Rogue Semiotics has some delightful reflections on the perfect tabloid headline, occasioned by The Sun’s “Swan Bake: asylum seekers steal Queen’s birds for barbecue”.
John Lanchester, as good a writer as there is in English at the moment, has an essential piece on Tony Blair in, of all places, The London Review of Books. Unusually for the LRB, Lanchester writes as someone who is essentially pro-Blair.
“The key issue for Blair seems to be his own sincerity. He is desperate to convince us that he believes in the rightness of his actions. This has been a faultline in his personality from the very beginning. It’s instructive, in this context, to consider the ways in which he differs from Thatcher. Her psychological and political make-up was based on the proposition ‘I am right.’ She relished disagreement and opposition, and the feeling that she was saying things that people did not want to hear but secretly knew were true. When she slipped into madness, or if not madness then something close to it, she did so with the wattage of her blazing-eyed rectitude higher than ever. But Thatcher never claimed to be Good, just Right. Blair’s political personality has always been predicated on the proposition ‘I am good.’ His dewy-eyed, slightly fumbling sincerity – his brilliantly articulate impersonation of earnest inarticulacy – has all along been tied to this self-projection as a Good Man. He is careful about not touting his religion in public, but he doesn’t need to, since the conviction of his own goodness is imprinted in everything he says and does. It is one of the things he has in common with the party he leads, and one of the reasons people are wrong when they say that Blair is a natural Tory. Thatcher’s sense of being right fits into the Tory Party’s self-image as the home of unpopular and uncomfortable truths. Blair’s sense of being good fits the Labour self-image as the party of virtue: the party we would all vote for if we were less selfish and greedy.”