The beginning, the middle and the end of the Blair project is power. No principle intrudes, no project commands, no loyalty dictates, no honour directs, no decency insists, no ethic drives: power is all. Power for the sake of power, and power for no other reason. He has made no commitment yet, but it seems clear that a British general election is going to take place in June, along with the recently rescheduled local government elections.
But why has he chosen an electoral date as indecently close as possible to his originally intended date in May. Why? The House of Commons may lawfully sit for another year, and there is every justification not to have an election, as the funeral pyres of a million beasts send their oily smoke into the skies of the emerging spring. But of course he needs to see himself as being in control of events; he wants to be above the whim of plague and the vagaries of nature, for the beginning, the middle and the end of the Blair project is power.
Letter to Unionists
What is unnerving and creepy about this creature is that he is able to get away with so much. It is just three years since he wrote his letter of comfort to the Unionists at Stormont, which assured them that people connected with still-armed paramilitary organisations could not hold political office. "Furthermore, I confirm that in our view the effect of the decommissioning section of the agreement, with decommissioning schemes coming into effect in June, is that the process of decommissioning should begin straight away."
All meaningless gibberish, the promises of a spiv, the hand-sleights of a card-sharp duping fools with his "find the lady". Sinn Fein is still in office, with IRA arsenals yielding not even a single pebble for a catapult. The Sunday Times recently named Martin McGuinness, Minister for Education in the North, as a member of the IRA army council, and he has not denied it. It is unprecedented in the history of democracy that a leader of an armed and illegal paramilitary organisation should by right have a place in government; yet this, three years on, is the effect of Tony Blair's worthless promises.
This moral compromise might not have mattered in the broader picture - after all, Martin McGuinness is one of the architects and the mainstays of the peace process, and nationalist Ireland is used to ex-terrorists making the journey from war to government. It is not, of course, used to such people retaining their links with paramilitary organisations - but even that unprecedented compromise might be stomached by constitutional nationalism. That, however, is not the only tradition to be consulted on the issue.
Political life
Blair's meaningless undertaking on arms was not given to nationalist Ireland, but to Ulster unionism. The man who laid his political life on the line for the Good Friday Agreement, David Trimble, must answer to a Protestant people whose attitude towards promises is biblical, unequivocal and binding. What binding effect has the Good Friday Agreement, and its accompanying codicils, actually had on republicans? Prisons north and south released their terrorist populations even as the IRA in South Armagh felt free to proceed with the murders of Eamon Collins, Brendan "Speedy" Fagan, and Paul Downey, without political consequence for, or condemnation from, Sinn Fein.
All this would have been bad enough without South Armagh remaining as the IRA-protected smuggling entrepot of these islands, as the one-sided interpretation of the Good Friday Agreement effectively forbade any exercise of due authority there by the Northern security forces. No law existed there but IRA law, no custom but that permitted by the IRA. Into this terroristrun heartland, where loyalties are confined to a few baronies, came foot-and-mouth disease, introduced by terrorist-protected smugglers, and at a long-term cost of many millions to the Irish economy.
South Armagh is not just any old republican stronghold, but the one abutting the Upper Bann constituency of David Trimble. How will the solid UUP farmers there feel about the untroubled existence of an IRA viral-depot on their doorstep? Will they stay loyal to Trimble, or will they switch their allegiance to the DUP? How much of a swing will it take to bring Trimble back to that crisis point from which over the past three years he has barely been able to remove himself?
The tragedy is that this trial for the unionist leader is simply unnecessary at the moment. In a year's time, the foot-and-mouth contamination would have been just another fading memory to compete with so many others. But only a fanatically egotistical obsession with his own power agenda could have blinded Tony Blair to the unnecessarily early perils which will certainly confront David Trimble in a general election.
Needless election
This would not be the first needless election to have emperilled an Irish-British peace initiative. In 1974, Ted Heath went to the country when the power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland was still finding its feet. The subsequent loyalist electoral triumph effectively served as a mandate against the new Executive, and a crippling strike, backed by loyalist terrorists, brought power-sharing to an end.
Ted Heath at least had the excuse that he was trying to bring British miners to heel. Blair has no such excuse. His only justification for this election is a mind-numbing, amoral hubris, which might just spell nemesis for the Executive in the North. As we truly know now, the beginning, the middle and the end of the Blair project is power.