August 12, 2005, 11:48 a.m.
Muddling Through?
Blair’s improvisation isn’t enough.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the August 29, 2005, issue of National Review.

It is the new conventional wisdom of British politics: Tony Blair has been strengthened and energized by the London bombings. Widely depicted only months ago as a lame-duck prime minister limping slowly to retirement, he seized the challenge represented by the menace of home-grown Islamist terrorism and presented himself as the only political leader capable of responding effectively to it. He has now presented a twelve-point plan (old habits die hard) to defeat the terrorists by closing down their websites, deporting them from Britain, and generally making laws to control their activities more closely. That done, he left for vacation. A Nick Garland cartoon shows him using his post-bombing upturn in the polls as a sort of ski-jump, to rise effortlessly above his rivals in Labour and other parties.

Even in its own terms, this picture has one glaring defect: Blair had actually been energized and strengthened five weeks before the bombings, by the defeat of the European constitution in the French and Dutch referendums. Blair had been a zealous supporter of the constitution right up to polling day. Defeat changed all that. He arrived three weeks later at the European parliament as the man who would solve the crisis by making the European “social model” more flexible and competitive. He proposed no specific policies that would achieve this wonder; nor has he done so since. On his return to Britain, however, he was generally credited with having converted Europe to longstanding British models of economic and constitutional flexibility. He was enjoying this return to popularity when the bombs went off — and made him even more popular.

On both occasions, Blair had done something similar: He had seemed to respond to the crisis with bold moves and eloquent language, while others were dithering. By the time people figured out that there was actually very little solid policy substance in what he had said, Blair was moving on to the next topic. And when the bold policies he had announced began to fall apart, run into obstacles, or gradually evaporate under criticism, it was his subordinates who were left explaining away the difficulties . . .

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