality is presented as profundity, veneer as depth, lustrous skin as solid flesh. The varnish has more depth than the varnished. It is governance by mirage, and how many travellers in the desert have been lured deeper to their doom by seductive shimmerings promising rescue?
Politics of display
Of course, no arid dunes lie ahead of the people of Britain. They have been the victim of a huge hoax, but it barely matters. For there is another and greater truth to be learnt from the British experience: that national politics throughout Europe is increasingly about display rather than achievement. It is the politics of the peacock feather; the bigger and the gaudier the tail, the more likely the electorate will choose the owner. And what do peacocks then do? Squawk brainlessly until it is mating time again.
The days of ideological manifestos clashing on the hustings are over. Parties are sold by merchandisers and branders, right across Europe, with no real differences in the politics of practice (as opposed to the politics of promise) between any of the mainstream contestants - even in Germany, the only strongly ideological country left in Europe. We choose our politicians rather as we choose between Daz and Persil, for they too have merely detergent powers. They are incapable of altering the fabric of society in a free market in which the Eurobank is the final arbiter of our futures. Instead, every now and then they give our national knickers a bit of a scrub. We used to call such people launderers. Now we call them leaders.