His rhetoric about taxes in the 1992 election was utterly confounded by his actions after it
His rhetoric about taxes in the 1992 election was utterly confounded by his actions after it. He is a highly conscious and artful phrase-juggler - and Honest John is quite prepared to fight dirty. On the other hand he can be just as smoothly charming as the Labour leader; Major doing some serious schmoozing has to be seen to be believed.Tony Blair, meanwhile, has been unusually frank for a leading politician. There are very important gaps to be filled in, notably on tax and voting reform. But Blair has made a fetish of promising only a modest agenda.
In recent years, he hasn't changed his mind on anything important. Given his determination to promise nothing he cannot deliver, it is one of the minor mysteries of politics that this basically straightforward, open man is seen by some as shifty and untrustworthy - even ''smarmy''.Partly, it is the venom of those who have been ruthlessly excluded by the modernisers. Leo Abse both an old socialist and an old Freudian, has been the harshest single critic of Blair's smiling image, variously describing the Labour leader as possessing ''an over-ready, winsome boy smile'', as being ''androgynous'' and practising ''the politics of perversion''. Worse still, as Abse shrewdly points out, he likes rock music.This is silly, savage stuff which tells us more about Abse than Blair. But it is a good example of the psychological warfare that presidential- style politics can degenerate into. It is not yet a capital crime to grin; and to draw a contrast between the Prime Minister and the Labour leader on the basis of honesty versus smiling insincerity is, so far as I can see, mere hooey.What, though, of Labour's counter-charge?Blair is tough, and a winner: Major is weak and a loserThis is, in essence, the Blairite answer to the Tory character-assassins and is about as accurate. It is certainly true that Blair is tough, and has reformed his party more radically than many others would have dared to do But Major is a hard case too.
He has been in power for six years, managing a fissiparous and disloyal party; his personal performance in 1992 had a lot to do with the Tories' election victory then. He is, in short, a strange sort of loser.Is Major weak in a way that Blair isn't? He certainly found press attacks horribly hurtful but to be lampooned day after day and remain cheerful - as he now can - is not something the average citizen could manage. Major possesses awesome self-control but is a very emotional man who has always been touchy about ''the mockers'' and genuinely thinks himself badly underrated. Yet the years have covered him with thick, barely penetrable emotional scar tissue and fed his basic, burning self-belief.There is another kind of weakness. Early on in his premiership, it is true that Major gave the Tory factions on Europe the clear and damaging message that he could be successfully bullied. This did more than anything else to feed the anti-EU revolt which has dominated his premiership and is the main evidence for the weakness that Blair identifies as Major's failing.Rightly: but would Tony Blair be very different? He has Major's example to learn from. In opposition, Blair has led ruthlessly and at times almost recklessly from the front He brims with optimism and energy.