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Blair Plays It Cooler
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
Guardian Newspapers, Limited

A new tone, but few new answers

As he seeks to burnish his credibility on the world stage -- he returned to the Middle East last night -- Tony Blair first needed to hold the line back at home. Yesterday, in his speech in Cardiff, Mr Blair was compelled to address a bubbling culture of growing doubts about the military campaign, reflected in recent press and parliamentary comment, in polls on both sides of the Atlantic, and in a rudderless few days which have seen politicians and military leaders struggling to achieve some kind of consistency and credibility as they come to grips with the realities of the campaign against al-Qaida and Afghanistan.

The manner in which he went about his task in Cardiff showed that Mr Blair remains confident about his cause, convinced about his tactics and, in spite of some real slippage in the polls, sure about his public support too. We had been promised an address of high emotion and Churchillian defiance, full of rallying calls to display greater moral fibre, national backbone and the rest of it. In the event, though, we got a less ambitious speech in a more minor key, shorn of some of the exhortatory phrases that had been promised, and delivered in a cool language designed to play down the drama and to calm Westminster and Fleet Street wobbles.
(More: The Guardian News Source)
2001 © Guardian Newspapers, Limited.

Dan