'I'm like any other human being," Tony Blair observed to his party conference last Tuesday, "as fallible and as capable of being wrong". Two days later, as though to underline the point, he went into hospital for heart treatment, writes John Waters.
Channel-hopping in the hours after a speech dominated by this fundamentally unexceptionable claim to human frailty, I had a sense that the commentariat was at a loss. Although the WMD debate has failed to ignite satisfactorily beyond the anorak wing of the electoral imagination, it has, over the past 18 months, filled more column inches and broadcast minutes than anything else, and so will not readily be relinquished.
The idea that Blair could finally walk out from under the weight of accusation by simply laying claim to human fallibility was too maddeningly simple for people whose gifts tend to lie with semantics and sophistry. For an hour or two they were noticeably befuddled. Should we be electing leaders, they seemed on the point of asking, who are, you know, human.
Modern political culture, speaking through a relentless media, demands that its public representatives be paragons of moral and fiscal rectitude, beyond weakness or error. Journalism, relatively untouched by sainthood, has become the watchdog of a public increasingly driven by such rage about something or other that it seeks the heads of its representatives for anything bearing even the faintest taint of human imperfection. What is called "sleaze" is a product less of politics than of public and media disingenuousness in respect of what political standards can or should be. Similarly, the so-called "culture of spin" results from the defensiveness of politicians who must conceal their weaknesses to survive in an era in which human frailty is forbidden.
It is an extraordinary achievement in itself that Tony Blair has survived to lead his party into a third term, as now looks virtually certain. He has, in this second term, unearthed in himself characteristics that are, in a sense, better than infallibility, or even perfection: courage, determination, vision, integrity, decency and the ability to stand upright in situations that would bring most men to their knees. In doing so he has exposed the posturing and fulminating of his critics in all its neurotic immaturity. Blair's humanity is indeed as frail as anyone's, but its flaws relate to the limits of body, mind and spirit, whereas the flaws of his opponents derive from a belief in their own infallibility and wisdom.
Now, Blair has played his last trump card: the invocation of his humanity against an opponent who wanted him to be weak in a quite different way. You might call it the ultimate spin. He takes another trick and deals the cards again.
Politically speaking, probably, he is Dead Man Walking. When they couldn't get him for being unprincipled, they went after him for his principles, and may yet take him down before his self-scheduled exit for one thing or another. To abduct a phrase: they have only to be lucky once; he has to be lucky all the time. But to watch him perform these past couple of years has been a privilege that modern politics, with its by now instinctive avoidance of principle and conviction, rarely offers. "Ah yes," his critics say with that smug literalism that is their chief hallmark, "so you concede that he 'performs' - he is an actor?" Does it matter? Authenticity is no longer possible in public life, which is really a kind of screen on to which personalities are projected in a process like other forms of marketing.
In the melodramocracy, the most successful politicians are those adept at reconstructing idealised forms of their personalities on that public screen.
From what we know of him as a man, Tony Blair is - transparently - decent, honourable and sincere. But this is no longer enough. To survive, he has had to reinvent and exaggerate his own decency, honour and sincerity for public consumption. In a sense he is wrong in claiming to be human. For what we see beyond the hall door of Number 10 Downing Street is not the human being, but the projected essence of that human being offered as a character to the public imagination.
When Tony Blair is wry, self-deprecating, apologetic or vulnerable, we observe not the flesh-and-blood man but a brilliant actor playing the part Tony Blair has written for himself - by turn wry, self-deprecating, apologetic or vulnerable. His critics call this cynical, but really he is like this because, every time he opens his mouth, he encounters a cynicism that is all but superhuman. He is not, as the glib wisdom would have it, a fake; but his understanding of the mechanics of fakery allows him to preserve his self-created image, so as to continue doing what he feels he must.
Thus does the modern leader insulate himself from the potentially fatal judgments of media and public, who demand that politicians become angels when they lodge their deposits, not because we desire a principled leadership but because, fearing this, we seek to make it impossible.