arrivistes

Matthew Parris on loans for honours:

Few of us leave the legacies we intend, and one of Tony Blair’s may be this: by impatience, overconfidence and carelessness of the proprieties, Downing Street has kicked apart an ancient, elaborate and flimsy rat’s nest of Establishment corruption in the award of honours. It has broken the code, failed to understand the very British way we do these things. It has spoilt it for everyone.

This was probably not the reform Mr Blair intended nor the honour he wanted, but honour of a kind there ought to be in history for those who push things so far that they snap. However unwittingly, they introduce a kind of candour into politics. That is what Mr Blair and his friends have done.

I think this is essentially accurate. But the coarseness of the process seems to be a particular New Labour touch. Recall 9/11 being a good day to bury bad news. This isn’t a particular scandal in itself. Press officers all think like this. That’s why they’re hired. It’s essentially what the job involves.

What isn’t part of the job is showing off about it – circulating an e-mail to that effect round the office. It speaks of insecurity. See, I know how it’s done – I’m a professional.

Look as well at the overt way in which New Labour promoted itself as being able to handle the media, the way in which the apparat prided itself as being on message, especially in the early years. They’ve spent half their years in office boasting of their incredible manipulative powers and the other half complaining that nobody trusts them, and blaming everybody but themselves.

Well I suppose that New Power, like New Money, tends towards the crude. I think this goes some way to explaining Matthew Taylor’s comments the other day. It’s a kind of crisis of the arrivistes.

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[Martin Wisse]

Remember also how one of their first powerplays in the media, the purging of the World Service's Arabists, backfired with the establishment of Al Jazeera by many of the purged Arabists...