-Caveat Lector- Comment
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,910448,00.html Prime Minister, go to bed now It is dangerous that Tony Blair is making the most momentous decisions of his premiership on too little sleep Andrew Rawnsley Sunday March 9, 2003 The Observer While trying to win support for war against Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair has been endeavouring to secure peace in Northern Ireland. A participant at last week's negotiations in Belfast, a witness who is usually admiring of the Prime Minister, was shocked by the drained, red-eyed Blair he saw. 'The first morning [of the talks] was a shambles. He just wasn't up to speed. Jonathan Powell [Blair's chief of staff] had his head down, frantically writing notes. Blair is completely worn out.' One visitor to the Prime Minister's office reports seeing bottles of pills and an inhaler on the desk, medical crutches to keep the man on his feet. It's said that Tony Blair has been looking so strung out because he has got a nasty dose of the flu. I suspect that the reverse is the case. He can't shake off the flu because he is so utterly exhausted. When you contemplate the pressures of his fatiguing existence, the surprise is not that the Prime Minister is looking so ropey. The surprise is that he has not cracked up altogether. For weeks - no, make that months - he has been on a murderous schedule of hideous complexity. Throughout the negotiations in Belfast he was also conducting phone talks with other world leaders about Iraq. When you are juggling this many balls, as his wife would say, some of them will get dropped. Especially if the juggler is knackered. As a Minister who knows him well says: 'Tony needs his sleep.' And he is not getting enough of it. The Iraqi crisis is demanding enough of his time and nervous energy. The drain on his reserves is made that much more severe because Mr Blair insists on embroiling himself on so many other fronts. Take one typical day since Christmas: the day after the Labour backbench revolt against him. It began with an early breakfast with local council leaders. Then he attended the enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury. After an awful journey to Madrid, it was past midnight when they reached the dessert course of a working dinner with the Spanish Prime Minister. The ludicrous overload on Tony Blair is partly a problem of his own making, a product of the self-consciously 'presidential' style of his premiership. Why couldn't those negotiations in Belfast be left to the able Paul Murphy? Because the protagonists have come to believe that all the serious business is done by the Prime Minister. Why couldn't John Prescott take responsibility for munching croissants with the local councillors? Because no one thinks they are really getting the Government's attention unless they are treated to an audience with the Prime Minister. When he has such a groaning plate of other responsibilities, why will Mr Blair spend tomorrow morning presiding over a health summit at Number 10? Why can't that be left to Alan Milburn? I don't doubt the importance of some of the issues to be discussed, among them coronary heart disease. But if he carries on like this, the Prime Minister will give himself an early coronary. The reason why Mr Blair feels he must host the health summit is because he fears that his absence from the domestic scene will be interpreted by people as meaning that he has lost sight of public services. If he isn't seen to be active on the home front, then the voters will conclude that the whole Government has lost interest. Why is the Prime Minister 'obsessing', to use the description of one Number 10 official, over asylum-seekers? Why can't he leave that to David Blunkett? Because Mr Blair has come to believe that nothing gets done in his government unless he gives it his personal attention. This highly interventionist style of running government is commonly described as 'presidential', but in a sense it is quite the opposite. Real presidents have elaborate support systems which mean they can focus only on the essential or float above their governments. The United States won the Cold War while Ronald Reagan was taking a nap. Look at George W. Bush. He does only the minium necessary travel outside his own country. He is content to delegate most domestic issues to either his White House staff or his Cabinet. The American president seems to be getting loads of kip. George Bush looks as though he sleeps like a baby. You can be reassured or alarmed by that as you will. Mr Blair's method of personal government is being tested as never before, possibly even to destruction, by this Iraq crisis. If he has never before looked so politically exposed, one reason is that the burden of arguing the case with the public has overwhelmingly fallen upon him. Because the Prime Minister has been projected as so large and omnipotent, those senior Ministers who might help him are inevitably made to look small and marginal. Number 10 is acutely conscious that it often seems as though Mr Blair is out there all alone. Other members of the Cabinet have been encouraged to demonstrate that dealing with Saddam is more than a personal obsession of the Prime Minister. John Prescott went into action at Labour's spring conference to try to rally Trad Labour behind the Government. Worried that women voters are particularly sceptical about war, female Cabinet Ministers, most recently Patricia Hewitt, have been fielded to make the case. The trouble is that virtually no one takes these effusions of support for the Prime Minister at face value. Fairly or not, just about everyone's instant assumption is that Cabinet Ministers only speak out for their leader because they have been put up to it by Number 10. The pressure on Tony Blair has been even further increased by the inability of the Americans to sell their President and their case for military action to the rest of the world. George Bush has not travelled outside the United States since last November. That may be just as well given the trail of diplomatic wreckage left in his wake when Donald Rumsfeld went rampaging through Europe. In the months that the American President has been grounded at home, Tony Blair has toured the Middle East, gyrated around Europe and crisscrossed the Atlantic. He invited the jibe from Nelson Mandela that he has become the American Foreign Secretary. He has become that because he has had to be. It has fallen upon Mr Blair to be the allied ambassador to the Arab World, the chief advocate in Europe and - his newest responsibility - spokesman to yoof. He spent three hours recording that question-and-answer with an international audience of young people for MTV's global pop channel. Why did he have to take that on rather than delegate the job to Jack Straw or Geoff Hoon? Because MTV wouldn't want Straw or Hoon as most of their audience will never have heard of them. Why did it have to be Blair rather than Bush? Well, can you imagine how the American President might have reacted to that Swedish yoof's surreal question about growing anthrax in his bath? The burden on Tony Blair does not strike me as at all healthy, and not just for him personally. Committing British forces to military action in Iraq will be one of the most momentous decisions of his life, with vast ramifications for many other people's lives. On the choices that Mr Blair makes over the coming few weeks may hang not just the fate of his premiership, but the future of the Middle East, the United Nations, Nato and the European Union. These are not decisions anyone should be making when their brain is trying to do far too much on far too little sleep. He can't - he shouldn't - carry on like this. 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