The benefits of the beginnings of any political healing period are often invisible, but the first 400 days of Tony Blair's administration in Britain have displayed signs of living up to its glittering promise. In so many of its initiatives, and especially concerning Northern Ireland, the Blair government has shown itself to be as radical and intelligent as the most optimistic of us, without the slightest benefit of spin-doctoring, had predicted.
Of course Mr Blair is still prone to being misunderstood, which is why he continues to protect himself with public relations voodoo. In truth, he is much too modern for the backward minds of present politics and media commentary, and so must create covering fire for himself through the use of media-friendly gimmicks.
An indicator of his dilemma came with the rather ludicrous launching some time back of "Cool Britannia", a feeble attempt to offset criticisms from even more feeble quarters. Mr Blair seems to have launched the idea in response to some mindless goading from the New Musical Express, the so-called Bible of British rock'n'roll.
After two decades of ignoring politics, the March 14th issue of the NME threw a wet gauntlet down to Mr Blair with the cover headline, "Rock'n'roll takes on the Government", and invited its readers to consider if they "Ever had the Feeling You've been Cheated?"
The main strand of the attack consisted of a series of short interviews with about two dozen pop "stars", under the headline "The stars kick Blair's arse". These proffered a litany of complaints about initiatives on matters like the abolition of supplementary benefit, the imposition of annual tuition fees for undergraduates and the government's failure to "open a debate on drugs".
Over no less than nine pages, Britain's pop elite moaned and whinged that the government wasn't doing enough for "young bands". A typical contribution was that of Richard McNamara of Embrace, who averred that "the government is going to get more out of Embrace being a successful group than they would from having four more road sweepers."
The implication was that the government must support aspiring bands on the off chance that they may become millionaire superstars, and that the tax-paying public is duty-bound to maintain those who declare themselves musicians in the hope that they may one day write a half-decent pop song. This is the extent of the concerns of British rock'n'roll in the late 1990s.
Roll over John Lennon, tell Sid Vicious the news.
The Cool Britannia concept seems to have derived from an adverse comparison in the NME article between the emerging realities of Blair's Britain and the joys of what was termed "NME- land". In the preamble to the feature, it was asserted that Labour in government had "betrayed" the residents of "NME-land".
Rock music's "decades-old, instinctive and deep-seated pro-Labour sympathies" had, the paper warned, "been chipped away to almost nothing." Meanwhile Mr Blair was pandering to "middle England", to "the mean-spirited, narrow-minded, culturally conservative, politically reactionary, xenophobic, racist and misanthropic Daily Mail reader", and even, God help us, to farmers.
"On March 1", thundered the Bible of Pop, referring to a recent day of protest by country-dwellers, "London was flooded by Uncool Britannia. Thousands of agricultural workers were pressganged by their feudal lords into marching through the capital in defence of fox-hunting. It was a sickening sight - a bizarre mixture of servile forelock-tugging and inbred aristocratic arrogance. The `countryside' that these marchers were out to `protect' is a horrible place, the worst of Britain and Britain at its worst."
And then came the annunciation. "Cool Britannia - by contrast - is a dynamic, perverse, perverted, polyglot, multiracial, multi-cultural place. It's sweaty, druggy, cool and funky . . . It's the Britain where diversity is not only celebrated but is taken as a source of inspiration". Mr Blair, it was alleged, had chosen Uncool Britannia, while seeking to "bask in the reflected glory of Cool Britannia". Within a fortnight, Cool Britannia was formally launched, with a Minister for Cool, no less, at its head.
This would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. It would be too much, I suppose, to expect that these "pop stars" would have bothered to read what Mr Blair was saying before the election; but if they had done so, they would not have been surprised by anything that has since occurred.
The expectation of "NME-land" seems to have been that, on arriving at Number 10 Downing Street, Mr Blair would don his old loon pants and appear at the front door smoking a joint, to announce free guitars and lifelong pensions for every pimple-faced wannabee over the age of 15.
Does anybody seriously believe that the Britain of the Spice Girls, Chris Evans and Elton John is anything other than culturally bankrupt and brain-dead?
Britain is not cool, not dynamic, not multi-anything. It is a rigid, racist and atomised society on the verge of a cultural and social collapse which only Mr Blair offers a chance of averting.
Britain is "cool" only in the sense that it is without passion. There were times, it is true, when Britain was arguably the coolest place in the world. But these times are long past and Britannia is now living off its former glories.
It is especially ironic that the recent show of "rebelliousness" by the high-and-mighty of British pop should underscore precisely the problem which Tony Blair's radicalism seeks to address. For the disease which his unique form of socialism seeks to treat is that which is capable of concealing social concern behind special pleading in precisely the manner which the NME feature displayed.
Obviously unbeknownst to themselves, the pop stars were expressing themselves in exactly the style of the ideology which they professed to despise. For what the NME article revealed was that the new pop elite of post-Thatcher Britain is every bit as selfish and as numbskulled as the Iron Lady might have willed it to become.
For all that their demands were disguised in the traditional language of social concern, they read like the whinges of small-industry lobbyists demanding concessions for their own sector.
Mr Blair is deeply uncool, and that is how he should be. He is passionate, intense, thoughtful and - although politically moulded in the years of sham-modernity since the sixties - remains, in a certain sense, old fashioned. He is precisely the kind of leader we require at this critical moment in history.
We Irish have a considerable interest in his progress - not just on account of the North but because the quality of our own political leadership is so poor that, in a certain sense, Mr Blair leads us as well. Now his honeymoon is over, let's hope he can ignore the moronic cacophony and get on with his revolution.