Blair and the Beast

My media contacts in Britain have all had a cow about Tony Blair's Al Gore impersonation this week. The prime minister began his premiership by slavishly sucking up to the media, creating the world's biggest spin operation, and subsequently didn't like it when a few saw through the blather. The Blair government is also knee-deep in corporate sleaze, something not so well known among Blair's American fans. Simon Jenkins lets it rip today on Blair's anti-media chutzpah, in a review of the latest corruption scandal:

As the onion skins peel back, al-Yamamah emerges as not a defence contract at all but a vehicle for financial "skimming" by rich Saudis (and Britons such as Mark Thatcher). While British governments could argue that before the 1998 convention such payments were legal, that has not been so since and they were specifically outlawed in 2001. Whitehall has been complicit in a colossal, secret and illegal act of bribery to win a grossly inflated contract. That is why Goldsmith had to suppress the SFO inquiry and why BAE dare not let Lord Woolf near the stinking trough. And Blair has the gall to call the press cynical.

I like Blair, but I haven't had to live with him this past decade. My own view is that Enoch Powell was right: politicians who complain about the press are like sailors complaining about the weather.