Posted on 12/06/2002 5:08:11 PM PST by Pokey78
The other day, it emerged that Princess Haifa, the wife of Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, had given $130,000 to a woman who passed at least some of it on to two of the September 11 terrorists. Since then, the American networks have been filled with a succession of shifty spin-princes put up not to dispute the facts, but rather to explain that it's perfectly normal for bigshot Saudis to give large sums of money to people they've never met, who in turn pass it on to all kinds of other people. It's just one of those cultural differences that foreigners can't be expected to understand.
That's the way I feel in the matter of Cherie Blair, the diet-pill ex-con, the psychic and the topless model. That's not the scandal, by the way, that's the official explanation for the scandal: nothing to see here, folks, move along; the only reason the guy was negotiating investment property for Mrs Blair is that he happens to have knocked up her psychic's daughter. After all, when you're looking for flats out of town, who doesn't turn to the partner of their ex-nude modelling fitness consultant? It's all perfectly routine.
Really? When did it become routine for the Queen's first minister to have a social set acquired from the phone-line small ads of the Sunday Sport? Ah, well, that's one of those cultural differences those of us who live far from Blair's Britain can't be expected to understand.
Nude models, diet quacks, psychics: I cannot speak for Britain, but in North America these are three of the four categories of person that most of us spend the first 10 minutes of our day dumping from the in-box. If Cherie had a fourth confidante with a guaranteed plan to increase the length of Tony's penis by three inches, the Blairs would have a full set: they could throw the perfect spam dinner party.
No doubt there are patriotic Britons who'll point out that the more peculiar entries in the Blairs' address book are as nothing to those in the Clintons'. True. Bill Clinton has a brother who celebrated his presidential pardon for a cocaine conviction by getting into a brawl with a nightclub bouncer. Bill's brother-in-law got mixed up in a hazelnut scam in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. On the list of scrapes that even no-account members of the Clintons' family would be likely to get into, a hazelnut scandal in the Caucasus must rank as a long shot.
But, aside from Mrs Blair's Clintonian denials, the comparison doesn't work. Bill Clinton's dad drowned in an FDR New Deal irrigation ditch before he was born. His ma raised him in Hot Springs, a den of sex and gambling and organised crime. When a guy from that background claws his way to the presidency, he's bound to have a little mud on his boots that he has difficulty shaking off. Unlike Bill and Hill, the public-school Prime Minister and his QC wife seem to have consciously adopted their retinue of Roger Clintons after they got to the top.
In the end, the Clintons were conventionally aspirational: they spent their vacations on Martha's Vineyard with Carly Simon and the Kennedys. Hillary famously brought in a psychic to help her consult Eleanor Roosevelt, but she didn't take the psychic on foreign holidays with her. The Blairs, by contrast, seem to have fallen victim to an imperfect understanding of their own Cool Britannia aesthetic: you start off modulating your vowels to sound more estuary English; you hang out with yobby pop stars; next thing you know, you feel the need for your own in-house psychic and topless fitness adviser and Aussie chancer, like a dull episode of Big Brother or a weekend at Michael Barrymore's.
What also makes it very unClintonian is Mrs Blair's obsession with property. Until they bought their post-presidential home in Chappaqua, the Clintons had lived in public housing their entire adult lives and never given a thought to property ownership. Americans are often bemused by the unshakeable British belief that an entire economy can be sustained by people selling basement flats in Tower Hamlets back and forth to each other for ever more extravagant six-figure sums. But, since the Tories left office, there's something very pathetic about the way all political scandals are now about residential accommodation.
If I understand correctly, property values are the last remaining consolation of the British middle class, the sole surviving feelgood factor, the one that has to compensate for the high crime and choked streets and all the other features of the most uncomfortable middle-class life in the Western world.
And yet Tony Blair pays no political price for his inability to do anything about it. When my colleagues wonder why the Blairs would be so attracted to their topless model's extended family, they're missing the point. These are Tony's kindred spirits. Like the all-knowing psychic, his promised future never comes to pass. Like the diet pills, his miracle cures do nothing. Like the nude model, he's an emperor without clothes. And, like Saudi royals subsidising al-Qa'eda, how he gets away with it is just one of those cultural differences those of us in the rest of the world will never understand.
How great is Steyn. I'm still laughing.
You can't make this stuff up.
a.cricket
Thanks Pokey.
L
Sure they did. Other people's.
Way to go, Mark.
I almost wet myself with this paragraph. Too true.
This line alone...
Thanks, Pokey!
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