The Blair Theatre of Deception. My advise is to stop supporting political labels and start supporting policies.

NO, Prime Minister

December 23, 2010

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A Journey: My Political Life
by Tony Blair
Knopf, 700 pp., $35.00

The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour
by Peter Mandelson
London: Harper, 584 pp., £25.00

The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour
by Andrew Rawnsley
London: Penguin, 895 pp., £12.99 (paper)

Failing Intelligence: The True Story of How We Were Fooled into Going to War in Iraq
by Brian Jones
London: Biteback, 302 pp., $16.99 (paper)

Nick Danzinger/Contact Press Images

Tony Blair and George W. Bush with their aides at Camp David, Maryland,
a week after the invasion of Iraq, March 2003. In the center of the background 
is Blair’s communications chief, Alastair Campbell.

No one who experienced the elated atmosphere of the American presidential election two years ago and who had also been in London in May 1997 could fail to be reminded of the similar mood when Tony Blair won his first general election. He makes the comparison himself. Just as Blair had once been, Barack Obama was greeted by adoring crowds “giving all that you touch something akin to magic.” Blair’s election had “felt like a release, the birth of something better than what had been before,” he writes, and the word “release” is right. After eighteen years of Tory rule, most British voters badly wanted a new government.

But the personable man who entered Downing Street just before his forty-fourth birthday was in many ways an unlikely figure. Blair’s father, who was born poor in Glasgow (and was a youthful Communist), rose to be a prosperous barrister, had hoped to be a Tory MP before he was incapacitated by a stroke, and gave his son the education he had lacked. After attending Fettes, the Edinburgh public school, and Oxford, Blair became a barrister and joined the Labour Party, although he had no roots in the movement or obvious political convictions. In an aside at the end of his memoir, he remarks that he has always been more interested in religion than politics, and he entered Parliament almost by inadvertence.

When I first came across Blair he was standing unsuccesfully in a by-election in 1982. He was elected the following year in an otherwise disastrous general election for his party—Margaret Thatcher’s second triumph—when “I didn’t really think a Labour victory was the best thing for the country, and I was a Labour candidate!” He joined opposition benches much diminished in talent; soon afterward, the Tory politician and diarist Alan Clark spotted “two bright boys called Brown and Blair” among Labour freshmen, and both their stars steadily rose.

After Labour lost again in 1987 and then in 1992, Neil Kinnock resigned the leadership, and John Smith was elected in his place, although Blair considered Smith the real culprit for the latest defeat. Smith had proposed higher taxes for the better-off, which was “great for the party faithful” but electorally disastrous, thought Blair, who saw the need entirely to remodel Labour, discarding its social democratic heritage and offering a sanitized form of Thatcherism. Even he could scarcely have foreseen that “New Labour” under his leadership would win three elections and that he would serve as prime minister for ten years, or where those years would take him, and us.