Blind prejudice

If Blunkett is indeed prickly and self-absorbed, it's because he's a politician, not because he's blind.

There is nothing funnier than one blind man looking for another blind man at a very crowded party. (Well, I suppose there is. It's the attempted handshake when they finally meet, which can often end with an inadvertent punch on the nose.) The meeting is even harder to engineer when one of them is buried under a heaving sea of bodies, all trying desperately to be the first to congratulate him on his new book.

This is a man who has hardly been off the radio or out of the newspapers this week, being by turns psychoanalysed, called a fantasist and accused of cashing in on his fall from grace. But in the heaving scrum there is no evidence of this universal disapproval. Somewhere near the bottom of it David Blunkett is basking in the adulation, and apparently genuinely enjoying the not always easy experience when you are blind of a volley of voices, coming at you from all directions, all assuming that you will instantly recognise them. "You'll remember me, David. You visited my school in Sheffield in 1998 and I told you that my mother knew your mother."

I know a bit about this because I am the other blind person looking for him, hoping that I can persuade him to do an as-live 30-second trailer for the interview I am scheduled to do with him on BBC Radio Solent. The problem I have, though, when I do finally beat a path to him, is equating the man I am talking to with the description of him I read in the press, all qualities apparently the direct result of his blindness. He is "isolated". He is "prickly". And, the one I take most exception to, "inevitably self-absorbed".

Hang on a minute - let's do a quick reality check. Isolated: this is a man who, at the moment, is managing to be warm, friendly and charming to about 11 people at once. He would probably quite like to be isolated but there seems no prospect of it for the next hour or two. Prickly? Well, yes, I know. It is easy not to be prickly at the likelihood of all these people shelling out £25 a throw for your book - 900 pages worth that I would bet few of them will get through from beginning to end - all contributing to the £400,000 or so he is reportedly expected to earn from the book. But I have now interviewed him many times, made a television documentary about him, tried to persuade him to let me write a book about him - and in all that time I have never found him particularly prickly. Terse sometimes; direct; but unfailingly polite and helpful.

But then there is the self-absorption that "inevitably comes with blindness". Now, I suppose you do have to be self-absorbed to write nearly 1,000 pages about yourself and your job - but, hang on, who else can you think of who has embarked on such an epic? Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Denis Healey, Winston Churchill ... None of them blind, so far as I am aware. But you did perhaps spot the other connection. All politicians. Could it be that here lie the seeds of self-absorption, rather than blindness?

What has really concerned me about some of this writing has not been an urge to defend Blunkett: after all, he is big enough and ugly enough to defend himself. It is this apparently compulsive urge to generalise about what blindness or disability has made of us, but with little justification in fact. Apparently it is inconceivable that any of life's ups and downs can occur without blindness being the guiding principle. I can assure you I know more outgoing, emollient, selfless blind people than I know outgoing, emollient, selfless politicians.

Meanwhile, I am grappling with another set of puzzling contradictions. Here is this bloke, apparently a bit of a curmudgeon and weighed down with the world's troubles - oh, and not able to see his hand in front of his face - none the less chatting away amicably with all and sundry; and then there is poor old Jack Straw, confronted by one solitary Muslim woman, finding himself completely incommunicado because he can't make eye contact with her. I must say the first thing that struck me, but apparently no other journalist, when hearing Jack's faltering explanation on the Today programme about why he found the wearing of the veil so difficult to cope with in one-to-one contact was: "So how does he think David Blunkett gets on at his surgeries, when people could presumably come in with a sack over their head and he'd be none the wiser?"

Say what you like about Blunkett - and most people have this week - the one thing that everyone acknowledges is that his relationship with his constituents is second to none. When I was making my documentary about him, we sought out, in typically journalistic fashion, constituents who would criticise him. We could not find one who had a bad word to say about him, other than the obvious political opponents, so perhaps eye contact is a particularly unhelpful way of getting on with your constituents. Perhaps everyone who wants a warm relationship with their MP should come in wearing a veil.

All this raises another question, of course. If it is so crucial to be able to eyeball somebody before you can feel that you have any sort of meaningful relationship with them, how has Blunkett managed to get on with Straw for all these years? Clearly I have now got 900 pages to wade through before I can find the answer to that question.

When I finally got a moment with David at his book launch party, he amicably dashed off a 30-second, unrehearsed trailer for my interview and even found time to record a get-well message for my producer's dad, who is 80 tomorrow. If that's self-absorbtion, perhaps it is an attribute more people should try to cultivate.

All this reminds me yet again that a lot of people in powerful positions still do not "get" disability. If those kinds of generalisations had been made about race or gender, there would have been an outcry. But these are not seen as generalisations in the context of disability, but as fair comment.

The call to write this column came as I was chairing a conference for Disability Wales in Cardiff, preparing for the loss of the Disability Rights Commission and its replacement with a single body covering race, age and gender. The commission's members fear that their specialist organisation is being strangled before getting beyond its infancy, with its job hardly started, let alone finished. In the light of what passes for fair comment on disability, they may well have a point.