Tall Tales of a Regular Guy

Tall Tales of a Regular Guy

Paul Thompson: Blair’s Journey

I DON’T normally read political autobiographies. Too much self-regarding trivia, too many names dropped, too little insight and honesty. Neither, apparently, does Tony Blair: “Most such memoirs are, I have found, rather easy to put down.” With the weight of recent history, to say nothing of 700-plus pages, I know the feeling. Blair’s name-dropping in A Journey is pretty relentless. He has a lot of “friends”—Clinton, (George W.) Bush, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Merkel—whom he admires and unstintingly praises. The only people he appears to dislike or at least dismiss are in his own party. If he and Gordon Brown were New Labour’s marriage made in heaven, here Blair serves the personal and political divorce papers.

It would be misleading, however, to present the book as a vehicle for personal aggrandizement and political score-settling. Blair is often startling honest about his character, fears and demons, lapses of judgment. Of the monstrous ego so characteristic of many political leaders, there is little sign. Blair’s reflections confirm the impression one gets upon meeting him—a warm, open, emotionally literate man who is generous toward others, particularly his own staff, friends, and colleagues. He can also be witty; there are some nice, funny stories and self-deprecating asides.

The book is framed as a journey, but a closer reading reveals three journeys: from normal guy to wearied but unbowed political survivor; from bold domestic modernizer to frustrated reformer; and from foreign policy novice to world statesman (hated or revered—take your choice). Each will be taken up in turn.

Mr. Normal

Blair gives little indication of his political apprenticeship. He tells us that he wasn’t active or even a member of the Labour Club during his university days at Oxford, and for a period after that he was busy in his legal practice. In the early 1980s, his wife Cherie was certainly better known in activist circles. She was on the Executive Committee of the Labour Coordinating Committee (the erstwhile center-left pressure group on the Labour Party) when I became a member of that Committee in 1983. Blair’s selection as a candidate to fight in the special election at Beaconsfield in 1982 and for the safe Labour seat of Sedgefield a year later are presented more as accident of history than grand plan. All this is consistent with a persistent theme of the book: Blair as a “normal,” even “non-political” kind of guy with friends and concerns outside politics.

Such a self-perception is not unusual for politicians in this day, and Blair makes explicit parallels between himself and George W. Bush. It’s central to Blair’s political argument, because he believes that he has some kind of cultural and ideological hot-line to the British people. In particular he “gets” aspiration, and getting aspiration got New Labour elected three times. This is contrasted to standard-issue left intellectuals who, though well-meaning and caring, resent success and don’t “feel” like normal folk. Blair has a go at Ed Balls, a recent Labour leadership candidate and (so he believes) the brains behind Gordon Brown, for seeking to block “aspirational” public sector reform. He also takes aim at Jon Cruddas, deputy leadership candidate and unofficial leader of the British center-Left, for trying to build an electoral coalition out of “Guardian intellectuals and trade union activists.”

Blair may well genuinely believe all this, and it’s true, as he says, that people from any background can have the common touch. But social background does shape social orientation. He is a posh boy who attended the most elite private school in Edinburgh. Aspiration is indelibly linked in that experience with individual rather than collective action—people want “choice, freedom to earn more money and spend it.” He is right that some on the Left ignore the electorate’s concerns with crime and immigration. But that is not typical of and in Labour. Cruddas warned the leadership about the danger that “too many people coming too fast” would affect the job and housing prospects of his Dagenham constituents. But he also pointed out that New Labour had more or less stopped building social housing and showed no understanding of the labor market insecurities of the average wage earner. In fact, the hopes and fears of Dagenham’s electorate—continually written off as traditional, working-class voters—were outside Blair’s tunnel vision of New Labour and middle England. “Aspiration” legitimizes his unwillingness to address issues of inequality. The imperative to make “wealthy people…feel at home and welcomed in the UK” leads him to want to preserve the Thatcherite legacy of “competitive tax rates.”

