Wine of the People

The other day I had lunch with a lawyer. “Do you like Tony Blair?” he asked, with the courtesy characteristic of his profession. I could give no sensible answer, as I have never had the honor of the prime minister’s acquaintance.

My learned friend went on to wonder how an apparently intelligent and sensitive man could get Britain involved in America’s current adventure in Iraq. It’s not as if the British public was spoiling for the fight. Perhaps Mr. Blair was genuinely frightened of the elusive weapons of mass destruction. There is certainly no shortage of members of Parliament who say they voted for the war because they were told Saddam Hussein could wipe us all out in forty-five minutes flat. Or could it simply be that Mr. Blair was afraid of compromising the special relationship between our two great countries?

One key to understanding Tony Blair is religion—not the battling certainties that animate many evangelical supporters of President Bush, but an altogether more modern, more flexible faith. The Christianity to which his (and my) generation of literate Englishmen did (or did not) subscribe was characterized by a 1963 book called Honest to God. In it, a bishop explained that God is the Ground of All Being, not an old man with a beard in the sky, a truth which some of his readers had tumbled to already (surely the old man with the beard is Santa Claus). This up-to-date faith had much to say about society: “though we are many we are one bread, one body” ran the mantra in the Church of England’s grim modern-language liturgy. It warmed to personal intensity, while soft-pedaling private prayer. The hard work of metaphysics and theology took a back seat to building communities. Diplomacy, someone once said, is the art of letting other people have your way; Christian charity, as it was promoted to us in sixties England, often seemed to mean letting everyone else have their way.
Of course it is good to encourage people to be kind, and one has to acknowledge the sincerity of a public school (i.e. private school) product like Tony Blair, who joins the British Labour party, the party of workers, with hand and brain, under the impression that he may help folk who lack the advantages he was born into.

But this sort of well-meaning Christian pragmatism is dangerously eager to please. Hence the persistent efforts of the Blair press office to fool all of the people all of the time. Hence, too, a willingness to give in to whomever has shouted most loudly most recently (they call it inclusiveness). A fellow supporter of foxhunting said to me over Christmas that the only sure way to save our sport is to have George Bush come out in favor of it, because he is the only person who can shout louder than the left-wing tyrants of the Labour Party.

For Mr. Blair and those like him are not Champagne socialists, eccentric noblemen with demotic principles, like Philippe Duc d’Orléans, who changed his name to Citoyen Égalité during the French Revolution (but was guillotined just the same). Such Bollinger Bolsheviks savor the sharp irony of their position; their taste for aristocratic pleasures is undimmed by their embracing the cause of the People.

Such inconsistency is alien to the Blair Project. The characteristic drink of the contemporary British Christian Socialist is blander, more middle-class. It lacks fizz, and so would never lead to an amusing indiscretion like the nose trick (in which the victim unintentionally gargles champagne through the nose). It is also cheaper than bubbly and, in the spirit of inclusiveness, well within the financial reach of all. It is Chardonnay.

The wine drunk at the celebration dinner after Mr. Blair’s general election victory was a Chardonnay from the village of Lugny near Macon in southern Burgundy, Macon-Lugny les Genièvres, shipped by Louis Latour and available for about $15. There is absolutely nothing nasty about this wine. The 2002 vintage that I enjoyed recently with an omelette lacked sharpness (unlike the same shipper’s Pouilly-Vinzelles, from the same part of Burgundy, available locally for about the same price). A thoroughly pleasant fruitiness gave way to firm, mild bitterness (a bit like the taste of orange pith), until, on swallowing, the fruit reasserted itself, lasting lingeringly. It was good. Decide for yourself if what is amiable in a wine is admirable in a politician.