The British prime minister Tony Blair has been telling friends, and staff in his London office in Downing Street, in confidence over the last few months that he would prefer John Kerry in the White House.
Blair's public position has been one of scrupulous even-handedness, offering no suggestion of support for either Kerry or US President George W. Bush. Newspapers have offered conflicting accounts of his preferred candidacy.
Blair was planning to make a statement on the presidency early yesterday or, at the very latest, at noon, at prime minister's question time in the House of Commons in London.
Downing Street yesterday held to the official line: "We have stood this ground very firmly and can't change it for the final mile."
But in private Blair has let it be known life would be easier for him under a Kerry administration. His thinking is in line with his wife Cherie's, who during Bush's visit to Britain last November referred to him as "that man" who had caused so much trouble for her husband.
Blair's thinking operates on three levels: What is best for the British government, what is best for the Labour party and what is best for him personally.
The answer to the first is that Blair believes that Britain has to remain close to the sole superpower if it is to have influence in world affairs, regardless of whether Bush or Kerry is president.
On the question of what is best for Labour, the answer is Kerry, not least because it would offer Blair an opportunity to try to heal internal disputes over Iraq.
There is a further reason why Labour would benefit. Blair's theory, which he has held since the beginning of the 1990s, is that a Democratic administration creates a political climate that helps leftwing and liberal parties round the world, and this would include Labour at the next election.
The answer to what suits Blair personally is more complex. As a social democrat, he would naturally favor Kerry, as do almost all senior staff at Downing Street and the UK Foreign Office.
One sceptic, a Labour insider, argued yesterday that Blair's apparent shift to Kerry was strategic, aimed at letting Labour supporters think he supported Kerry. The Labour insider argued that Kerry had an interest in raking over the run-up to the war in Iraq and that Blair would suffer from such an inquest.
According to one UK Foreign Office official, a Kerry administration would "change the atmospherics," meaning there would be a more consensual approach to problems such as Iraq, Israel-Palestine and Iran.
For more than two years, Downing Street and the Foreign Office have expressed frustration with Bush over his failure to engage seriously with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Some Downing Street staff and Labour officials have been cultivating Democratic contacts, either attending the Democratic convention or working with the campaign team.
Downing Street has opened its doors to Democrat visitors.
The Democrats have not been wooed with the same vigor that the then British ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, applied to the Bush team in 2000.
Sir David Manning, who is close to the the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has been working at establishing ties with the Kerry team but he has not pursued the Democrats with the same enthusiasm.
The Kerry team has been much more positively vocal about the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, than about Blair. During a Blair visit to the US, the official line from Downing Street and the Kerry team was that no convenient time could be found for a meeting.
In reality, it was Kerry who refused make a space in his diary.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
RSS