In the latest political shenanigans and feverish media circus over the date of Tony Blair's departure, accusations of disloyalty have been freely traded between the warring factions, and indeed the question of the degree of loyalty to himself that the prime minister is entitled to expect from his parliamentary colleagues is a genuine and complex issue. So it's fortuitously useful to have been reminded by last Sunday's Observer of an act of conspicuous disloyalty towards one of his closest friends and political allies performed by Mr Blair back in January 2001, when he precipitately sacked Peter Mandelson and effectively ended his career in British politics. The reminder comes in a long and fascinating Observer interview with Robert Harris, eminent journalist and novelist, once very close to Blair. Here's the relevant extract from Lynn Barber's interview with Robert Harris:
[Harris's] personal disillusionment with Blair came in 2001 when the Prime Minister sacked Peter Mandelson for the second time over the Hinduja passports aff air. Harris is good friends with Mandelson, who is godfather to one of his children. Friends have fond memories of a birthday party at which Harris, Mandelson, Jon Snow and Jeremy Paxman gave a rousing rendition of Village People's 'YMCA'. Harris rushed round to Mandelson's flat when he heard the news: 'Peter was like a cornered animal with hundreds of press outside; he'd been fired in this brutal way for no obvious reason. That was a revelation to me – the extraordinary indifference with which his oldest colleagues dumped him. I was with him when he rang Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, the Lord Chancellor, the cabinet secretary, and I heard one after the other tell him to shut up, basically. That was why I stuck my neck out for him – naively I'm sure – but I felt angry and aggrieved. He'd been a good friend to me when he was successful and I thought, "To hell with it, I can't just dump him when things have gone wrong." My god, to see some of the people that did – Mary Ann Sieghart [of the Times] sucking up to him in the street and then dancing on his grave!'
In the Sunday Times, Harris wrote one of the most blistering diatribes I have ever read, under the headline: 'The revulsion I feel for New Labour's coldhearted ways.'
A year or so later, in March 2002, I posted in Ephems some reflections on the dismissal of Peter Mandelson over the Hinduja passports affair, concluding — as Robert Harris had evidently also done — that there had never been any evidence that Mandelson had done anything improper in regard to the Hinduja brothers' passport applications, that Mr Blair's act in dismissing him before the allegations against him had even been investigated was almost unbelievably premature and unjust, and that had Blair waited until the facts were established he couldn't possibly have justified requiring Mandelson's resignation. A lot of the controversy at the time revolved round the question of a telephone call allegedly made by Peter Mandelson to Mike O'Brien, the then responsible junior minister at the home office, enquiring about the progress of the Hindujas' 
application: but (a) even O'Brien confirmed that there had been nothing remotely improper about the telephone call which he thought he remembered, and (b) since there was no record of such a telephone call ever having been made, with neither of the two ministerial private offices having any record or memory of it, it seems improbable in the extreme that it ever took place. (Mandelson subsequently said that since O'Brien claimed to remember it so clearly, he supposed he must have made the call, but that he himself had no recollection of it, a point which is not adequately reflected in the otherwise useful BBC website 'time-line' chronicling the events leading to the Mandelson resignation and the subsequent formal investigation clearing him.)
I hold no special brief for Peter Mandelson, one of the most active creators of New Labour and thus one of those primarily responsible for the diversion of the Labour Party into its present quagmires. But the record suggests that he was an exceptionally effective minister, both as Trade and Industry Secretary (post from which he was dismissed by Blair in 1998 almost as unjustly and prematurely as in 2001) and latterly as Northern Ireland Secretary, a position for which he was especially well equipped. His positive qualities have been a very great asset to the EU Commission: the Blair government has been correspondingly damaged by their wholly unnecessary loss.
Other subsequent ministerial dismissals have raised comparable questions. Those who demand loyalty from their colleagues surely have a duty to be loyal to their colleagues in return?
Postscript (8 Sept 06): The last sentence immediately above has reminded me of Auden's lines:
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return
– but I don't recall ever seeing any signs of bitterness or desire for revenge on Peter Mandelson's part, despite his fearsome reputation as the scheming Machiavelli of British politics. Someone I know who used to see him from time to time in No. 10 (no, not him!) speaks of his human warmth and informality. But he used to evoke great hostility in some quarters.
