A Sunday Times leader yesterday said this:
A defeat for Tony Blair, however unlikely, would be seen as the voters' verdict on the Iraq war, with implications well beyond these shores.And the Guardian today seems to agree in how it rates the importance of the war in Thursday's election:
As Labour enters the final days of its campaign, it can be quietly satisfied that its record for economic competence is intact, even though it has not dislodged Iraq as the key issue.Writing in Saturday's edition of the same paper Jonathan Freedland seemed also to agree, at least to this extent:
What if the predictions are wrong and the Tories do well? That will be simpler to explain. Observers will say that Blair was punished for an unpopular war...For Freedland, however, you can't really turn the thing the other way around. He believes, you see, that if Labour were to achieve 'a substantial victory', then not only would that not count as any kind of vindication on the war for Tony Blair; you wouldn't even be able to conclude 'that Iraq was just not that important to the people of Britain'. No, what it would mean is that 'Labour will have won despite Iraq'.
Well, I admire the guy's interpretative powers. He can sum, in advance, the millions of voters and their decisions, the various preferences, values and priorities behind these and the combination and ranking of them, and confidently assign meanings to opposite aggregate outcomes such that, whichever way things go, the opponents of the war can feel that the election result has upheld their standpoint. Wonderful.
But it's a silly game. Either you can't put together the myriad thoughts and decisions of millions of voters into one composite meaning, or in a rough and ready way you can; but in the latter case there has to be some logical consistency to it. Thus, for example, if things going very badly for Labour can be taken to mean that Blair has been punished for the putative wrongness of the Iraq war, then things going passingly well for Labour must mean that he hasn't been punished for it. Likewise, if his being punished can be presumed to mean that the putative wrongness of the war was that important (in the overall scheme of things and relative to their other concerns) to the voters, then his not being punished must, by the same token, be presumed to mean that the putative wrongness of the war was not that important (in the overall scheme of things and relative to their other concerns) to the voters. And so forth.
This line of thought on Freedland's part is just the latest chapter in the big book of the persistent refusal by many of the war's opponents to accept that a divisive political issue was resolved in the only way it could have been, that is, politically, democratically. It is the signal of an intention to go on and on and on. They marched, argued, agitated, but didn't prevail; why, parliament went and voted differently from their wishes. They wanted one inquiry, another inquiry, but these inquiries didn't find as they preferred; some would have had yet another, and different, inquiry. They will, if they can, call the law down on their side, and if this fails them, who knows what other higher instance. But Blair must at all costs be punished for failing to see things their way.
The reason for the relentlessness and fury of this response is one I've speculated on several times already on this blog. I just may do so again before we get to Thursday. For now I will conclude on Jonathan Freedland by repeating that election results, at least when they are clear-cut, do have a way of altering the terms of a political debate.