Tony Blair and political instinct
Monday, September 6th, 2010I’m finally blogging again after a long and partly self-imposed absence.
To kick things off, here’s my column from today’s MEN, on Tony Blair:
Why do people who hate Tony Blair hate him with such a ferocious passion?
The answer, I suspect, isn’t just that they believe he took the country to war with Iraq on the basis of dodgy intelligence.
It isn’t just that they believe that the war was fundamentally misguided.
No; it is also that they suspect, somewhere deep in Mr Blair’s soul, he knows this too. They believe he was simply too weak to stand up to a right-wing American administration.
Their fury is fuelled not only by righteous indignation, but by a deep-rooted sense of betrayal.
They are entirely wrong.
In 2005 – during Mr Blair’s last election campaign as Labour leader – I asked him whether he would still have taken part in the invasion of Iraq had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction.
I expected him to pause; to consider; to agonise, even; or, if not that, then to trot out some carefully-prepared and subtly-worded answer to a question he must have known might be asked.
Instead he said simply and without hesitation: “Yes, I would.”
I’ve been thinking about that moment quite a lot while reading Mr Blair’s memoir, A Journey. I must have interviewed the former-PM more than a dozen times during his years in power. Now, more than ever, I believe he remains fundamentally misunderstood.
Critics of Mr Blair paint him as weak and devious. An ‘actor’. A ‘puppet’. Both descriptions do him an injustice. Yes, he had an unrivalled ability to communicate; to ‘sell’ his policies to his audience. And yes; his decision to support America’s unprovoked, incoherent and badly-thought-out invasion of Iraq will forever tarnish his legacy.
But the fact is he believed in the war, as he believed in almost everything he said.
The correct criticism of Mr Blair is not that he was inauthentic. It is that, as a political thinker, he was shallow. And arguably – for most of the time – this wasn’t a handicap at all, but a liberation.
Mr Blair freely admits he had little time for Labour’s ideology or history. He describes his frustration at party activists who would rather sit around on a Friday night discussing the principles of socialism rather than going out to, in his words, ‘party’. Mr Blair preferred action to discussion. And he relied largely on his political instincts – instincts that were profoundly, and proudly, middle-class.
He was not a socialist, but a meritocrat. He was prepared to put his family first – as when he snubbed local comprehensives and sent his children to an independent school – and he assumed everyone else was, too. He was motivated by success, and access to the finer things in life – and assumed everyone else was, too. He literally struggled to understand anyone who thought differently.
It was Mr Blair’s very ’shallowness’, and overriding faith in these instincts, that allowed him to change the country, fundamentally and indelibly, during his time at Number 10. And the country did change: a national minimum wage, devolution, a settlement in Northern Ireland, academy schools, university tuition fees, an expensive welfare-to-work programme, ASBOs, huge investment in public services, independence for the Bank of England.
Compare his record with that of Gordon Brown.
Here was a man of deep principle; a man steeped in Labour history and values. A man who surely had a philosophically-coherent reason for every decision he ever made. A man who had a decade as Chancellor to reflect on what he would do when he finally got his chance as prime minister.
And when the moment came, what happened? Nothing. There was almost complete paralysis at the heart of government. Mr Brown will be remembered for tackling the global financial crisis – no mean achievement, it is true. But in terms of domestic reform, in terms of changing society? I struggle to think of a single initiative. When I recently put the same point to Ed Miliband – a close ally of Mr Brown – he did, too. It is as if Mr Brown was crushed under the weight of his own thoughts.
Memorable prime ministers – great prime ministers, you might say – are defined not by what they think, but by what they do.
Margaret Thatcher was another instinctive leader.
So was Winston Churchill.
Both, like Mr Blair, has an unshakeable belief that their instincts were right – and shared by a majority of British people, regardless of party allegiance.
Was Mr Blair a great prime minister? That is ultimately a matter of taste. That he changed the country, however, is beyond dispute. And don’t think for a second that he spends sleepless nights worrying that he betrayed his own principles over Iraq. He believed then he had done the right thing; he believes it now; he will probably believe it until his dying day.
He’s that kind of man, you see.