French schoolgirls from outer space boggled my mind

The other day I was stopped in the streets of Bath by two young girls who waved a questionnaire at me and wanted to know if they could ask me a question.

Normally, when I am stopped by females waving questionnaires, I will either run like mad or lie through my teeth to get away, because although these consumer-oriented harpies like to tell you it will only take a moment, they always put you through at least a quarter of an hour of hellish questions.

This time it was different. For a start, the girls were only about twelve. For another start, they were French. And the single question they asked was very simple: "Please, do you know who is Tony Blair?"

I have often seen gangs of French children wandering through Bath, so it is clearly a favourite target for cross-Channel school outings, and most of them carry little study sheets and questionnaires which must be designed to focus their visit and prevent them spending all their time shopping and shoplifting.

(I wonder if the French realise that they have a reputation in the whole of the south of England for being compulsive shoplifters? I have been told about this by shopkeepers as far apart as London and the Channel Islands. If the English are a nation of shopkeepers, then the French are popularly supposed to be a nation of shoplifters. Personally, I think that if there is any truth in it, it is probably because it is a statistical certainty. Most of the foreign shoppers are French, so it stands to reason that most of the foreign shoplifters will be French as well. Still, it is unnerving to go into a shop in Bath and see a notice saying All Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted written in French and no other language...)

And I have often wondered what questions these young French persons were asked in their wanderings round Bath, what ingenious artistic, historical or architectural posers they were being posed, and now I knew. It was: "Do you know who is Tony Blair?", a bit of information, to be honest, which they could have picked up without leaving France.

Ah, but were they trying to find out who Tony Blair was, or whether I knew who he was? Was it my ignorance or their ignorance they were exploring? Was the question on their paper "Can you try and find out how many Englishmen in the street know who Tony Blair is?" or was it "Who on earth is Tony Blair?"

I had a look at the paper: "Qui est Tony Blair?"

"He is the Prime Minister," I said.

They looked at each other.

"Prime Minister? What is that? Qu'est-ce que c'est que le PM?"

It was beginning to dawn on me that these two little French girls were not terribly interested in politics. If they didn't know who Tony Blair was, or what a Prime Minister was, then they probably didn't even know who their own French Prime Minister was or what he did. Why, even I, a benighted Englishman, know who the French Prime Minister is. It is Scott Joplin. No, not Scott Joplin, but a name like that...

"Well, a Prime Minister is the man who... or woman who..."

Who what? There flashed through my mind all the articles I had read recently which explained that the PM no longer has any real power, that it is all in the hands of the big global corporations, that the PM can only tinker with the system, playing at devolution, playing at reforming the Upper House, and so on. There also flashed through my mind all the other articles I had read entitled "Who is Tony Blair?" or "Will the real Tony Blair stand up, please?", in which it was made clear either that Tony Blair is a genuine politician, or that he was nothing of the sort, only a power- hungry manipulator... Somewhere, no doubt, there is an article explaining why a power-mad manipulator like Tony Blair should want to occupy a post with no power...

Still, as an in-touch British journalist I owed it to these two young French girls to give some sort of explanation.

"Well," I said, "the way it works is this..."

They had gone. No doubt tired of my hesitation, they had gone in search of someone less vacillating.

Or perhaps I had received a visitation. Perhaps, in an effort to get me thinking about Tony Blair, and politics, and the nature of power, someone had actually sent me a vision. Perhaps a couple of angels, disguised as French schoolgirls, had been sent to set me thinking...

It's a humbling thought that I have been chosen for this. Ever since my encounter with them, I have often asked myself "Who is Tony Blair?"

It has never failed to put me straight into a deep sleep.