Americans Choose Tony Blair - 11 July 2003

If you notice a more baritone sound, a sexier note than usual, it's because I'm just coming out of, I believe, an affliction I've not suffered from for almost 30 years - it's called a cold.

To be precise it takes me back to 1974 when, on a memorable day in San Francisco, my wife and I, my closest friend and his wife, went off together to obey the injunction of President Ford, who at the time was most conspicuous for appearing everywhere with a little button which read "I took my shot".

There are several good things for which President Gerald Ford will be remembered, most of all for being a healing, honest presence after the fever and deviousness of the Watergate scandal and the first abdication in disgrace of an American president.

But not the least of President Ford's legacies was that button, his campaign to have everybody in America take the new flu shot.

Flu is an unfortunate word in having a popular vernacular sense, meaning a bad cold, as against the fact of influenza as a serious, acute respiratory infection.

I, myself, am here today only, I'm sure, by the grace of God, for there was a day in 1919 when I was given up for a goner.

Three of my classmates in school had already died but I remember the quite special gentleness of my mother, a daunting Northern lady, when she told me that all was well and I was permitted to sit up in bed and read Punch.

I had survived what we now refer to as the flu pandemic of 1918-19.

The First World War, which was just over, had killed off eight millions, the influenza pandemic killed 20 millions.

The folk memory of that dreadful plague passed on through the generations of families everywhere that had had it.

So it was wonderful news that the World Health Organisation of the United Nations had created a vaccine that gave protection from the three or four influenzas likely to be rampant during the coming winter.

President Ford made a speech to the nation and his crusade led to a dramatic fall in the incidence of influenza the following winter.

It was announced at the time that the vaccine didn't save us from the common cold, from which there was and still is no cure, but somehow by osmosis or autosuggestion a lot of us seemed to have escaped colds by simply thinking about President Ford and his little button.

Well, this turned into a plug or boost for the autumn flu shot and if it did I'm delighted, especially for any and everybody over 60. Millions now living wouldn't be living if they'd not gone off once a year to have a procedure that is painless and takes about two seconds.

Now to the brass tacks.

A young but distinguished American foreign correspondent, who speaks Arabic and Chinese among other dialects, and has been stationed everywhere from Beijing to Los Angeles, to Cairo, to Paris, found himself in London the other day.

He has a nice feel for the drift of popular opinion most places he writes from but he has the sense to trust the trustworthy pollsters and none is more reliable, I suppose, than the Pew Research Centre in doing worldwide surveys.

It recently wanted to know who is the most trusted statesman, leader, in the world, if there is one.

And it found the man. And our colleague was pleased that the Pew result coincided with his own judgement.

83% of the American people trust this leader more than they trust their own president.

And the man, it says here, is highly regarded in countries as far apart as Australia and Nigeria. The man is Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Imagine then the increasing dismay with which our correspondent went along on a tour of Britain.

"Everywhere I go," he said, "Mr Blair is dismissed as President Bush's poodle." An influential paper says his critics see him as a "prime minister who's betrayed his country to a Texas gunslinger", otherwise characterised as "a buffoon".

That's pretty brutal talk from one ally to another. Not as bad, however, as that same paper's constant reference to a "baboon" presiding in the White House during another war.

Abraham Lincoln was the leader so called - most often and witheringly among what the early socialists called 'the ruling classes' in, of course, the South of England. They certainly had most to lose from the drastic suspension of the cotton trade and were understandably on the confederates' side.

It occurs to me that quite a different view of Lincoln was taken in the North of England, most strikingly in Lancashire, at a time when Manchester was the cotton capital of the world.

So strong and widespread was the feeling of the Lancashire cotton workers against slavery that the men at the Manchester docks refused to unload the cotton from Southern ships that had escaped the Northern blockade.

They sent the ships back until the word of the boycott convinced the confederates to try other ports or destroy much of their immense crop - which they did, as yet another element in their defeat.

The Manchester workers were unemployed for two years.

At the entrance to the Manchester Town Hall there is, or there used to be, enshrined in a glass case the original of a letter from what was then the executive mansion - Washington January 19, 1863 - bang in the middle of the bloodiest year of the Civil War.

Lincoln expresses his main concern about the war which was at any cost to preserve the union and then at the end he comes down to the boycott.

"I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working men of Manchester are called to endure in this crisis. I cannot but regard your decisive utterances and action as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country."

And he ends: "Whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual. - Abraham Lincoln."

However, back to Mr Nicholas Kristoff - our distinguished and baffled correspondent - who found on his British tour so much resentment of the prime minister, such a widespread use of the catchword "poodle".

To which, however, he has a modest response, that not only is Mr Blair no poodle but that Mr Bush should study Mr Blair and learn a few things from him - patience, willingness to admit the strong opposition to the war, readiness to learn the points of view of the most influential opponents - like the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury - and yet come out of it with his convictions intact.

Certainly many Americans, who are for the war and see evidence enough in the materials - especially biochemical - that we found and hoped we had destroyed during the 1990s, are yet uncomfortable when they hear Mr Bush's speeches but are reassured by the intelligence and the seriousness of Mr Blair.

Mr Kristoff puts it this way: "We have a passionate president, totally focused on a big picture, ideological campaign."

Which by the way has been variously interpreted as to bring democracy to the whole Middle East, even if we have to wreck nations to do it or a vast Christian crusade to save mankind for democracy.

On the contrary Mr Kristoff sees in Mr Blair "passion tethered to practicality, idealism without ideology."

An old journalistic hand I know, old enough never to see any rift between Britain and America as fatal, commented: "Poor Tony Blair. in the spring he was the bravest man in Europe, today he's a dupe."

For myself I can only say this too will pass.

I've just been re-reading a splendid book put out six or seven years ago by Robin Renwick, former British Ambassador to the United States.

It's called Fighting with Allies and there's a wicked double meaning to the word "with".

Indeed the whole book is a riveting history of the continual, not to say continuous, backstage dustups between the leaders of the two countries, from the war of 1812 up to and through Vietnam.

There's hardly been a time in which the British didn't deplore the pushy American tendency to go it alone, and the Americans didn't lament the British tendency to play safe but want to be considered the ring leader all the same.

Let us take up the instructive case of the war of 1812, roughly caused by Napoleon's insistence that neutral - that is American - ships must not trade with the British and the British insistence that American ships trade neither with the French nor with the Canadians.

There was a blow up and perhaps the most dramatic explosion of the notion that Anglo-American relations were always an exercise in sweetness and light was the British Navy's sailing into Chesapeake Bay to precede an invasion of Washington.

There was a famous afternoon when Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn sat down to dinner at the White House uninvited.

The tenants - President and Mrs Madison - had fled, grabbing some clothes, a portrait, a clock as they left.

Admiral Cockburn dined, enjoyed his meal quietly and gave a signal to some marines posted by and they immediately put to the torch the curtains in the windows of the mansion.

The admiral departed after grabbing a souvenir or two and on a hill from across the Potomac River President Madison saw his home, the president's house, as a vast flame against the setting sun.

We got over that. We'll get over this.

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