Novelist Philip Pullman, 63, is best known for his award-winning children's trilogy, His Dark Materials. His latest book is The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
New Labour and Tony Blair are one and the same thing. Does anyone imagine the phenomenon would have happened without him? In thinking about what New Labour means, I keep coming back to the man who created it, and who left it such a deflated hollow.
Tony Blair has a phosphorescent quality. He is a will-o'-the-wisp, an emanation of rotting marsh gas that flares and glimmers in the dark, leading stray travellers into deeper and deeper mires. His power is almost supernatural. He managed to lead an entire party into supporting policies that were utterly alien to its nature; he took a movement that had once been proud to feel itself socialist, and made it into a fervent supporter of low taxes, private finance initiatives, and people getting filthy rich. He encouraged Jack Straw, in opposition before 1997, to deplore the business of locking people up for profit, and then cast a spell on the same Jack Straw, now transmogrified into home secretary, so as to make him set about building more private prisons than the defunct Tory government could have dreamed of.
I think there are only two explanations for this weird power of Blair's. One is that he is not actually human, but a sort of spirit, a boggart or a hobgoblin of some kind, specifically the sort described by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) as "Fiery spirits or devils … such as commonly work by blazing stars, fire-drakes, or ignes fatui; which lead men into rivers or over precipices."
That would account for the otherwise inexplicable power he had over the Labour party. We were seduced by an imp, or a spirit made of congealed air, as described in Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies of 1691. They seem human, these apparitions, but really they belong to a sort of in-between realm neither fully human nor completely diabolic. They go about the world, outwardly human, but in fact up to their own rascally business.
I once saw Blair's weird power at close quarters. There was a reception at 10 Downing Street for people involved in children's books, which had had a bit of a boom that coincided with New Labour's time in office. I suppose there were about 80 people there. I was introduced to the prime minister, and we had a stilted conversation for about a minute and a half, during which I thought how odd it was that this man, reputedly so skilled a political operator, should be so awkward and uncertain when talking to just one person.
Shortly afterwards he had to leave for some reason, but before he left he took the chance to stand on a chair or something similar – something informal, anyway – and talk to the whole room.
And as he stood up he suddenly seemed to come into focus. Everything about him was clear and vivid and immediate and attractive. Even his cheeky-boy grin, which had always seemed a little shifty when I saw it on television, and was strained and implausible at close quarters, was flawless and convincing when I saw it across a room. He spoke for about five minutes, without notes, and he said exactly the right things in exactly the right way, self-deprecating and witty and knowledgable, and managed to make everyone feel they were important without feeling that they'd been crawled to. It was a masterful performance, clearly supernatural in origin. It was as if until he was the centre of attention he didn't fully exist. I'm not sure that before he spoke he wasn't actually transparent.
I remain open on the hobgoblin or will-o'-the-wisp theory. Rotting vegetation, marsh gas, elusive glimmering lights that promise a safe passage and then suddenly disappear – it all sounds familiar.
The other explanation of what he was up to has nothing of the supernatural about it. I owe it to that excellent little book On Bullshit, by the philosopher Harry G Frankfurt.
According to Professor Frankfurt, the bullshitter is not a liar. The charge that Blair lied to parliament never seemed right to me, but I never understood why until I read this explanation of the difference between lying and bullshitting:
"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."
Before I leave Professor Frankfurt's great work I must also mention another aspect of the Blair phenomenon, the "I only know what I believe" attitude in the prime minister's words to the Labour party conference in 2004. Referring to the contemporary proliferation of bullshit, Frankfurt describes the increasing lack of confidence in the possibility of any knowledge of objective reality: "One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity."
That's the man in a nutshell. Any doubters need only seek the YouTube clip of Blair reading the lesson at Princess Diana's funeral. He's being so sincere that he actually acts it, as if he's thinking of the words himself and trying them out for the first time. The whole performance is excruciating, but you can't take your eyes off it.
Whether emitting phosphorescence or bullshit Blair was a first-class act, which for 10 years or so held the Labour party in thrall. I look forward eagerly to his future mischief. Hobgoblins live for 700 years or so, according to Robert Burton.