A Journey: My Political Life

Everyone's nice guy

This is an amiable memoir, from a very amiable politician. Everyone is "a nice guy." Almost no one, no opponent, no leader of any other country except Saddam Hussein, is not "a nice guy," and like a children's prize day, almost everyone gets a superlative. Lee Kuan Yew was the smartest, Bill Clinton politically the cleverest, George W. Bush the most principled; Nicolas Sarkozy the most energetic; Paul Keating the most entertaining (undoubtedly true, even over apparent runners-up Silvio Berlusconi and Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott—strong contenders certainly). Ariel Sharon was the toughest; with that strange British weakness for scatology, Blair pronounced Sharon "someone who could make the shit go back up the bull's bottom." Condoleezza Rice is, perhaps, the most decent.

His selections and prize-givings are fair, from my limited acquaintance with most of the recipients. Politicians do tend to be affable or they don't win elections, and Tony Blair is a very gracious and companionable, as well as a successful, politician. Apart from Margaret Thatcher, he is the only British prime minister to win three consecutive full-terms since the expansion of the electorate in the first Reform Act of 1832, the only leader in the history of the Labour Party to be consecutively reelected to full terms at all, and one of the very few British party leaders never defeated in a general election, personally or as leader. But it is a little like reading or speaking with Donald Trump: everyone and everything is great.

Those people whom he has occasion to describe other than with perfunctory awards for their particular characteristic of expertise, are generally limned out with insight and often originality. Non-political, or at least non-partisan, personalities, such as Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth, are sketched perceptively, and the elements of leadership challenges, such as the fraught week between Diana's tragic death and the affecting state funeral (in which the author played a decisive and constructive role), are well described. Tony Blair is undoubtedly a very positive and generous-hearted man, an authentic and thoughtfully religious man, in a field crowded with devil-take-the-hindmost cynics at home and smash-and-grab scoundrels abroad. It is much to his credit that he preserved his meliorist views—his genuine affection for most people, his respect for and the respect of his peers—managed to stand for principles that were often unpopular, and made his way so successfully in such a hazardous occupation.

From time to time, Tony Blair's almost impenetrably bonhomous carapace reveals a tiny aperture through which emanate less saintly reflections. He loses patience with the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, a saturnine and capricious manipulator, but never with the even more sinister and ruthless Rupert Murdoch, presumably because Murdoch can still be helpful to Blair as a still young ex-premier. (He is, even now, only fifty-seven.) Murdoch dumped him, as he has deserted all political leaders who were ever helpful to him except for Ronald Reagan, but Blair was leaving office anyway, and chose to overlook it. Blair's contempt for the so-called working press, especially the bbc, shines through his roseate benignity, and he is certainly entitled to that. He is a little absent-minded about the occasions when he asked us (I was then the chairman of the Telegraph newspapers) to help the government with Northern Ireland and with Iraq, and I know I was not the only Conservative national newspaper publisher who did so.

There are also cameo appearances of ego and even, astoundingly in such a spotlessly virtuous narrative, of deviousness. Of his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency of Europe (a misnamed trapeze-act of a job with uncertain powers that was awarded instead to a cipher), he wrote: "I was a big figure, not someone easy to have around if you were worried about your share of the limelight." The implication is he would overshadow the national leaders in Europe, including the president of France and the chancellor of Germany. Despite Blair's and others' unceasing efforts to confederate Europe, the powers of the nominal president of the European Union are limited and fluid, and, like fluid, run quickly downhill in any test with the principal national leaders.

Blair walks us in meticulous detail through the long minuet he conducted with Gordon Brown for the Labour Party leadership and control of the government following the death of John Smith in 1994. Blair outmaneuvered Brown for the leadership, and a nebulous understanding emerged that he would hand over to Brown after two terms— nebulous because, like most verbal commitments to hand over a great office or anything of value, it was subject to re- or misinterpretation. No one not privy to every element of these intricate discussions can know exactly what happened, and Blair and Brown, the only people who meet that criterion, clearly do not agree about it. Blair believes that he had to be elected to a third term to protect "New Labour" and its reforms from Brown's tendencies to backslide into "Old Labour," the union-dominated, tax-and-spend socialism that made the Conservatives the natural party of government between the fall of the last Liberal prime minister, David Lloyd George, in 1922 and the emergence of Blair's confection of New Labour in 1997. (In the seventy-five years between those dates, the Conservatives governed for forty-six years, and also dominated coalitions for nine years, against twenty years of Labour rule.) Blair clearly rewrote the rules to run for a third term, continued to improvise on them as he served half that term, and handed Brown a thoroughly discredited regime when he stepped down in 2007.

