This is a central theme of every major statement on Europe. Britain, he told an Indian audience earlier this year, has lost an empire but found a "modern foreign policy role" as, wait for it, "a pivotal partner". More seriously, what runs through all Blair foreign policy speeches is a preoccupation, amounting almost to an obsession, with leadership. As in "brilliant job at Quidditch, Harry". Consider for a moment the word "brilliance" - not one you might instantly associate with soldiers - and you realise that it is actually the noun form of the colloquial adjective "brilliant", or "brill". We will stay with you to the last." Later in the same extraordinary oration, he said: "And we as a country should, and I as prime minister do, give thanks for the brilliance, dedication and sheer professionalism of the British Armed Forces". When he spoke of America to the Labour party conference last year, the cadence of school chapel unmistakably sounded through: "We were with you at the first. In his otherwise excellent and clear-sighted Warsaw speech on Europe he suddenly described the British as "a proud and independent-minded island race (though with much European blood flowing in our veins)". It says something, that old school mug.Īnd it's not just the body language. Yet I have a distinct recollection (I hope this is not violating the Official Secrets Act) that when a few scholars of Europe were asked to go and discuss the continent with him some time before the 1997 election, one of us - or was it him? - was served tea in a Fettes College mug. This is a little odd, since by all accounts at Fettes College he was rather a rebel, not the school prefect type at all. To anyone who has had the dubious privilege of attending a real-life Hogwarts, his body language and his whole style are irresistibly reminiscent of the school prefect or Head of House. For all the Nehru suits, glitz and programmatic internationalism, Tony Blair remains a tremendously English public school type. Then there is Tony Blair and the World Community, currently showing at airports in West Africa. (In case you think JK Rowling's names for school boarding houses are a tad fanciful, note that two rival houses at Fettes College, the public school attended by Tony Blair, are called Moredun and Kimmerghame.) The values are loyalty, courage, comradeship and, above all, house spirit, when Harry's wizard performance as scrum half - sorry, Seeker in Quidditch - brings glory to Gryffindor against the perfidious Slytherin. The book, and the film, dwell lovingly on all the obscure details of school uniform, rules, privileges, house colours and so on.
Stripped of the wizardry, here is a quite old-fashioned yarn of English public school life.
The case is even stranger with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
0 kommentar(er)
