Neil Berry • Special to Arab News

LONDON, 8 June 2003 — Fanatically certain of his own rectitude, Britain’s Prime Minister is forever exclaiming: “Let history be my judge”. And he plainly has not the smallest doubt that his actions will ultimately be seen to have been courageous and far-sighted — no matter how questionable they may currently appear.

After six years in office, Blair is becoming ever more prone to invoke posterity’s hypothetical recognition of his political achievements. Increasingly distrusted by his contemporaries, he evidently derives psychological comfort from contemplating the heroic stature he is destined to enjoy in the eyes of coming generations. In this compulsion for anticipating a favorable future verdict on his performance, Blair may be felt to have taken a step in the direction of madness. One British journalist, the Times columnist Mathew Parris, has in fact publicly questioned the prime minister’s sanity.

His many British detractors would certainly love nothing more than to see Blair bundled out of office in ignominious circumstances, a victim of his overweening tendency to bend reality to suit his own version of events. Last week, some were sensing a potential British “Watergate” in the New Labour leader’s controversial, possibly deceitful, claim that Baghdad possessed the capacity to launch weapons of mass destruction against London in as little as 45 minutes.

Whatever his ultimate political fortunes, Tony Blair can at least feel confident that he will not quickly be forgotten: This after all is a British leader who has figured large in international affairs during the past several years. But the chances that he will be remembered for the quality of his statesmanship are dwindling by the day.

It is Blair’s fateful alliance with President George W. Bush that historians may well find especially worthy of attention, for on paper the relationship appears not so much implausible as altogether unfeasible. What, they will wonder, was the basis of the rapport that developed between the ostensibly “progressive” Blair and the red-necked Texan Republican, with his instinctive commitment to all manner of reactionary policies? Admittedly, Blair’s eagerness to cooperate with George Bush could be seen simply as a continuation of long-standing British obedience toward Washington. Yet the truth may be that Blair and Bush, both of them devout, church-going Christians, are fervently united in their core beliefs, in their essential view of things. Rumors that they have sat down and prayed together — though officially denied — have nonetheless become part of political folklore: Even if the story is not literally true, it is widely felt to be true.

Who now doubts that Blair actually has more of an affinity with George Bush than with his seeming trans-Atlantic kindred spirit, Bill Clinton? Nobody is going to accuse America’s cavalier former president of excessive piety. Barely credible as it seems, at the outset of the 21st century Britain and the United States are being ruled by a pair of old-fashioned white Christian zealots, men with a profound sense of self-belief and an equally profound sense of religious mission.

The American political analyst, Michael Lind, has written a book which casts suggestive light on the historical background to the Blair-Bush partnership. An anatomy of the political culture that spawned George Bush, Lind’s study, Made in Texas, shows how the “Lone Star” state evolved in great degree as a Scoto-Irish settlement. The old Texan stock from which the George Bush and his father spring is ancestrally linked to the Scotch Puritans who colonized Northern Ireland in the 17th century. Lind points out that Texas — though by no means without its liberal traditions, as personified by President Lyndon Johnson — is in many respects the last great bastion of white supremacist British Protestantism.

Now consider the relevance of all this to Tony Blair, the effusively pro-US British politician whose formative years were passed in Scotland and who could be said to be a creature of Scoto-Protestant culture. At his God-fearing Scottish boarding school, Blair (though in general no great reader) is reported to have kept a copy of the Bible on his bedside table; he also, it appears, developed a taste for the work of Sir Walter Scott, the prolific 19th century Scottish author whose work glamorized the age of chivalry, the time in the Middle Ages when it was the raison d’être of English crusaders to subdue the Muslim world and proclaim the virtues of Christian civilization. Given such influences, it is hardly surprising if Tony Blair feels at home in the neo-feudal milieu of George W. Bush.

In Made In Texas, Michael Lind has much to say about George Bush and Israel and the portentous Old Testament-inspired alliance that has emerged between Christian fundamentalists like Bush and US Zionists. According to Lind, Bush and his fellow-believers are convinced that Israel will in due course become the setting for the end of the world, for the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible. To what extent Tony Blair shares their peculiar preoccupation with Israel is unclear — though in this connection it may not be irrelevant to note that his favorite novel is Scott’s Ivanhoe, a story of the Middle Ages celebrated, among other things, for its concern with Jewish suffering; the British critic Karl Miller has even suggested that Ivanhoe’s affecting portrait of the beautiful but victimized “Rebecca” helped to engender the Western philo-semitism of the mid-20th century.

As Britain’s prospective leader in 1997, Tony Blair projected himself as a truly contemporary politician, thoroughly modern in all his attitudes. Historians may conclude that this self-consciously chivalrous prime minister was more like an escapee from the distant past.