Brian
The White House has just published an up-dated version of its "National Strategy for Combating Terrorism". A useful summary of its main points in the New York Times of 5 September notes that it "focused more on decentralized networks of extremists than on Al Qaeda and … singled out Iran as a potential source of unconventional weapons for terrorist groups."
There are some interesting and thought-provoking points in the following extract from the document, tending to show as unduly simplistic the idea that the whole thing revolves around opposition to the Iraq war (sorry!):
Our terrorist enemies exploit Islam to serve a violent political vision. Fueled by a radical ideology and a false belief that the United States is the cause of most problems affecting Muslims today, our enemies seek to expel Western power and influence from the Muslim world and establish regimes that rule according to a violent and intolerant distortion of Islam. As illustrated by Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, such regimes would deny all political and religious freedoms and serve as sanctuaries for extremists to launch additional attacks against not only the United States, its allies and partners, but the Muslim world itself. Some among the enemy, particularly al-Qaida, harbor even greater territorial and geopolitical ambitions and aim to establish a single, pan-Islamic, totalitarian regime that stretches from Spain to Southeast Asia.This enemy movement seeks to create and exploit a division between the Muslim and non-Muslim world and within the Muslim world itself. The terrorists distort the idea of jihad into a call for violence and murder against those they regard as apostates or unbelievers, including all those who disagree with them. Most of the terrorist attacks since September 11 have occurred in Muslim countries – and most of the victims have been Muslims.
In addition to this principal enemy, a host of other groups and individuals also use terror and violence against innocent civilians to pursue their political objectives. Though their motives and goals may be different, and often include secular and more narrow territorial aims, they threaten our interests and those of our partners as they attempt to overthrow civil order and replace freedom with conflict and intolerance.
There's naturally a lot here that Europeans would express differently, including the frequent characterisation of international terrorism as 'the enemy', reflecting of course the US administration's conviction that the effort to pre-empt and root out terrorism constitutes a 'war'. Many of us would dispute this, believing that the 'war' metaphor is liable to give rise to dangerously misleading assumptions about the appropriate measures for countering terrorism (not, for example, including the need or justification for putting civil rights systems on an emergency war-time footing, and only rarely if ever requiring the application of military force). But in general this seems a valuable and insightful document, and it's vaguely reassuring that its title refers to 'combating' terrorism, not 'defeating' it.
Brian
Today's (1 Sept 06) Guardian2 publishes an article by Peter Taylor which encapsulates all the illicit assertions about an allegedly causal relationship between Iraq and terrorism in Britain, invalid assertions that have often disfigured C P Scott's once great newspaper in recent months. A friend has called the Taylor article 'intelligent' in a comment on an earlier post (and recommends a forthcoming television programme for which the article is a puff). This suggests a greater plausibility in Taylor's case than I can find in it.
I'm afraid I find this article ill-judged almost to the point of perversity. Mr Taylor opens with a familiar reference to the supposed "succession of government ministers insisting that the terrorist threat has nothing to do with Iraq and British support for American foreign policy", adding that "Such political certainties fly in the face of all the empirical evidence…", when to the best of my knowledge no-one has produced a shred of evidence that Tony Blair or any other minister has said anything of the sort: indeed Blair has explicitly said the opposite (see quotation here). It's simply sloppy journalism to parrot this slander, copying it out from the last article the writer has read, without bothering to check its veracity. Not a good start.
It is one thing to acknowledge that the Iraq issue, among many others, is exploited by the perverted in order to recruit and fanaticise terrorists, which is true, worth saying and uncontroversial, indeed often stressed by Blair. It is something else entirely to go on to claim, explicitly or by clear implication, that (a) inciting or committing murder is an understandable (and therefore implicitly justifiable) way to express anger over a foreign policy issue; thus (b) the "reason" for terrorist acts and suicide bombings is disapproval of UK Iraq policy; so (c) therefore those involved in the occupation of Iraq are responsible — that's to say, to blame — for the terrorism; and it follows that (d) UK policy on Iraq, whether or not that policy is justified on other grounds, should be changed in order to remove the motivation and "reason" for terrorism in Britain.
