Kicking Blair Upstairs

So is Tony Blair officially in the running to become President of the Council of member states of the European Union (a new job, that might or might not be quite powerful, depending on who gets it, that will come into being if the Lisbon Treaty passes)? The Financial Times “says yes”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5313c12-7145-11de-877c-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=70662e7c-3027-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8.html

bq. Tony Blair was announced on Wednesday as Britain’s official candidate to become the European Union’s new president, even though Britain’s former prime minister has not confirmed he wants the job and the post has yet to be created. Lady Kinnock, Britain’s newly appointed Europe minister, surprised Downing St and Mr Blair when she declared: “The UK government is supporting Tony Blair’s candidature for president of the council.”

“Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2009/07/why-is-brown-backing-blair/ questions whether there is anything in it for Gordon Brown.

bq. Given their longstanding rivalry, it is slightly surprising that Gordon Brown has openly backed Tony Blair to be the first ever President of the EU. (Technically speaking, president of the European Council, a job that will come into being, if and when the Lisbon Treaty is finally ratified later this year.) I cannot imagine that Brown would really relish greeting Blair back to Downing Street as “president of Europe”. So why has he done it?

And the Economist’s _Charlemagne_ suggests that it “was all a big mistake”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2009/07/no_tony_blair_has_not_launched.cfm

Lady Kinnock, who is a very new minister, after years as an MEP, basically messed up. She was asked about Tony Blair as a possible candidate for the new presidential job, and bafflingly, this question took her by surprise. She meant to be enthusiastic, but went too far. So when she said that:

“The UK government is supporting Tony Blair’s candidature for president of the council”

that did not mean that there is a Blair candidacy, and the British government is working behind the scenes to lobby for him. What she meant was, if Tony Blair were to become the candidate, then logically enough the Labour government would lobby for him. I do not think I am being spun here. I am told that senior British officials believed, to quote one source, that Lady Kinnock “fucked up” in the way she phrased this, and that makes sense to me. The British political and diplomatic machine would like Mr Blair to be the first president, obviously because he is one of theirs, but also because he represents the basic package of support for free trade, support for the Atlantic alliance and hostility to a European superstate that Britain would want from this job, which essentially replaces the current role played by prime ministers of countries holding the rotating presidency. But it is not something anyone wanted to rush into now. For one thing, frontrunners almost never get the big jobs in Europe. For another, it is hard to see why Mr Blair would want to put himself forwards for a job he was not very likely to get, interrupting his well-paid semi-retirement with a blast of global humiliation.

My money is on Charlemagne’s interpretation here – it sounds distressingly plausible. That said, now that Britain has ‘endorsed’ Blair as EU president, I imagine it will have to actually endorse him and publicly campaign for him too (unlessBlair immediately makes a public statement to the effect that he has no interest in the job). Even when statements like this are the result of inexperienced politicians ‘fucking up,’ they are hard to disown. Furthermore, if Blair were to get the job, I suspect that Charlemagne is wrong on the transatlantic values stuff – politicians are notorious for cutting their ideological cloth to suit the measure of their office, and I would not at all be surprised if Blair turned out to be a lot keener on European integration as soon as he assumed his new role. Which isn’t to pass any judgment on whether he would be a good president of the EU or not. My immediate instinct would be to say that he would make a better fist of it than the other plausible candidates I’m aware of, but then I was cautiously optimistic about Wolfowitz becoming president of the World Bank back in the day, and we all know how that turned out.