[brave new world] caught in an upward plummet

There are some who are not going to like this post and will now part company with the fool they see me to be:

Once, at a stag night, the stripper took me aside and said: ‘You’re not taking this seriously. It makes me nervous.’ She was right. Once, at school in Form 3, my report said and I remember exactly: ‘Inclined to take the more serious aspects of School too flippantly.’

Guilty I'm afraid, just as we're supposed to take the upwards scramble in society seriously and to walk over our own grandmothers to gain advancement. For me all that's a yawn.

If you’ve rubbed up against real money once or twice, you’d know it’s certainly intoxicating. After his re-election in which I played some small part, a certain mayor of a city of four million took me for a drink at an inner city hotel. People were coming and going, congratulating him and I noticed that with one or two he was quite deferential. Trouble was I didn't know those men from Adam and wasn't sure I wanted to.

One invited us, we were whisked away to a location where some sort of party was going on, then to a high rise building I know not where in the night and the thing which struck me most was the hush, the hygiene and the lack of fuss. I also noticed the clinical coldness in the clipped conversation - it wasn't so much conversation as making the right small talk to the right people.

The carpet was plush, the double doors opening were silent, the leather car seats transported us in silence, except for discreet music on the CD [this was in its infancy at the time], we gazed through darkened windows at the night cityscape and everywhere we were met by the respect which money buys and by opened doors.

At the venue, in clinches of conversation, glass in hand, you were either summed up and marginalized or invited to join them next Thursday, lifted, raised one echelon. Level by level you went up and up but you had to care. I never cared and was eventually given up on.

But many do care terribly and one top blogger, who recently came in for criticism, wrote of this marginalization. He cared about it and it hurt when he was not included in the big boys' game.

This was Tony Blair's way up. From schooldays he had been earmarked by those who saw talent and one talent spotting organization, the Bilderbergers, invited him to the 1993 conference, as they had with Gordon Brown before him and as they have now with Ed Balls.

Tony Blair's biographer, Rentoul, records that, according to his lawyer friends, Blair was much less concerned about which party he was affiliated with than about his aim of becoming Prime Minister … Nu Labour was the vehicle and as Wiki said:

Although the [later] transformation [to New Labour] aroused much criticism (its alleged superficiality drawing fire both from political opponents and traditionalists within the "rank and file" of his own party), it was nevertheless successful in changing public perception.

Tony Blair was bereft of real policies and a weak man who appreciated the hush-power of privilege and he certainly possessed charm, a visionary manner of speaking and a pretty wife and so he swept all before him.

His way was smoothed and it helped that he was 1] a buffoon 2] intergenerational with the ‘right stuff’ 3] malleable. Ditto with Dan Quayle, Gerry Ford and Al Gore. Jim Hacker is no more than a spoof on this type of malleable power seeker. In turn, Blair was swept along into things which clearly made him blanch.

When the other countries were having their national atrocities - 911, Beslan, Port Arthur, Paris riots and the like - Blair had to have his. He was not yet a 'made man'.

Woodrow Wilson touched on the powerlessness of the figurehead when he said, “They [chief executives] know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

Leaving politics aside and looking at celebrity, would you say Posh and Becks are happy people? Dangerous to read too much into photos but look at the one above. They're paupers in reality, shells in human form and the cracks are clear for all to see - the fierceness, the determination, the world at her fingertips and slipping away at the same time.

Beckam himself reminds me a lot of Jay Gatsby in the film version.

Look at Britney Spears. Is that a girl who's got it all together? Anna Nicole Smith? Kate Moss? Whitney Houston? Monroe. Rehab was made for such as these. I feel not the least envy for these tragic people, only pity and a fervent desire never to go down the same path, not that there'd ever be a chance of it.

I wouldn't be in Blair's shoes for the world and there is no smugness in this utterance.