Daily Times

One year after Brexit and Britain will be where it should have been last June — going to the polls in a snap election. Yet the winner here is not British democracy. Nor, indeed, was it when the prime minister, who likes everyone to call him Dave, saw fit to resign over a non-binding referendum of his own making rather than trying on the borrowed robes of elder statesman for size.

Then, as today, the biggest winner remains the most ignoble Tony Blair.

It was the former war-mongering prime minister who set the precedent of going to the trouble of having himself re-elected before deciding it was all a bit too much effort to finish what he started in Iraq. And so it was that he handed the keys of power to the dour Gordon.

The latter proceeded to sacrifice any chances of re-election to save the collective skin of the New Labour war cabinet, of which he was a prominent member. The political bombshell came in the form of casually announcing that the Chilcot inquiry’s findings into the legality of the Iraq war would not be made public until after the 2010 general elections. Thus in one fell swoop did Gordon Brown not only make a mockery of the notion of an informed citizenry casting their vote in a free and fair election — he also handed victory to the Tory ties and crest in the first hung parliament Britain had known since 1974.

The Brits have long been known for their sense of fair play. And this was very much on display when the coalition went on say it with — not flowers — but with halting the release of documentation detailing the minutes of the last cabinet meetings in the run-up to the Iraq war of aggression. Ditto when it similarly blocked a judge’s ruling calling for the disclosure of extracts of the Blair-Bush telephone conversation moments before the invasion. What better way to wheel-and-deal in Austerity Britain than such payment in kind?

Even Cameron’s decision to not keep calm and carry on played to Blair’s advantage. For in the ensuing frenzy surrounding the Tory leadership race — the long-awaited Chilcot report, costing British taxpayers some 10 million GBP pounds, hardly left a dent at the political level. This was to be expected. And, in any case, Blair had already pre-emptively washed his hands of it. He did his bit when he went on CNN, apologising to Fareed Zakaria — that unthinking man’s pundit. That current affairs maestro whose intellectual Global Positioning System has always remained unfailingly in sync with an establishment narrative preferring to posture as conventional wisdom. Of course, Blair was careful not to apologise for committing a war of aggression, the supreme crime as per Nuremberg provisions. He was, after all, a lawyer before he chose to break international law at Her Majesty’s Service. Thus his only regret was the faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. And then came the kicker: he would do it all over again to rid the world of the Saddam Hussein. Sorry, it seems, is all that Blair can’t say.

Sorry is all that Cameron can’t say, either. When the going got tough, he preferred to cut-and-run; hiding behind that tired old line of the people having spoken, of respecting the majority will. Sadly, it seems that electorate have only become suddenly important to successive British governments when they are to be lied to or when they are to be the scapegoat for a prime minister’s untimely resignation.

And so, David Cameron is back where he belongs. In pig muck all the way up to his elbows. He began sticking it to pigs long before he stuck it to the British public. And now, sadly for pigs everywhere in the Suffolk area, he will be sticking it to them for the unforeseeable future in his reinvention as the Prince of Pork. Unfortunately for the British public, he will not be producing Blair’s head on a stick anytime soon. That is not the Oxford way. Eton rifles be damned.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.co