A Domestic Journey: Enter and Exit the Modernizer

Unsurprisingly, Blair’s initial time in office was dominated by a domestic political agenda. But what was his “boundless, at times rather manic lust for modernisation” actually directed toward—Britain’s hollowed-out industrial base, its centralized political structures, or entrenched class inequalities? None of the above. He defined the task ahead as reform of public services. Blair evinces frustration at the lack of progress on this great task in his first term (1997-2001). Many would disagree, instead seeing the first period of office as the time when New Labour made many of its most durable reforms—such as devolution to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and the passage of a national minimum wage.

However, he’s right that New Labour was not radical enough when it had the chance. Blair confesses to being obsessed with the notion that “the country might take fright at the mandate it had given us.” A more plausible reading is that he and the rest of the New Labour leadership were terrified of the opportunities that the conclusive 1997 victory and the subsequent high expectations from the public had created. Whatever the explanation, once the initial radical reforms from the “New Labour, New Life for Britain” manifesto of 1996 were introduced, the political project stalled, with further progress hampered by a mistaken pledge to stick to Tory spending plans.

If the first term was partially “wasted” in Blair’s mind, the second was to be about “delivery.” However, as he spelled out in a famous speech in 1999, the “forces of conservatism” and “vast vested interests” hostile to change apparently stood in the way of the modernization of public services. Blair continually contrasts this to the dynamism of the market and the private sector, always looking for ways to bring its people and methods to government. Yet for all his market worship, the book shows that Blair is naïve and largely ignorant about the private sector. This is a place where no vested interests ever rear their ugly heads, where monopolies never restrict consumer choice or workers’ rights. Little or no mention is made of the financial sector, its excesses, and the failure to regulate it. In part, this reflects his division of labor with Brown, who oversaw economic policy.

The obsession with public sector “reform” continued into subsequent administrations. Labour did pump significant investment into health and education in its third term (2005-2009), but it was always entangled with attempts to introduce further marketization and individual choice. Though Blair admits that New Labour always painted public sector unions and professional groups as the obstacles to change, many of the proposals it made were unpopular with wider sections of the public, whom Blair then has to describe as “ultimately ill-informed” and to be ignored. Such policy orientations have to be related back to earlier observations about Blair’s personal and political biography. There is a revealing passage where Blair says, “I take an essentially middle-class view of public services,” going on to justify his own choice of schools for his children by claiming that good state provision is “reasonably rare.” That view is belied by the facts of steadily rising educational standards.

An Innocent Abroad?

The most gripping chapter in A Journey concerns Northern Ireland. Blair deserves immense credit for his role in the peace process. He attributes his success to patience, an ability to motivate and persuade, and good tactics. The chapter ends with ten “core principles” for dealing with international policy conflicts. They are largely banal—leaders matter, never give up—and limited outside the conditions of the particular conflict from which he drew them. Unfortunately, they are also a sign that Blair thinks he has some unique capacity to address and solve international issues.

This belief was no doubt reinforced by the second scenario discussed in the book—Kosovo. Again, Blair comes out of the events looking good. He is the man of principle, the determined leader who persuades or cajoles Clinton and other allies first to intervene militarily and then to commit troops on the ground. Emboldened by success, Blair then expanded and generalized his foreign policy principles, notably through an April 1999 speech in Chicago. There he further articulated the idea that regime change, to overthrow despots of various stripes, could be justified without reference to any threat to immediate interests. As a result he became the darling of the America media and a fellow traveller with the Bush neocons. Blair is sometimes annoyed with the neocon label and at other times embraces it. The latter is not surprising, given the language of “enforcing liberal democracy” and the recurrent parallels drawn between the long struggle against communism and the seemingly endless war on terror.

What is clear is that Blair’s previous successes emboldened his sense that an aggressively interventionist foreign policy is effective and that he could persuade any number of potential allies to back it. Then came Iraq. The public perception of failure leads Blair to spend three long chapters outlining and explaining the course of events. He plaintively asks the reader to keep an open mind and to reflect on “whether I may have been right.” I have, and he wasn’t. More importantly, Blair says nothing significantly new in these chapters. On weapons of mass destruction, his arguments are particularly tortuous and evasive. He repeats that he believed in their presence in Iraq “without any doubt at all.” If he did, that was foolish. At a reception in early 2003 for the journal I then edited, I spoke to Robin Cook, who was until 2001 British Foreign Secretary. He was blunt—“there are no weapons of mass destruction.” Blair mentions a conversation with Cook in which the latter predicted domestic disaster if Labour backed the invasion, particularly without UN support. This indeed came to pass. Blair admits that on Iraq, he was “as isolated as it is possible to be in politics.” His determination to push ahead regardless of what anyone in his own party or the electorate thought led to the destruction of whatever remained of his and New Labour’s political legitimacy.

