This Burst of Charity Will Not Fool Blair

Ever since 2001, the comparison between Tony Blair and William Gladstone has become columnar stock in trade. Matthew Parris, ever sharp, was one of the first to draw it after 9/11. Lots of the rest of us have echoed it since. And, yes, some of the similarities between the prime minister and his four-time Victorian Liberal predecessor are striking. Few British leaders have combined the religious, the morally driven, the interventionist and the impetuous more readily than these two.

Yet the Gladstone-Blair comparison goes only so far. It is hard, for example, to imagine Blair returning from holiday in Egypt this week and feeling the inner confidence to say the following, noted down by Gladstone as he returned to London in the autumn of 1876 after campaigning against Turkish policy in the Balkans.

"On Monday morning last between four and five o'clock, I was rattling down from Euston station through the calm and silent streets of London, when there was not a footfall to disturb them. Every house looked so still that it might well have been a receptacle of the dead. But as I came through those long lines of streets, I felt it to be an inspiring and a noble thought that in every one of these houses there were intelligent human beings, my fellow countrymen, who when they woke would give many of their earliest thoughts, aye and some of their most energetic actions, to the terrors and sufferings of Bulgaria."

Politicians of the democratic age have a more cynical and nervous view of their countrymen and women. Rattling through the streets of London in the early hours in 2005, a passing prime minister is more likely to notice the ravages of late-night partying and drinking. And it would be a very confident leader who persuaded himself that the waking thoughts of many Londoners this week would concern the sufferings of Bulgaria or its current equivalent.

That is why it is going to take rather more than the current swell of national self-esteem about the British people's response to the Asian tsunami to reshape Blair's view of the electorate to whom he will shortly make his appeal. The popular response has indeed been inspiring, and may also be a reminder that better angels lurk within all but the most selfish souls. But it does not prove we are a nation of consistently energetic visionaries on the Gladstonian model.

In a sense, we have been here before. Twenty years ago, in the summer of the Ethiopian famine, it was briefly fashionable to see Live Aid and its associated work not just as a rebuke to Margaret Thatcher's aid policy - which it undoubtedly was - but even as a harbinger of new forms of political engagement - which it turned out not to be. Live Aid was, indeed, a major event. It left its mark on many lives. But it did not fundamentally change either Africa's vulnerability to famine or the state of British politics.

The response to the 2004 tsunami, like that to the 1985 famine, caught politics by surprise. In both cases, ministers were wrongfooted by the public's capacity for generosity. But in each case the furore about government inaction has frequently been a surrogate. Those who have had it with Blair have taken out their anger on the fact that he stayed on holiday. But such people would have damned him if he had come back (imagine the charges of presidentialism and headline chasing), just as they have damned him for not doing so. Any stick to beat a dog.

Nevertheless, things have moved on. Twenty years ago, we had a government that deliberately cut overseas aid, that saw supplicants as scroungers, and that was intellectually attracted to the notion that all aid was both corrupt and futile. Today, that is demonstrably no longer so. It would be a travesty to pretend that Blair shares Thatcher's gut contempt for aid as such.

None of this, though, makes Blair a Gladstone. The Grand Old Man may have thought he discerned a sleeping nation capable of being roused to action by Turkey's injustice towards the Bulgarians. Blair, by contrast, is more likely to discern a sleeping nation fearful of an influx of Turks and Bulgarians alike. And who is to say, despair over it as we may, that he is wrong about that? Right now, we may feel good about ourselves. But enjoy it while you can. Come the election, things are likely to be very different.