Tom and Jerry

Peter Brookes has some fun in The Times with this cartoon in which he conflates the celebrity divorce of the year with the ongoing civil war within the Labour Party.

Tony Blair put it rather well the other day when he said that the opposing camps inside Labour is like two completely different cultures "trying to cohabit in the same organism"

Here's more of what Tony Blair had to say about "The guy on the placard" courtesy of John Rentals Facebook page.

“The guy on the placard”

Blair in conversation with Sir Harold Evans, Reuters, New York, yesterday. “There are two types of politics on the left – one is what I would call the culture of protest and the other is the culture of government. And I sometimes liken it to this situation. You’ve got a guy with a placard protesting and there’s a face on the placard, which is the person in government.

“My type of politics: I’m the face on the placard. I’m that bastard. ‘Let’s go get him.’ That’s what government’s about, so when you decide, you divide. You go into a position of authority, people dislike you and so on – but… you can get things done. We tried for a hundred years to have a minimum wage: we got one under my government. We only got it because we were in power.

“Now, the moment you’re in power, some people say it’s not enough, other people say you’ve left out this group… So I’m the face on the placard. The other culture is the guy holding the placard. They don’t really want to be in power; they want to make the people in power respond to their concerns. But it’s a different culture. And what’s happened with the left and not just in the British Labour Party but elsewhere is that these two different cultures are trying to cohabit in the same organism.

“And this is why I say that politics to coming to where certain things that have been building for a long period of time are now manifesting and what I wonder is what’s then going to happen, because I don’t see how those two cultures cohabit. Because the guy holding the placard hates the guy on the placard, and the guy whose face is on the placard is a bit irritated with him because he’s always telling him he wants more, he wants this, he wants that, and he’s saying, yeah, I’m trying to get this job done here.

It’s a big moment in politics. I just have this fear as to whether this populism is something we’re going to have to experience before we realise it’s not really sensible.”

For a full account of Tony Blair's interview visit: http://www.reuters.tv/l/6Yt