Scientific soaperama

Conspiracy theories are fun, but like a lot of fiction they don’t tell us anything about what’s going on at this moment. What to put in their place? I suggest the Scientific Soaperama. It goes like this. You make up a character, let us say, Tony Blair, you make up the back story of his inner life, then you use your invention to predict the behaviour of the real Tony Blair. This is actually quite scientific; you know, making predictions based on a hypothesis and all that.
I’ll start with mine.
Tony Blair sees himself as being a member of a triumvirate; him, George Bush, and God. Of these three, God hasn’t said a dickybird for the last one thousand three hundred and seventy three years, so He’s very much a silent partner. If He’s still there. George Bush, well, he admits himself that he has problems with human language. So that leaves Blair. Tony Blair is the voice of the triumvirate. And the other two, President of the USA, Creator of the Universe, whatever, are just there to make up the numbers.
The role of the triumvirate is to bring about the New World Order. We don’t have to ask ourselves what that might look like. Like it’s precursor, Democracy in Iraq, we’ll worry about the New World Order when it happens. But I think we can tell from the kind of thing that Blair likes and the kind of thing he doesn’t like, the kind of thing the New World Order will be. When it arrives.
So Blair’s motivation, the grand motivation behind all the little projects like taking his country to war in Iraq, becomes clearer. When he says, with that modest but slightly worrying intensity, that he himself personally believes that we, meaning I think the human race, will look back at this time and see it as a turning point in human history, that’s not a politician’s get out, that’s not Okay I fucked up but give it a rest will you. That is putting Tony Blair, the only one with a proper speaking part in the Triumvirate, at a pivotal, perhaps, when all is told, the pivotal point of human history. That is what he is journeying towards. Not just greatness, but... Maybe, when Blair rather tetchily refuses to say if he and Bush prayed to God down on the ranch in Crawford, maybe his irritation is at our inability to catch on. Maybe Bush and God were praying - no, let’s be serious.
The thing about the Scientific Soaperama is that the hypotheses are just that, they don’t claim to be true. I certainly don’t think my hypothesis describes the totality of Tony Blair - presumably even world class statespeople are officially recognised as clinically insane if their condition merits it, but Blair is not clinically insane. It’s true that people who are in positions of great power for too long - about six weeks - become functionally crazy, because they never get the feedback the rest of us get. We’d all love to develop delusions of grandeur but friends, family, workmates conspire against it. And we know that delusions of grandeur don’t do much good to the deluded in the long run, look at poor Old Ma Thatcher; geriatric, her criminal past cemented forever into her son’s disgrace. Blair hasn’t gone that far yet, and I’m sure in his domestic, his family, his business, his recreational life he’s as sane as the rest of us.
I’m also sure that in these things he’s a banal and tedious man. He does not interest us. But as a politician, he interests us a lot, and will continue to do so. Much of his political behaviour seems irrational and extreme. But every time he does something that makes you shake your head in disbelief, try seeing him as the voice of the triumvirate, the Great Helmsman of the New World Order upon whom History will gaze back in awe; the, white-haired maybe, voice weaker, but still tall and proud, the first and greatest and for ever Prince of Peace and Universal Government. And see if he makes a bit more sense then.