Endgame

Although Blair often mentions his love affair with the public, the book also reveals that he knew that the love affair could not last: “Get out before they stop listening, stop liking, and start loathing. That was my hope.” He didn’t take his own advice. Like Mao’s trip down the Yangtze River, the great leader was determined to finish his political journey, even if he was swimming against the tide of public opinion. By early in the third term, Blair knew he had lost the public but remained convinced that his story had not ended. He took a perverse pleasure in carrying on with unpopular policies, possibly because he knew the end—giving a date for stepping down and enabling the long-awaited Brown accession to take place—was in sight. “Being in touch,” Blair says, was replaced by “doing what was right.” As that time drew near, he was reduced to making long, set-piece speeches that he admits few people listened to.

Despite his growing unpopularity at the time, he doesn’t take any responsibility for Labour’s subsequent general election defeat. Instead, Labour lost in 2010 because it departed from the New Labour recipe, and Brown was to blame for reverting to Old Labour tax-and-spend policies, thus alienating middle-ground, middle England. Even setting aside the fact that “tax and spend” was largely a response to the global financial crisis, as it was with Obama, Blair’s judgment on the trajectory of electoral politics indicates a high degree of willful, if convenient, self-delusion. Labour has lost close to five million votes since the 1997 landslide. Almost four million of those were lost during his leadership (in the elections of 2001 and 2005).

Conclusion

“I begin as one type of leader; I end as another.”

Now, Blair is politically estranged from the Left and continues to sing the neocon foreign policy tune, the new Labour leader Ed Miliband has pronounced New Labour dead, and David Cameron has risen to the premiership in a campaign almost straight out of the New Labour handbook. Where has Blair ended up? It would be easy just to say on the Right, and that would not be wholly inaccurate. In a postscript, he sides unambiguously with the current Coalition government on deficit reduction, attacking Keynesian responses and any view that the state is or should be back in fashion after the global financial crisis. But such a judgment may be too simple. By the end of his time in office, Blair had started to act like a president in a party system, reinforcing his long standing rejection of tribal politics and left/right labels.

Perhaps he thinks he is in the wrong country. There a lot of comments in the book that reveal Blair’s preference for the USA, a land where class apparently doesn’t matter and aspiration is king.* “It’s why I like America. I adore that notion of coming from nothing and making something of yourself.” Then there’s the little matter of religion. At the end of the book, Blair makes the startling claim that he was always more interested in religion than politics and promotes the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which he founded in 2008. Well, good luck on that one. He might be wise to remember the famous statement that his chief of staff, Alistair Campbell, made about British politics: “We don’t do God.” Indeed, the three current major party leaders are either atheists (Miliband, Nick Clegg) or “questioning Christians” (Cameron).

In the end we learn more about Blair’s personal journey than the transformation of British politics, or of the Labour Party. That is partly because the book was written through the prism of who Blair became, rather than as a contemporaneous narrative. If you want the latter, the two volumes of diaries by Chris Mullin—a left-wing junior minister in various New Labour administrations—are a better, more accurate, and funnier account. Whatever his political disagreements with Blair, Mullins can’t help liking “the Man” (as he always calls Blair). That may well be a reasonable overall judgment of Blair’s book.

Paul Thompson has been a long-time leading figure on the modernizing Left of the Labour Party. From 1993–2007 he was editor of Renewal: A Journal of Labour Politics and before that chair of the Labour Coordinating Committee. He is currently Professor of Organisational Analysis at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

*Editor’s note: The American edition of the book, published by Knopf, includes a “love letter” introduction, from Blair to America, in which he writes, “The essential values [America] embodies are so much more fundamental to our fortune than even Americans themselves may appreciate.”