Born in the middle-fifties, a portent of redemption
as bright and promising as rockabilly, Tony Blair
required an additional period of gestation, laying
dormant in a bucket through two decades of crying fear
until out of the shit of the eighties a new mushroom
poked up, all white and shiny, a power-seeking tool
with a permanent cheeky grin, a twitchy tail-fin
to guide us boldly into silver-synth millennium
under the bright smarmy stars on a swarmy night.

Buttering up Michael Foot, reading Isaac Deutscher
on Trotsky, this young man was already a parsnip
too sweet, too stringy. It’s a pity, he said to a camera
how some are born so much more equal than others.
Boxer and Clover kicked for animal joy in the stalls,
but when Napoleon got into the farmhouse, poor Snowball
ran for cover. Tony Mosley with his foppish blackshirt
sidekick, Peter Goebbels, a wolfish sheep on the lamb
with his mushroom dome of an innocent Albert Speer:
no double star, nor faun in a film by Walt Disney.

Yes, another came before him, his John the Baptist
was a much loved namesake, remembered by socialists
as George Orwell. Eric and Tony Blair, destroyers
of English socialism. Eric of course was the greater,
progressed from washer-up to sweeper of broken worlds,
from roving anthropologist to missionary disillusion:
a position Tony fucked us in - so we could see his eyes
sparkling, hoping it was all all right for us, okay.

Arrogant, an almost deferential respect for the poor,
Eric changed his given name - too posh, too bland -
but Tony was a man of the people from the start,
he thought. Eric suffered under his mask. His alter-ego
Tony knew not poverty, built his big, air strictures,
feats of engineering, castles in air, countries to live in,
a bridge over the Orwell with its panoramic views
of fires and mires and shires, a honking, working river
with black winds blowing through its singing wires.

Eric Blair invented Big Brother. On reality television
a fictional rich bastard enjoys tormenting his paid guests
as we enjoy watching them squirm and hate. Able only
to devise a format that designs in conflict - lack-love,
another, ever more disrespectful way of living together -
plagiarists of his monster are raking out dead coals,
no metaphors for anything, just more empty drum rolls.
First Tony’s rolled and crashed, then crashed and rolled.

Islam became his Revolutionary Communism: a spectre
stalking Europe in an electric wheelchair and a hijab
eagerly checking her e-mails for news from Baghdad,
a girl on a mission with a limited life-span, a short straw,
her world blazed up on Google like a dropped match,
a forest fire, a case of blight, a harvest to devastate.
A power for good, a fighting power, church militant : his
Jihad took a generation to grow, her generation’s hate.

Les Freres Blair went up in the same hot air balloon,
two pricks in a rainbow bubble over everything. We’re
all in the same basket, in the Jack Straw boat. No present
like new times and nothing to declare. I turn the pages
of comparisons you hate: Tony and George - a critical
dreamer and a dreaming critic - falling down to earth
we tumbled over and over to their lies. Petty squabbling
powers ruled us wisely and truly, and vain hopes died.
George Orwell has claimants; Tony Blair’s despised.

John Muckle