A second Thatcher? Better by far to be an original Blair.This looks set to be a wonderful week for him, a week he thoroughly deserves. During ancient Roman triumphs, the general dressed as a god had a slave beside him murmuring all the while, ``memento mori''. But he has reached the stage when even thinking about Thatcher must do him more harm than good. It drove her towards paranoia and megalomania and made the eventual wreckage of her project and party inevitable. Well, Blair said it himself - she was a better destroyer than creator.Thus far, Blair has proved himself to be a creative, open and wholly unparanoid politician. Her insistent question - ``one of us?'' - steadily weakened the Tory coalition she led but never loved. But they add up to a powerful warning to anyone who would follow that path.Were Tony Blair to model himself on Lady Thatcher, in short, he would be aiming too low.
He, after all, has been living with her political inheritance. He knows that it includes a splintered party, most of whose best politicians have been lost to government through resignation or dismissal, and a legacy of bitterness that will poison Tory politics for a generation.Margaret Thatcher's political failings, including her excessive reliance on a small group of courtiers, her excessive distaste for less radical members of her own party, and her excessive self-certainty, may be inherent in any leader of her type. That is in his nature too.When it comes to the business of government, however, Major's experience of the Thatcher era is worth reflecting on. But the next week, only a little chastened, and hardened by the crowing of his enemies, he will be back, and pushing some more. One might as justly call him the Tory Callaghan.Which is right? Electorally, it is Tony Blair. He is also offering the tingle of optimism, however faint, in a weary time.
Each time he risks himself, and pushes the game on, he seems to benefit, and so does Labour At some stage he will overreach himself That is in the nature of the man. If Major's reputation revives it will be as the great holder-together of a hysterical party, the calm voice in a frantic world, the understated pragmatist who quietly trudges on - the leader, as he would have it, of the grown-ups' party People talk about him as a modern Baldwin. Major's brand of Toryism, now refined by Norman Blackwell, the new Number 10 policy man, is about selling reassurance and solace.
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As such, it depends upon blackening the memory of the Thatcher style almost as much as Blair's New Labour depends upon evoking it.Here, the crossover is striking: the Tory Prime Minister must pretend to admire the Thatcher inheritance, while winking furiously at the public; the Labour leader is meant to hate the inheritance, yet signals that he admires the Lady.The contrast could not now be sharper. It would be an administration, he's saying, conducted at full hurtle.John Major embodies a much gentler, more cautious style of politics. You wouldn't find him voluntarily bringing the words Margaret Thatcher into conversation, as Blair does Not, at least, in a positive way. Blair is taking a gamble, and the use of Thatcher's name is part of that gamble: it is an emblem of the express-train style of government he wants for Britain.