Humphrey--Gone to the Heavyside?

After barely an hour here, it was easy for me to see that the six-month honeymoon of Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair is over. First, a couple of weeks ago, had come disclosures that Blair, the great excoriator of Tory sleaze, had accepted a 1-million-pound bribe (“donation to the Labor Party”) to exclude Formula One racing from a ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship. And now the newspapers are full of allegations that Blair and his wife Cherie have done away with the Downing Street cat.

Humphrey, black and white, took up residence in and around No. 10 at some point in the Thatcher years, becoming a well known prowler in the corridors of power. Humphrey lasted through John Major’s tenure and went AWOL only in recent weeks. Suspicion swiftly focused on Cherie, known to have cat allergies.

Simultaneous to Humphrey’s disappearance, his hated rival Scrounger, the St. James’s Park cat, also went missing. Keepers at the park were fond of Scrounger, one of them telling the press that “Scrounger was a good ratter and an important part of the team.” Humphrey liked hunting ducks in St. James’s and would venture into Scrounger’s territory in search of prey. The two, according to the keeper, “did have the occasional scrap.”

The Blairs think of nothing more intently than the sort of press they receive. Plainly, they saw that the Humphrey affair could do them even more damage than the Formula One debacle. A week ago, the media were summoned to an undisclosed location in the suburbs of London, where they were allowed to photograph Humphrey, who was posed, a bit like those kidnap victims in Lebanon a few years back, amid newspapers displaying dates and other evidence that this was not a fake. The official line is that Humphrey has kidney trouble, i.e., is decorating the PM’s carpets and lowering the tone. Opinion in the visiting press corps was mixed. Privately, one said it seemed like the old Humphrey to him. But another said this “Humphrey” seemed younger.

It sounds like curtains for Humphrey.

But the Blairs still screwed up their PR. Humphrey had been posed next to a goldfish bowl, and the next day one of the newspapers ran a letter from Lord and Lady Renton saying that they were “deeply distressed by the photograph . . . and indeed television pictures of an innocent goldfish being terrorized by Humphrey.” Another letter said darkly that “New Labor will have to provide better evidence [about Humphrey’s safety] than secret trysts attended by fellow traveling journalists. It’s all too reminiscent of the early Hitler years for comfort, even if the fables are only about a cat.”

As a matter of fact, Hitler loved pets.

The Humphrey saga is a parable of so-called New Labor. Blair and his crowd sweep in, promising a clean broom, a new dawn. Inter alia, they pledge to ban fox hunting, which is an easy option since the rural pro-hunt vote will never be theirs. Then the Blairs are confronted with an elderly cat with maybe a little incontinence problem and . . . hey nonny nonny, it’s off with Humphrey to the suburbs and then the friendly vet with the needle.

Meanwhile, Labor’s first budget will clean up the welfare mess by taking money away from single mothers toward the financing of child-care centers. In other words, force the mothers into low-paying jobs and farm out the kids, thus increasing the potential of social and familial mess. You’ve heard it all before. The left of the Labor Party is already in rebellion.

Blair, who in so many ways modeled himself on Bill Clinton in his determination not to be saddled with old political baggage, is different from ol’ Bill in that where Blair feels that he won’t be boxed in as a throwback to the old Socialist past, he’s not afraid to take a stand. He’s the first British prime minister since the early 1920s to agree to meet publicly, on the steps of No. 10, with a Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams.

But mostly, Blair’s as rabid as Clinton to take no risk, to be corporate-friendly and to pick the easy political options, like welfare “cleanup” and toughness on crime. But some of the footprints of his true character are beginning to show, nowhere more vividly than in the Formula One affair and in the murky business of the exiled Humphrey. Is it fair to judge a politician by the treatment of his pet? Absolutely--much more than by the way he deals with his wife. No one worried whether Lyndon Johnson picked up Lady Bird by her ears, as he did his hound Him. Even Richard Nixon tried to get his Irish setter, King Timahoe, to love him publicly. And talking of presidential pets, where exactly is Socks, now that Chelsea’s left home?