Death of an individual, accentuates the Clones

My impression of Tony Blair's grisly promotion of his auto biography, is somewhat blighted by his assertion that he couldn't foresee the Iraq blood bath the he and president Bush enabled by a halfassed military campaign that whilst it removed an evil bastard like Saddam Hussein hurrah! was swiftly follow by a predictable collapse of law and order resulting in the death of many thousands and American businesses accessing billions of unaccounted for re-construction dollars.

Still since all that's a million miles away from us in these parts, we'll put that to the back of our minds, perhaps what really sums up Blair, if I was paying attention was Blair's suggestion that modern politics is about project management rather than Ideology's, meaning the core values and principles that politicians and political parties used to feel passionate about.

Naturally the thought occurred that if you look at any leaders Blair, Brown, Cameron, Clegg, or even the wannabees like the Milliband boys, what a bland uninspiring and mediocre bunch they all are, coming back briefly to Blair, clearly Gordon Brown caused him immense grief in office, and yet rather boringly he still considers him a friend, and Gordon Brown to this point has failed to respond, conflict without emotion.

Political parties have become drab boring organisations populated with leaders or future leaders competing to be as inoffensive nondescript as is possible carefully modifying their views to fit the latest available market research, what a future.

Of course this isn't new, but politics should be about the individual, even if ambitious politicians like to convince us that the are just like you and I, well of course they are not, but just occasionally an individual politician does come along and often they'll prove it by saying stuff which doesn't fit comfortably with the mainstream,  so how upsetting, last weeks news that Sir Cyril Smith had died, a politician, who seemed unafraid to express blunt honest opinions, irrespective of mainstream opinion, which had the effect of making him immensely popular with normal people, an example to legions of dull mediocre cloned politicians of all parties.

BBC News Cyril Smith obit