Bonapartism
A snippet from today’s Guardian:
Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s chief of staff, reportedly said in private last year that he wanted to create a “Bonapartist” system in which Downing Street controlled every element of government. This runs against the constitutional convention that cabinet ministers are accountable to parliament for their departments.
I’m not sure that the essence of Bonapartism was that Downing Street got to control everything. This is, nevertheless, very exciting. Does Mr Powell understand, following Leon Trotsky, that “If two forks are stuck symmetrically into a cork, the latter can stand even on the head of a pin”, and that “That is precisely the schema of Bonapartism”? And with history weighing down like a nightmare on the brains of the living, as it does, do we think Mr Blair will turn out to be more like the Uncle, or the Nephew?