In 2001, I spent a chatty weekend in England with British academics and policy wonks. It often felt like a Tony Blair impersonators’ convention. “I know what you mean,” said a British reporter: “Shallow enthusiasm.”

Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart wrote on this yesterday. He described the Blair style: “Sentences without real content . . . vague aspirations rather than real commitments . . . oratorical Muzak, conveying little but a sense of well-being.” I shan’t miss Tones.

The point isn’t his lack of a vision. I think the “vision thing” is a crock. It’s become a menu item politicians order from their flacks the same way they get hairstyles. But it’s another matter to lack any real purpose except proving that your party can win elections, too.

“I have an irreducible core,” Tony Blair protested in 2000, the way Richard Nixon said, “I am not a crook.” When you reach the point that you have to issue a denial, the impression is probably indelible. It’s about his lack of discernible principles, or even indiscernible ones. Someone recently called Tony Blair the first Labour leader who was not “recognizably ‘Labour.’ ” I think that’s vague enough. You don’t need to be rigid, or fill a checklist. But there should be something basic, principled and connected to a tradition — beyond your desire to win.

Bill Clinton is an obvious parallel: a winner, ostensibly left, also with a highly elastic political core. In 1980, he lost his bid for re-election as Arkansas governor and concluded it was necessary to accommodate, to avoid losing again. Since it was the Reagan era, that meant accommodating the right. He got tough on welfare and crime, embraced capital punishment, and was re-elected for the next decade. In 1992, he was elected president.

But then what? His big, worthy goal was to end the disgrace of American health care. Yet, he and wife Hillary, who headed the effort, decided from the start that they had to placate the huge insurance industry. So they never allowed a public, “Canadian-style” approach, which most Americans have long favoured, into the discussion. In the end, the industry scuppered the reforms they proposed. For his next term, he didn’t even try; it wasn’t only due to Monica Lewinsky.

It seems to me this is key to the renowned Blair-Clinton “pragmatism.” They didn’t just want to win. Tommy Douglas wanted to win. Sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. And they didn’t just attend to the moods of the time, which any leader must. Both became habitual trucklers to power; that’s what they really meant by pragmatic.

It seems to me this explains Tony Blair’s ruinous foray into Iraq. He’d have been far more popular, and easily won re-election, had he stayed out. But he was convinced those with power have to be accommodated. You must get on their right side if you are to be a winner yourself, whether it’s Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, both of whom he courted for their media clout, or the almighty president of the U.S. He confused pragmatic politics with subservience to power.

This kind of realism always justifies itself by saying you can’t do anything without power. But, in fact, some people accomplish a lot without power — as Tommy Douglas did in his federal years. And you can gain power but do little of value, which is true of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

The horror of these politicians is that their pragmatism went way beyond pragmatic. Neither needed to be as bloodily pragmatic as they were, they could have stayed closer to their roots, their pragmatism itself became ideological. They too easily gave up the fight, in the holy name of realism. It was their besetting sin, as if they liked being ruthless and wanted to throw that in the face of their woolly, overly “idealistic” comrades. Get real. Smell the coffee, as Bob Rae, a Blair-like figure, used to tell his own supporters after being elected as leftist premier of Ontario. There’s something weird going on in there.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.