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The Tuscan sun seems to suit Tony Blair. And there is a certain appropriateness in the Prime Minister choosing Italy to start his holiday today. Blair has spoken recently of his closeness to the Italian Prime Minister, Massimo D'Alema, a fellow advocate of the the Third Way. But it is another Italian leader to whom he is far closer. Young Tony is a disciple of Il Duce.
The Prime Minister has more than just a whiff of Mussolini about him. Maybe this stems from Blair's strident self-belief, or his vanity, or his carefully crafted image as the great leader, head of "the political wing of the British people", for whom nothing is impossible. Whatever, this comparison is more than just superficial. The two are are close ideological cousins. The idea of the Third Way was Mussolini's - and he also acquired a reputation as a great war leader by occupying Albania.
The study of Il Duce's career yields a timely warning from history. Mussolini was elected with a huge parliamentary majority of 404. Once Prime Minister, he embarked on an ambitious programme of constitutional reform: the Acerbo Law of 1923 ensured him a permanent parliamentary majority. The Fundamental Law of 1925 bypassed parliament by making him answerable only to the King. Similarly, Blair's contempt for Parliament, and, seemingly for his own Cabinet and ministers, is well known.
Like Blair, Mussolini set out to rule by balancing the diverse elements that made up his party, yet feared that one of these elements might eventually be strong enough to challenge him. So Mussolini cut off his party from its grassroots, and set up the Fascist Grand Council, a kind of Latin Millbank, that did away with the last vestiges of democracy within the Fascist Party, and merely "consulted" its membership via referendums.
Mussolini eventually resorted to the drastic but logical step of de-politicising his party; Fascism became a kind of social club for its members, while the real decisions were made by the clique around Il Duce. Thus, Fascism's strength came, ironically, not from the strength but from the weakness of Fascist institutions. No sooner had Mussolini set up a committee charged with a sorting out a policy initiative than he set out to undermine it in order to enhance his reputation as the "only man who could get things done". After last week's "night of the short knives", it is apparent that Blair has adopted a similar strategy.
Like his mentor Mussolini, Blair has surrounded himself with a mediocre Cabinet of old hands, the better to buttress his own position. These, in turn, will be weeded out as soon as sufficient yes-men (and women) from the 1997 intake can be brought in to form a Stepford Cabinet.
The creation of a supine Cabinet will be accomplished by increments. It has to be. In a party where subservience to the Great Leader is encouraged, by the old Mussolini trick of holding open the possibility of preferment to even the most talentless, such as Jack Cunningham, the big summer reshuffle allows too much attention to focus on the question of personnel. Better by far to accomplish the transformation by degrees. So reshuffles become a rolling business. And consequently, a few phone calls ensure that tame apparatchik George Robertson is put out to pasture at Nato, allowing a tame acolyte or two to step further into Blair's "engine-room of government".
Blair, like Benito, is an instinctive centraliser. As Simon Jenkins recently noted, Blair "is his own Foreign Secretary .. . His own Northern Ireland Secretary . . . as for the Home ministers, they merely step aside when Mr. Blair needs a photo-opportunity". Such greed for portfolio was matched by Il Duce, whose observation that "it is really simpler to give orders myself instead of sending for the minister concerned and having to convince him about what I want done" could easily be lifted from a private conversation between Blair and Alastair Campbell (Mussolini, a former journalist, had no need for a pet spin-doctor).
Yet for all his obsession with efficiency, Mussolini, like Blair on the euro, bluffed and fudged and ultimately avoided the tough policy decisions of his day. Ultimately, he brought ruin on his country by mindlessly yoking it to the foreign policy imperatives of a more powerful ally.
Thus a one-time socialist Prime Minister with a head full of "modernising" ideas, a huge popular mandate and a talent for self-aggrandisement, perverted parliamentary democracy until it became totalitarian rule. If the example of the Third Way's originator is anything to go by, the edifice of Blair the world statesman is likely to be built on feet of clay. Nowadays Mussolini is something of a joke. Nevertheless, in the Twenties and Thirties, plenty of people were taken in by him. Men of the calibre of Churchill, Gandhi, Thomas Edison and Ezra Pound were all, at some stage, enthralled by the great poseur. As Blair amasses sycophantic accolades, the tragedy that was Mussolini's New Rome is being repeated as the Blairite farce in New Britain.
Next time you see a picture of Blair kissing a Kosovan baby, needlessly running up the ramp of his aircraft before he flies off to see Clinton, or jumping out of his helicopter a foot or two before it touches down, think of those fading photos of Il Duce jogging with his generals or posing on a horse. And yes, in his end-of-term report our Prime Minister even promises to make the trains run on time.