ON the night of the last British general election count I was staying in a Galway hotel where I had that day spoken to a conference of advertising executives in my capacity as Irish Times media correspondent.
My talk, on the "social responsibility" of the advertising industry, had gone down like a lead balloon. Among other things, I had suggested that the industry should think about directing business towards the fringes of the Irish media market, to keep alive those weaker elements of the industry threatened by the dominance of major operators.
I had criticised the nature of advertising, which divides the population into categories of consumer, and directs its messages at particular sections on the basis of income and position. This, I argued, was recreating media - and politics - in their own image.
The response from the floor, as I say, was not notable for its enthusiasm and I found that, unencumbered by queries for clarification or further information, I was able to get early to bed. I watched the election count for a while. The opinion polls had been predicting a Labour victory, and the early indications suggested this outcome was still on the cards.
Certain that I would awake to hear that a Labour government had been elected, I fell asleep. Several times in the night I was awoken by the noise of revellers downstairs: my advertising executives were watching the count in the bar. The raucous cheers penetrated my half conscious state to tell me the Tories were winning.
I'm going to enjoy the count this Thursday night, for this and other reasons. Although my role is more usually in the attempted reconditioning of fallen icons, I am sure most of you will forgive me for reminding you that I was the first columnist in these islands to predict greatness for Tony Blair. On the Tuesday following his election as leader of the Labour Party, I laid out here the range of the possibilities he represents.
Although the shallow political and journalistic view of Mr Blair is that he is the shallow creation of his spindoctors, I see no reason to revise my opinion that he is truly the best hope for sane politics we can aspire to see in our lifetimes.
MR Blair is a true radical. This is not visible in his articulation of policy, and only remotely in his demeanour (although it is possible sometimes to observe it in his inability to look at home in a suit). For the most part, it is visible only as a sub text of his language and tactics. I wrote back then that the language he employs, far from being vague as his critics allege, has a very specific set of meanings. The thing is, you have to listen.
It is easy to be critical of Mr Blair's alleged lack of substance, but the undoing of Thatcherism was not to be achieved by the kind of simple mindedness and cynicism which appear to be the notable contributions of Mr Blair's critics. The quality that makes Mr Blair qualified to dismantle Thatcherism is his ruthless idealism.
Had he simply been radical or ruthless or idealistic we would now be looking down the barrel of another five years of Toryism. In an era when idealism became all but impossible to articulate, Tony Blair, knowing that idle ideals cost votes, found a way of walking on cynicism.
Mrs Thatcher came to realise that, in order to gain a stranglehold on British politics, she needed to influence only a small minority of the electorate, that she could best achieve what she wanted by appealing to private interest rather than public good, and that social irresponsibility could be used as a ladder to power.
She was almost right. The nature of Britain's class system, never mind its electoral system, gives a headstart to those who would offer to the voters the prioritising of their own selfinterest. By tapping into the selfishness of the most electorally volatile and anti social elements of British society, Mrs Thatcher got what she wanted and then went about reconstructing that society to ensure that the cynical ethic she represented would become virtually unassailable.
She brutalised Britain almost to the point of making axiomatic her own observation that there was "no such thing as society," and in the end so contaminated its politics that only the selfish were interested enough to vote for what they wanted.
In a sense, Mrs Thatcher destroyed politics as the implementation of public desires and re created it as the reign of the publicly indifferent. She appropriated the dark arts of marketing, advertising and public relations to make the Thatcher brand unassailable in the political marketplace. In a pincer movement with the Murdoch press, she poured the effluent of her cynicism into the lives of the British public.
BY seducing some of the less well off with the idea that they, too, could one day belong to the ranks of those with selfish interests to protect, and by reducing the remainder to apathy, Thatcher and Murdoch eliminated any form of recognisable public decency to which any future challenger to their hegemony might appeal. Together they destroyed languages of commonality and idealism, and drove wedges between citizen and society.
This is what defeated Neil Kinnock. Although at face value his rhetoric appeared to be going down well, in truth it was heard by the voting public only as a threat to the selfish interests which Toryism had come to represent. What the opinion polls were picking up was how people would like to be seen, but polling day revealed how successfully Thatcher had done her work. Labour was unelectable, and would have remained so under virtually anyone except Blair.
Tony Blair understood the kind of selfishness Thatcher had tapped into, because he came from precisely the class at which her drive for power was targeted. But he is also a child of the Sixties revolution and had remembered the best bits.
This made him exactly right to invade Thatcher's Britain from inside its belly. There was no point in Blair launching into another attempt to persuade the voting public that Thatcherism was an evil which had all but destroyed Britain. Publicly people might agree, but privately they would again look to their own narrow interest.
Blair knew that the Thatcher culture had to be handled gingerly if it was to be dismantled. He also knew that, while that culture existed, he could not beat it without seeming to join it.
And so, with a ruthlessness of which only the truly great are capable, he camouflaged himself in the apparel of the enemy, playing to the same section of the electorate which had kept Margaret Thatcher in power. He may court Rupert Murdoch, shaft his own left wingers and make polite nods in the direction of Margaret Thatcher, but only a fool would see in these anything other than a determination to invade the citadel by stealth.
All that matters now is that he is going to win.
We have come to the end of the long night.
Good morning.
Rejoice.