Jack Straw, the Labour front-bench spokesman for something or other, announced this week that he’s retiring from the front-bench. Britain, of course, has begun a week of official mourning. Stunned crowds have gathered in cities and towns throughout the Arab world to bemoan their terrible loss.
American military buglers have been sounding “The Last Post” to mark the professional demise of the man commentators are calling “The Last Statesman”. In Brussells, European Union officials who aren’t on extended holidays (seventeen in total) have “downed tools” for the rest of this month as they try to come to terms with the epoch-changing news. It was rumoured that the FA asked the great Blackburn Rovers fan to attend England’s Hungary match at Wembley earlier this week to allow the public to bid him farewell, but Mr. Straw said he felt there would already be enough talentless incompetents on display.
Once, getting ready for a live interview on the BBC, Straw is reputed to have told the interviewer that he was about to deliver “five minutes of career-enhancing waffle”. If true, that comment seems partly to explain the mystery of Straw’s otherwise baffling political success – after all, he was Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary and was, albeit briefly, and probably mainly by himself, touted as a potential successor to both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
First, Straw possessed the modicum of self-knowledge often denied top-level politicians.
Second, he was the Usain Bolt of bullshitters – he was an absolute master of piffle, blather, drivel, waffle and caveat. Put any question to him, and endless, serpentine sentences would slither from his mouth, delivered in a style that suggested they meant something, when in fact they contained absolutely no substance whatsoever. In Straw, Paxman and Humphrys met their match, mainly because the whole processing power of their brains was entirely engaged in trying to extract sense from the utterances of the calm little weasel in front of them: this would inevitably result in the interviewer’s equivalent of a Microsoft-style Blue Screen of Death and a message to contact their system administrator.
Third, “Tehran Jack” (as the Bush administration dubbed him, due to his propensity for sucking up to Iran) possessed that most vital of political gifts: the ability to cling to office no matter how badly you perform in parliament or how ineptly you run your department (in Straw’s case, the answer to both was “abysmally”). When reading ex-BBC Political Correspondent, Lance Price’s a book about his time as one of Tony Blair’s spin-doctors, I lost count of the number of times he used variants of the comment, “Jack Straw was, as usual, utterly useless”.
But the weird thing is, Straw’s uselessness was no barrier to either advancement or survival. We’ve all known people like that: they breeze in from nowhere, cock it all up, and everyone predicts they’ll be “gone by Christmas” – but, having made themselves indispensible by supporting some even more senior power-monger or other, they’re still there a year later, after which they get promoted, no doubt to the general bemusement of the unfortunate blighters who have to serve under them. In Straw’s case, it seems that he made himself indispensable to Tony Blair by supporting him against the PM’s arch-rival at No. 11. Then, in a breathtaking demonstration of the instinct for self-preservation in action, made himself indispensable by switching sides when it seemed that Gollum was finally about to get his stubby, nail-bitten fingers on The Ring.
Some people, it seems, have no other talent but the ability to advance their careers. Useful talent to have.
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