ninme

The Sunday Telegraph - No wonder Tony likes George, the last Blairite. By Matthew d’Ancona

But, whatever the party or, indeed, the British public think of him, the President has a straightforward, self-deprecating manner that goes down well with the Prime Minister and his intimates. On one visit to Downing Street, Mr Blair’s team complimented the President on his outfit. “The Lord made me wear it,” said Mr Bush with a straight face. When they realised he was teasing them, everyone in the room cracked up.

I’ve never heard that one before. But on to the big important ninme-worthy point:

“The rulebook of international politics has been torn up,” he declared. Pre-emptive action would sometimes be necessary: “we have to act on the basis of precaution.” Domestic security is inextricably linked to democratisation overseas: “to protect our future, we need to help them to theirs”. All of which, Mr Blair concluded, meant a radical overhaul of the world’s multilateral institutions, especially the United Nations.

That the Prime Minister has been saying all this since his Chicago speech in April 1999 is a measure both of intellectual consistency and practical frustration. If the UN was to renew itself, it should have done so at last year’s 60th anniversary summit: an opportunity that was conspicuously squandered.

Its authority is in tatters after the oil-for-food scandal, and it is difficult to detect any focused campaign to implement the kind of reform of which Mr Blair spoke on Friday. “The problem is the lack of take-up,” one of his closest allies admitted to me. For all the mistakes that the American neo-conservatives have made, the UN has yet to prove wrong their central thesis that this tired institution is intrinsically unreformable.

In a rhetorical flourish that was almost Panglossian, Mr Blair said that international cooperation over Iraq’s democratisation might heal the international divisions spawned by that country’s liberation from Saddam. He envisaged “a new concord to displace the old contention”. Well, maybe. In private, his allies rage that the international community is still not putting its shoulder to the wheel to assist Iraq in its reconstruction, and they have a point.

But geo-politics is no less petty than Westminster politics. The attitude of many countries to the Iraqi conflict is: it’s your mess, George and Tony, you fix it. Not so, of course: Iraq is everyone’s mess, in the sense that the outcome of the struggle in Baghdad and Basra between democracy and terrorist insurgency will reverberate around the planet for decades to come. If Iraq can become, in time, a relatively stable, prosperous democracy, terrorists in every country will have suffered a grave setback. But the reverse is also true. Liberated Iraq is the laboratory of the global future.