By Lauren O’Hara
IT WAS Halloween and I was walking to a house in the woods. ‘Come in costume,’ said the invite: spooky in the pitch black through overhanging trees, bats flitting and only the sounds of my breath and the crunch of leaves beneath my feet.
Ahead, a dim circle of light – the torch of another guest. It felt uncannily like a cult film of a few years back.
“Hi,” I say to a tall black back and let off a scream as he turned around. As he shone the light eerily under his chin, it was unmistakeably the face of our former Prime Minister.
“Good idea, don’t you think? Return of the Tony Blair Witch Project.”
“Oh… ha-ha!” I replied. But he had a point, just when we thought Tony had gone forever, he comes back to haunt us, poised to rise from the ashes and become the first ever EU Presidential phoenix. Scary, indeed.
Well, that was until Merkel and Sarkozy teamed up to scupper his chances. As the French President has said, “The names that first come out of the hat are not necessarily the ones that are finally chosen.”
While Greece may have swung to the left, most of Europe has been stalwartly heading right of centre, and it seems our Tony, despite his militaristic ambitions in Iraq and conversion to Catholicism, is still seen as too soft and not close enough to the Christian Democrats, who are promoting the view the EU President should come from a right wing party and the new post in foreign affairs from the left.
I explained this to my friend, John, who cheerfully said, “Oh well, I won’t toss my Blair mask on to the bonfire yet.” After all, he explained, he’d need one again on Thursday when dressing the Guy, at which point the assembled company cheered.
Which left me wondering why Blair remains so unpopular that we would rather see a non-descript name from a tiny country take on the EU leadership than one of our own kind. I suppose, it’s because he let so many people down.
I have long-standing, Labour party supporting mates who really believed that he was sincere until the blatant lies about Iraq, the freebie holidays from Berlusconi, the spin and Machiavellian manipulation of Campbell made them hollowly disillusioned. Nothing, it seems, he can do or say now will win back their respect. He has left a whole generation of voters cynical.
As we await the signature of Vaclav Klaus to pave the way for the United States of Europe and instantly forgettable names such as Herman Van Rompuy and Jean-Claude Juncker are promoted as possible contenders for the crown, I revisited that night of goblins and ghouls.
Surely it was better, after all, to have the devil you know? That was until John said, “Hey, could have been worse. I almost chose the Mandelson mask.” Now that really is frightening…