Blair's explanation for his struggles, as one who states, doubtless with perfect justification, that he could intuit the mindset of contemporary middle Britain, was that he gauged public opinion correctly, but did not agree with it. This is the traditional challenge of the leader, and the litmus test for great leadership: to lead opinion to a more enlightened perspective. Thatcher led opinion away from the socialist basket case the previous Labour regime of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan had left when she sent them packing in 1979 for an eighteen-year Conservative tenure of government. Roosevelt led American opinion to all aid short of war for Britain and Canada in 1940–1941; Truman led it out of isolationism to support the Marshall Plan and NATO. Ronald Reagan led them into monetarism, supply side economics, and the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Blair recognized that British public opinion was unconvinced on Iraq and that it blamed Israel for the attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. In his explication of these matters, (and he is now the European Union's representative in the Middle East), he shows his finest quality, courageous and righteous defense of principle, but also one of his worrisome traits—a naïve difficulty in grasping the less constructive aspects of national interest. He makes a very strong case that Saddam Hussein had to be deposed: the international case of his violation of seventeen U.N. security council resolutions and violation of the Gulf War ceasefire terms, as well as his barbarous despotism. And he forcefully makes the point that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization and that, ghastly though the consequences of war for innocent civilians are, Israel had the right to require the abatement of terrorist cross-border raids and rocket attacks.

Blair was effective leading on the first issue and has testified impressively on the Iraq War and the absence of a wmd discovery in post-Saddam Iraq, but he did not try to lead opinion on the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006, even though the major Arab powers, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, overtly supported it. He purports to believe that the Palestinians would make peace tomorrow if they were sure that Israel would allow them to be really independent, and that the Israelis would agree Palestinian independence simultaneously, if convinced that the Palestinians would really accept the permanence of a Jewish state. And he seemed to take seriously former Pakistani President Musharraf's assertion that it would be much easier to deal with al-Qaeda and the Taliban if Blair and Bush would just "do Palestine," as if that were a simple matter. Palestine has been sustained and aggravated as a problem for sixty years by the Arab powers because it is the hair-shirt of Arab failure and thirteen centuries of Arab retreat and because it conveniently distracts the Arab masses from the tyranny and misgovernment inflicted on virtually all Arab citizens, except, to a degree, those that live in Israel.

Blair also purports to believe that we just have to stay the course in Iraq and Afghanistan and conciliate the Palestinians and Israelis. While his defense of the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam are cogent, he seems not to understand why it went so horribly wrong between the invasion in 2003 and the surge in 2006. Next to the failure to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam and the failure of military intelligence to detect and warn MacArthur and Truman that there were 140,000 Red Chinese troops across the Yalu in North Korea in early 1950, the greatest military blunder in American history was the disbanding of the 400,000 members of the Iraqi army and police, dismissed into unemployment but allowed to retain their weapons and munitions. What could "the admirable and committed" Bremer and Rumsfeld have imagined—that they would all become targets-shooting or game-hunting enthusiasts, instead of, as happened, hired factions in a civil war? According to Tony Blair, this policy was "open to dispute." It does not do to write, as he does, that the Iraqi Army melted away—it was officially abolished. Much of it could have been rallied to a post-Saddam regime, and at least kept out of the ensuing bloodbath of which it became the chief cause and executant, if it had been handled like the German and Japanese forces after World War II. (The Japanese army, under American orders and with drastically changed rules of engagement, kept order in much of China for six months after their surrender.)

The same inexplicably simplistic perspective (for such an agile politician) pops up elsewhere. Thus, Britain must have integration with Europe and retention of the Special Relationship—not to say, in Churchillian terms, Grand Alliance—with the United States. After ten years of government, he had not moved the needle on British public opinion over Europe, and he never grasped that you cannot engage in this sort of strategic bigamy: the perpetuation of an alliance of two great sovereign Ships of State (Longfellow's verse famously sent by Roosevelt to Churchill in 1941 and read over the airwaves by Churchill), while plunging into total Euro-immersion.

He dismisses as nonsense the Thatcherite view of Europe, although the European Union, except for Britain, has not really created a new private sector job in ten years and the southern countries clearly sold the Europeans a false prospectus on joining the Euro, expecting Germany and France to pay for it. Yet he congratulates himself on the French defeat of the integrationist Treaty of Lisbon, as it enabled his government to escape its own promise of a plebiscite and subscribe by mere adherence, jammed through Parliament by government whips in the teeth of a hostile public opinion.

The point, as he must know better than anyone, given that he is the undisputed British heavyweight political champion of post-Thatcher Britain, is that the public do not want to go back to pre-Thatcher industrial relations, and Blair spared them that; do not want to go back to pre-Thatcher taxing and spending, and Blair and Brown crept up on it like Birnam Wood on Dunsinane; and do not want their relations with the United States, the key to Britain's influence and even survival in the last sixty years, subsumed into a Continental diplomacy dominated by the Willemstrasse and the Quai d'Orsay. He fails even to try to explain why Europe, which would drag Britain backwards in all these areas, should be embraced so wholeheartedly by an electorate that he completely failed, after ten years of half-hearted effort, to persuade of its virtues.

