Broken Vows: Tony Blair, The Tragedy of Power
By Tom Bower, Faber & Faber, 688 pages, £20
It was December 1995 and I had just left Tony Blair’s parliamentary office feeling rather pleased with myself. I had interviewed him for an “Analysis” programme on Radio 4 dedicated to unearthing the philosophy behind the “new” politics. Alastair Campbell had been unenthusiastic, but had relented on the proviso that I had half an hour, max. Instead Blair spoke eloquently for more than an hour, answering my questions with effortless gusto. On the way back to the studio, I allowed myself a smile, only for my producer to retort: “That was useless. I’m not sure there is anything to salvage from it.”
She was right. The conversation was an exercise in charm-laden vacuity. We decided to bulk up the programme with various political scientists versed in the “third way”. There were only two conclusions that could be drawn from the mess: either I had conducted a bad interview and was not bright enough to tease out the gems, or the Blair project was an empty shell. That was, for virtually everyone at the time (including a generation of mesmerised Conservatives), unconscionable.
With the benefit of two decades of hindsight, Tom Bower starts from the assumption that Blair was nothing more than a gameshow con artist. He starts there, and after 680 pages of character destruction, he ends there too. Having defenestrated, in previous books, everyone from Richard Branson to Bernie Ecclestone, from Conrad Black to Robert Maxwell, perhaps there is no surprise in the conclusions drawn in Bower’s latest endeavour.
The author is nothing if not assiduous. He has interviewed dozens of former ministers and 200 former civil servants, some perhaps with a score to settle towards a prime minister who barely hid his disdain for Whitehall. Much of the author’s opprobrium is inevitably focused on Cherie — the Lady Macbeth of Fleet Street lore. Bower claims that the day she walked into Downing Street in May 1997, she “dumped her bags at the entrance door, expecting someone to carry them upstairs”.
According to this narrative, she is always scheming and grafting.
The book is replete with priceless vignettes. Just after Christmas 1997, Blair visited the Seychelles where he was a guest of Branson’s for dinner. He wrote his New Year’s message beneath the palm trees, vowing that Labour would “tackle the problems of poverty”. Then there is the sight of the great man dressed in yellow and green underpants in the flat above the Downing Street shop. He greets Campbell with the question: “How many prime ministers have a body like this?”
I can’t help wondering who might have been the source for this piece of information. Surely it can’t have been the doggedly loyal spin-meister?
Throughout the narrative, Bower portrays Blair as a charlatan, a man who is easily bored and cannot think through complex issues of public policy. The party leader who won three elections and, for a time became the poster boy for the international centre-left, had little interest in books or history, Bower asserts. “He lacked any hinterland regarding politicians, social movements and conflicts before 1939. He was uneducated about the Reformation, the French Revolution, the eruption of European nationalism and socialism during the 19th century, the causes and conduct of the First and Second World Wars ... he was even uninformed about the Labour party’s history and its leaders”.
Bower probes the myriad initiatives on the NHS, education standards and crime. Time and again strategies are begun and not seen through. In numerous cases, a parliamentary bill contradicted the one before. An area previously given little attention by historians of Blair is energy policy. Bower goes into detail about the pursuit of an open market by the Labour government, which allowed the purchase of many of the UK’s power stations by state-owned foreign companies — without any attempt at reciprocity. He also traces the surprising source of Labour’s open-door immigration policy to a junior minister, Barbara Roche, and an academic called Sarah Spencer. Their view, according to a passage serialised with glee by the “Daily Mail”, was that “immigration and multiculturalism brought positive good” and that there was therefore no need to keep numbers down.
According to Bower, it was only in the later period of his term of office that Blair became worried about growing public hostility to immigration — and that his solution then was to try to cook the books.
Blair, for sure, didn’t help himself by chopping and changing his ministers, ever on the lookout for the quick win. But in his search for a denunciation on every page, Bower struggles to acknowledge a single significant success in a decade of public policy. That is an unsustainable analysis.
On Iraq, the author offers fresh anecdotes but no spectacular smoking gun. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that the story of the great misadventure has pretty much been told. As I wrote in “Blair’s Wars” in 2003, the PM gave his assurance to George W. Bush at the presidential ranch in April 2002, a year before hostilities began, that he would stand with him, come what may. The task then was to engineer the outcome.
Bower quotes Andrew Turnbull, cabinet secretary to Blair for three years, as saying: “I wouldn’t call it a lie. You can deceive without lying, by leaving a false interpretation uncorrected.”
As on-the-record Whitehall statements go, that is a strong one.
Bower produces intriguing details about how certain ministers and officials were excluded from crucial meetings. He writes: “At Blair’s insistence, every traditional safeguard that might have led to a warning about any potential danger was excluded.”
He suggests that of all those involved in the pre-war machinations, the arch villain of the piece was Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6. David Omand, security and intelligence co-ordinator, is quoted as describing Dearlove’s relationship with Blair as his “Icarus moment”.
If there is one area of the Blair era that remains under-reported it is his life after Downing Street. He has built a nexus of businesses deliberately opaque in a bid to keep snoopers at bay. He also has a particular penchant for libel lawyers. Bower, as his previous books show, is not one to be deterred. He uncovers fascinating detail, but again not the killer single fact. Blair has earned tens of millions through a combination of consultancies, public speaking and offering himself as an intermediary on corporate deals.
One moment he appears on a video extolling the virtues of Kazakhstan’s long-serving autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Next he is defending the Rwandan leader, Paul Kagame, in the face of human rights accusations (as the British government, it must be said, has long done). He publicly gives the benefit of the doubt to Egypt’s military ruler, General Abdul Fattah Al Sissi. For a man who based his foreign policy on unseating “evil” rulers, Blair’s “relations with dictators have been, and continue to be, bewildering”.
Anything goes, if good money is to be made. Thus he can fly (private jet, of course) to Florida to make a speech to the International Sanitary Supply Association.
This image of a former prime minister touting himself about may be distasteful; the scorecard for his decade in power may be one of grave disappointment to those who pinned on him so many hopes and expectations. But Blair is not the first world leader to disappoint. He is not the first to cash in afterwards. So what justifies the visceral loathing felt by so many towards him?
A couple of years ago, I interviewed Blair again for Radio 4, for a programme looking at Syria and the terrible legacy of Iraq. Why, one listener complained, had I not carried out a citizen’s arrest on him? I wrote then that journalists and historians had exhausted the Blair trail. To get a better understanding of his mind, and our responses to him, it is surely time to turn to the psychiatrist’s chair.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
