Britain and the man with the golden smile

Some years ago there was a vote to identify the most boring aspect of the British way of life. The Queen’s spectacles comfortably won first prize; second came any family with two Volvos.

Every year the lady wearing the aforementioned spectacles gives a speech which sets out what the nation’s future is going to be for the next 12 months. The spectacles are vital for reading out the ‘Queen’s Speech’, ie, what Tony Blair has had typed out for her. The MPs talk a lot and then vote, apart from a few irrelevant trouble-makers, for whatever Blair wants to do, for instance to join his friend George W. Bush on an interesting trip to the hornets’ nests of the Middle East.

This, for us northerners, is a curious, indeed new-fangled way of running your affairs. Europe’s oldest parliament (930 AD), Iceland’s Althing, involved a more logical decision-making process. Vikings sat around on stones in the open air, agreeing who was the next victim. Then they sailed off for some more raping and pillaging. The British style is different in this as in many other respects. They keep their houses cold but drink their beer warm. They insist on calling their elite private schools ‘public schools’. They even write obituaries of horses. And their masculinity is sorely tested by young British women who are either on or off - brazen hussies or frosty, zipped-up Mary Poppinses.

Small wonder that the males of the island feel at best rather awkward with the opposite sex and invented James Bond to ease their embarrassment. Bond is a hero with no inhibitions about mounting women, horses, cars, you name it; and these days he is so macho he doesn’t even care if his martinis are shaken or stirred.

Unfortunately it’s the real-life Tony Blair who in the last days of his premiership is faced with trying to save what is left of British dignity - a tough nut to crack, as we up on the Baltic have been observing with growing sympathy.

A couple of weeks ago, at the Lord Mayor’s dinner, Blair invited the good guys’ old arch-enemies, Syria and Iran, to help find a way out of Iraq. A few days later the British prime minister unhappily agreed with his interviewer on al-Jazeera, David Frost, that the invasion of Iraq had been "quite a catastrophe".

It is an old, Russian trick, a politician’s last resort: if all else fails, try telling the truth. Not that Blair is the first British politician to have had problems with Iraq, which was invented by his predecessor Winston Churchill 85 years ago, drawing a line round Shi’as in the south, Sunnis in the middle and Kurds up north. Later Churchill admitted that this make-believe country - a British colony till 1932 - had been his worst political mistake. As he prepares to ride off into a political sunset of memoirs and the US lecture circuit, Blair may have remembered that James Bond never took orders (at least not directly) from the CIA and found the courage to stand up to George W. Bush. That’s the kind of hero we up North can admire, more Viking than poodle.

Some years ago there was a vote to identify the most boring aspect of the British way of life. The Queen’s spectacles comfortably won first prize; second came any family with two Volvos.