By GEORGE WEIGEL [First Things] – There is something rather sad about the fact that Tony Blair, an obviously intelligent man with certain admirable qualities, grasps far less of the truth about Diana, Princess of Wales, than celebrity journalist Tina Brown, whose biography, The Diana Chronicles (2007), shattered a lot of the Diana mythology in which Blair seems stuck like a fly in amber. Yes, as Blair contends, Diana was “hunted down” by the paparazzi and the editors who paid huge sums for pictures of her and her lover, Dodi Fayed. Yes, she was a devoted mother to her two sons, and, yes, her royal husband was a callous, self-absorbed bore of dubious metaphysics and equally dubious morals.

But, as Tina Brown amply demonstrates, Diana was also a wildly ambitious, poorly educated, shallow, and vindictive woman who came close to bringing down the British monarchy in a fit of pique over its unwillingness to integrate her Sloane Ranger style into the royal family. That this woman’s death, however tragic, sent an entire country into a nervous breakdown says something deeply disturbing about the culture of contemporary Britain. That Tony Blair perceived this national crack-up as “a tide that had to be channeled” rather than a nonsense that had to be confronted suggests that he is not quite the Churchillian figure some of his American admirers would like him to be. Imagine Churchill dealing with his fellow Britons in June 1940 the way Blair dealt with his fellow Britons in September 1997, and you can begin to imagine the royal family, led by the heirs of the Nazi-sympathizing duke of Windsor, reverting to speaking German.

This shallowness is of a piece with Blair’s surprisingly superficial view of the West he wishes to defend against jihadists. How is the West to confront the self-destructive cultural malaise of which Blair rightly warns if he can define the West only as a set of political and economic arrangements agreed to on essentially utilitarian grounds?

Continued at First Things | More Chronicle & Notices.