Added to this, with his (strangely ill-defined) modernism, Blair has an unfettered contempt for “the system”. In practice, this means doing away with or plain ignoring all those “gentlemanly institutions” – the 19th century Civil Service, the hereditary Monarchy and Lords, the Army, the City, the legal establishment and the established Church – which historically acted as Great Britain’s form of checks and balances. The sense that executive power had gotten out of control began in the 1980s with Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher and led to the formation of popular and powerful campaigns for reform. But Blair is worse. Worse because he is not a Tory, and therefore not ultimately bound, like Thatcher, to the strictures of the establishment. His party drinks from the well of socialist centralisation, statist power and interventionist government. Blair is using established powers to push through his own “radical” monopolistic brand of royalism.
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