All these conclusions are illegitimate. Mr Taylor seems dimly to perceive at the very end of his article that he has come uncomfortably close to defending murder and suicide bombings by seeking to 'explain' them, so he hastily admits that such acts are "undoubtedly obscene". One awaits the predictable "but". Sure enough, here it is. "But the reason for them is scarcely beyond doubt." My emphasis, of course.
So there we have it, out in the open at last: the "reason" for the murder of innocent civilians by suicide bombers is British and American action in Iraq. No mention of Kashmir (an especially neuralgic issue for, especially, Pakistanis, often much more so than Iraq), nor of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Chechnya, Algeria, Kosovo, Afghanistan, the pro-western régime in Saudi Arabia, western policy towards Iran: still less any mention of the sense of alienation of Muslims in western countries exposed to a western culture whose most conspicuous characteristics are the opposite of all that Islam seems to them to stand for. No reference to the systematic glorification of martyrdom and the promises of delectable rewards for it in another world. No: according to Mr Taylor, the "reason" for terrorist atrocities is Iraq. So, by seemingly irrestible logic, the British government is to blame for terrorism: and the remedy for terrorism is to change tack on Iraq.
I would hope that on reflection those tempted to seize any stick with which to beat Tony Blair might agree that this is shoddy stuff, profoundly distasteful, unworthy of a liberal and responsible newspaper. Alas, there have been too many equally unacceptable and illicit propaganda pieces in the Guardian recently. I look forward to Peter Taylor's television version of his Guardian article on Sunday with the utmost foreboding: visual images are even more dangerously convincing than the printed word.
Myths, by which I mean lies, repeated sufficiently often, eventually become part of the conventional wisdom.
Update (2 Sept 06): I am glad to see that the indefatigable controversialist Professor Norman Geras has also been lambasting Peter Taylor's dreadful article on his always stimulating blog, as well as plugging away at the naive and noxious fallacy that seeks to attribute the blame for terrorism to the UK and US governments: see this, this, this and this. He also quotes a splendid demolition job on Noam Chomsky's poisonous article of 1 September 2006 in the Guardian (the supposed link to it in the Guardian's website mysteriously doesn't work). I don't by any means always agree with Professor Geras (for example, he supported the Bush-Blair occupation of Iraq, which I have strongly opposed from the beginning), but again and again he is robustly right-minded on issues where to be right is not necessarily to be popular.
Update No. 2 (3 September, pregnant date): Mr Taylor's television programme this evening was every bit as terrible as his article; in some respects, worse. Most of it was devoted to footage revealing what most of us knew already, namely that Islamic jihadists have been going off from the UK and elsewhere to fight the western infidels occupying Iraq, mainly by blowing themselves up. There was some unsupported but plausible speculation by various American and British experts that some of these jihadists, presumably not including successful suicide bombers, would sooner or later return to their homes in Europe and the US and put their Iraqi experience to good use by performing terrorist acts in their native lands. The only motivation suggested for these activities was disapproval of 'American foreign policy in the middle east', including especially US support for Israel's 'occupation of the Palestine lands' (west bank settlements? Israel itself? take your pick). Hero status through martyrdom was cited as an additional attraction. A clear and predictable moral was drawn from all this in the final minutes. The west was making no progress in the war on terror. Eventually there would have to be 'talks with al-Qaeda' (one of the experts did however point out that this could be difficult to arrange in practical terms since al-Qaeda was a loose amorphous movement, not an organisation). There was a reference, inevitably, to the pig-headedness of those, not identified for obvious reasons, who denied 'any connection' between Iraq and terrorism. The object of talking to the "so-called terrorists" — the ultimate give-away, that phrase — would very clearly be to work out how to remove the causes of terrorism in the west by changing western foreign policies, by implication a doddle since these were obviously failing anyway. Roll titles.
It beggars belief that anyone at the BBC could have approved this muddled and defeatist rubbish for transmission on BBC2, the national broadcaster's prestige channel. However, I doubt if it can have done much harm, except perhaps by encouraging the sponsors of murder in the name of Islam to keep on plugging away in the deluded belief that in the end western rejection of extreme Islamicist demands would crumble away. Most of those watching it who found it convincing would be those who were semi-secretly sympathetic to the terrorists in the first place, on the dubious principle that anyone who hates Bush, Blair and the Israelis can't be all bad. Any Israeli watching it would have found it pretty chilling.
Brian