Blair identifies the effort of the French, Germans, and Russians to form an alternate pole of influence to the Anglo-Americans before the start of the Iraq War, yet blames America for not developing a relationship of perfect trust with Russia and advises it to avoid the same mistake with China. Of course, he is too astute and worldly not to realize that Great Powers become friendly with each other by aligning their interests together, not by cooing at each other like New Labour doves in London's famous squares. He does not, as far as I could detect, mention the Commonwealth once, despite the fact that the combined gdp of just the United Kingdom, India, Canada, Australia, and Singapore would be the third largest in the world, after the United States and the European Union, and larger than China's and Japan's combined.

This leads us to this memoir's greatest problem: Tony Blair is pretty clear in his view, which he implies is almost unquestionable, that he was an important and successful prime minister. But he wasn't especially successful. He promoted the Labour Party from an occasional contrapuntal appeasement of the need for a change in governing party in a democracy, to a respectable alternate government, but it didn't work and ended in shambles. He says it is inevitable that leaders are unpopular after ten years, but he's incorrect—it isn't inevitable. If Thatcher had finessed it at all, she would have been fine for a fourth straight Conservative term, which John Major took instead. If health and the Constitution had allowed, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and even Bill Clinton would have been alright for a third term, as fdr was.

Blair claimed to me when he was opposition leader that he would be more "radical" than Thatcher with health care, that a Labour Party leader was needed to apply the rod to the backs of the nurses' and teachers' unions, "as a Republican U.S. president had to go to China and a Likud leader of Israel had to make a deal with Egypt." In this book, he claims to have achieved "radical" change in the National Health Service, education, pensions, and crime prevention. This is bunk. The Health Service, with billions more thrown at it, remains Europe's largest and most inefficient employer (after the disappearance of the Red Army); education is still mired in the Luddite time-and-motion obtuseness and the philistinism of the teachers' unions; and pensions are no longer adequately funded. Blair did not get around to any of this until more than seven years into his mandate, and then only in half measures. His unctuous distinction between New Labour and Brown's Old Labour was largely a blend of self-serving artifice and outright delusion.

Tony Blair claims to have been a "radical" reformer (in the British sense of profound, not the American usage of extreme). In furtherance of this argument, he spends several pages on the changing of weekly Prime Minister's Questions (in Parliament), from two fifteen-minute sessions to one of thirty minutes, and a page on expanding the G-8 Conference to a G-13 (and now on its way to a G-20), as if more conferences between government leaders were any sort of reform. They bore and irritate almost everyone, including the participants, the taxpayers who foot the bill, and the world. He has bought wholly into the most horrifying climate change horror scenario, even though global warming has been by only one degree in the last thirty-five years, despite more than a doubling of carbon emissions. He proclaims his rival Gordon Brown to have been a great Chancellor, but Brown only followed Paul Keating's advice: "take it off them any way you please," but if you raise income taxes, "they'll rip your "f***ing guts out." (Brown and Blair did take it in every other way, and in the end "they" ripped Labour's guts out anyway.) Next to Alan Greenspan's and Robert Rubin's, Gordon Brown's reputation has been shredded by the recession more thoroughly than any other economically prominent person's, ahead of lions of the private sector such as Sandy Weill and Jack Welch.

Tony Blair limped out of office, claiming he had lost popularity because he didn't explain Iraq and Lebanon (which had no direct British involvement) thoroughly and because of the remorseless effluxion of time, then artfully handed Gordon Brown, who squandered the pristine condition of Britain's finances left by Thatcher, a grenade with the pin pulled. His government was a disguised, long-fuse disaster, yet another Labour Party disaster. And though his foreign policy was Alliance-based and commendable, so too were Attlee's and Harold Wilson's.

There is a jolly forward to the American edition enunciating the greatness of America, a cheerleading effort presumably prompted by the U.S. publisher. The author's admiration of America, for its idealism, meritocratic democracy, and scale, are sincere and nicely formulated. What Blair seems not to realize is that the United States emerged from the greatest, most bloodless, strategic victory in the history of the nation state at the end of the Cold War and has for twenty years, under the presidents he knew and extols (Clinton, Bush, and Obama), made the greatest mess of domestic and foreign policy since the 1920s, if not the prelude to the Civil War. Outsourcing tens of millions of jobs while admitting 15 million unauthorized, unskilled aliens, carrying the European and Japanese luxury goods and engineered products industries on their backs while gorging themselves on Muslim and Venezuelan oil, and issuing trillions of dollars of worthless real estate-backed debt has made for an insane and aberrantly self-destructive a public policy prescription. Unfortunately, Tony Blair was part of it, albeit a small part, a mere second, but he seems to have missed the action, like one of Caesar's bodyguards on the Ides of March. With all this said, A Journey is less self-serving and mendacious than most political memoirs, and is as engaging a read as anyone who has had occasion personally to appreciate the thoughtfulness, decency, and effervescence of its author, as I have, would expect.