If I were Hillary Clinton, I’d rather Cherie Blair just left me alone
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Version 0 of 1. Politics is too important to be left to the bad people. Who knew? Cherie Blair knew, apparently. But then she forgot. Luckily, Hillary Clinton was around to coax this easily dismissed insight back to the front of her mind. “When I see what a difference you are making,” Blair wrote in an email to Clinton, “it reminds me why politics is too important to be left to the bad people.” Quick. Get Hallmark on the phone. A greetings card with this on it could do excellent business in that convenience store at the foot of Portcullis House. Not that Blair thought that her cringey brown-nosing was for public consumption. This pearl was washed up among the detritus of Clinton’s newly released emails, sent from a private account when they should have been sent from an official account. Anyone hoping that the emails would contain information useful to those hoping to destroy Clinton’s presidential bid must be disappointed, unless liking apples, Chinese rugs and your personal assistant is politically damaging. If anything, they confirm that powerful people are pretty much like the rest of us, except that they attract lots of other powerful people, wanting favours. Related: Hillary Clinton: the best of her emails The favour Blair wanted from Clinton was a bit odd. Blair wanted Clinton to meet with Blair’s friend Sheikha Mozah, erstwhile first lady of Qatar, which was something Qatar’s diplomatic people could have fixed up with the US’s diplomatic people with perfect ease. After all, they were raining money on the Clinton Foundation anyway, while Qatar was already established as a friendly conduit between the US and Iran. But Blair wouldn’t then have experienced the joy of hooking up one of her important and powerful friends with another of her important and powerful friends. Because that’s what the good people like doing. The bad people like doing it too, though, so it’s all a bit complicated. It must be nice, seeing yourself as part of a global illuminati of good people, busily setting good people up with each other, so that all the good people can get together and do good stuff. It must be extra reassuring to realise that a proportion of the global population see you and your spouse as not actually very good people at all. Different people, good and bad, with different and contradictory opinions, eh? Very tiresome. But if you keep it simple and decide that all the people who don’t agree with you are bad, then what can go wrong? Yes, that’s right. Everything can go wrong. That’s why some of us are quite hung up on democratic accountability. I’m afraid I find it a bit creepy that three women whose power devolves from their marriages are rubbing shoulders like this. All credit to Clinton for seeking and getting a democratic mandate. None to Blair or Mozah for just going ahead and behaving as if they had. The ruling Al Thani family, into which Mozah married, even manage to be effusive supporters of the Arab spring while hanging grimly on to absolute power themselves. Blair claims she is exercising her soft power in the cause of “disability”, and it’s true that Qatar is much more progressive than other states that operate under sharia law. Still, I remember the days when Blair saw sharia law as considerably problematic. No matter. When you want to heal the world, you’ve got to work with what you can get. “You may not know,” Blair modestly explained to Clinton, “but for the last four years I have been working with the Qatari’s and in particular with Sheika Moser [sic] on disability issues in Qatar and I have built up a good relationship with them.” Ugh. That almost reads as if building up a good relationship was the point, not the disability issues. (And at what point in a good relationship do you learn how to spell someone’s name correctly anyway?) So what, to paraphrase Mrs Merton, first attracted Blair to the multi-billionaire Sheika Mozah? It seems vulgar to bang on about the Blairs’ great attraction to vast wealth. But one can shrug off any feelings of judgy self-righteousness by reminding oneself that these guys are impervious to such criticism, swaddled as they are in the soft cashmere of belief in their own rectitude. They deserve to be very wealthy and to rub shoulders with the very wealthy because they are good. Not that the Blairs are the only people who believe in this self-serving stuff. There are plenty of people in the world who think their splendid moral purpose is so clearly evident that it needs no public scrutiny. There are plenty of people, too, who believe that philanthropy could solve all the troubles on the planet if only they could be left to get on with being good without interference from the state. Tony Blair was big on the power of charity. David Cameron and the Conservatives always are. And there’s nothing wrong with charity, nothing at all, except that it’s an acknowledgment and exercise of inequality, rather than a corrective to it. Related: That’s me in the picture: Cherie Blair, the morning after Labour’s election victory, 2 May 1997 Does it matter that Blair back-channelled Clinton, setting her up in a meeting with Mozah? Everyone knows, after all, that that’s how things work. Does it matter that these three women flattered each other with generous dispensations of each other’s time and energy, in some mutual expression of each other’s goodness? It does matter that they are all women. Ladies who lunch are sneered at and patronised far more than men who play golf, even though it’s historically more likely that the latter would be carving up something or other in entirely their own interests. Clinton is not a lady who lunches, by any means. But Blair seems to have been behaving like a turbo-charged lady who lunches, and dragging Clinton into it. I’m sure Mozah is an interesting woman, and Blair can be friends with whoever she likes. But if I held high office – perish the thought – I’d find people like Blair, so keen to be the one who fixed their Qatari Sheikha chum up with their US secretary of state chum, a complete and utter pain in the backside. I wish she would start being less Cherie Blair, wife of the former prime minister, and more Cherie Booth, leading human rights lawyer, as she seemed so keen to be when her husband was in No 10. Or maybe she doesn’t know where one ends and the other begins. Last year, Booth left Matrix, the human rights chambers she co-founded in 2000, and is now focussing on Omnia Strategy, which she set up in 2011 – two years after she wrote those emails – as “a pioneering, international law firm which provides strategic counsel to governments, corporate and private clients”. With friends like hers, no doubt the business is thriving. |