The Hindu Business Line : <I>Tony Blair's impending exit </I>

"Not with a bang, but a whimper" — the lines T. S. Eliot wrote in his celebrated poem, ``The Hollow Men'', exactly fit the long-awaited exit of Britain's Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, the news of which is due any day. `Long-awaited' or even eagerly awaited, because the poor man was getting broad hints about his overstaying for many months now, and it was all he could do to hold on to the door handle to avoid getting pushed out.

The media had even been keeping count of the number of occasions he had been promising to step down in order to mollify and keep at bay his detractors who have been wanting him to set a firm date. May be, the painful parting kick in the form of the disastrous reverses for Labour in the recent local council elections will help him make up his mind.

How did the youngest Prime Minister (at the age of 43) in nearly 200 years, suffer such a grievous erosion of his authority and credibility within a space of ten years, becoming, as a columnist put it, `a by-word for mendacity, double-talk and self-serving recklessness'?

Somewhere along the line, his words and actions began marking him out as a narcissistic person who was also too clever by half, and had no compunction in leading Parliament, his party-persons and the people at large down the garden path, even if it meant holding back, distorting, fabricating or falsifying information to which they were entitled.

In short, they all began to see in him glimmerings of certain character defects compounded by his `presidential' manner of functioning with the help of a small coterie accountable to none but himself.

No parallel in history

There was, of course, the cash-for-peerage scandal in which persons closest to him and enjoying his utmost confidence have been implicated and he himself went through the mortification of being twice subjected to police interrogation in his own office. But the scam is only a symptom of an underlying disease — a pathological and irresistible urge to manipulate events and indulge in machinations in pursuit of self-aggrandisement.

The most conspicuous and indelible example, which will forever be viewed as a shameful chapter in the country's history, is the way Mr Blair made Britain the ready and willing accomplice of the US in carrying out the illegal invasion of Iraq.

There is no parallel in recent world history to the sordid saga of circulation in official dossiers to Members of Parliament of atrocious lies about Iraq's manufacture of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's collusion with al Qaeda.

The dominant sentiment in the minds of the British people is reflected in the following extract from an article by a leading commentator, Mike Marqusee: "...most damningly, Blair leaves Britain deeply embroiled in two avoidable, unjustifiable overseas wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He comes second only to Bush in bearing personal responsibility for the deaths of 6,55,000 Iraqis and the near destruction of an entire society. After the calculated lies Blair told both Parliament and the public to get Britain to make war against Iraq, the greatest regret is that he will leave office without being impeached, though there is still hope he may face an international criminal tribunal at some time in the future..."

What an unceremonious end it is going to be when it finally comes to the career of someone who, at the time he swept Britain off its feet in 1997 by a landslide victory, repeated on an equally grand scale in 2001, was universally hailed as a brilliantly shining star of the New Labour and a John F. Kennedy in the making in British politics!

B. S. RAGHAVAN