Tony Blair and me: A change of heart....

 

I bought this tome at a second hand book shop in Warsaw, it cost me PLN10 - which is a little over a quid in today's money.  It's taken a while to get through, such is the level of detail, but I'm glad I did.  It's made me re-assess him, as both a man and a leader.

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I admit to having a soft spot for the bloke: we're the same vintage (he's about 6 weeks younger than me), he's apparently a football fan (Newcastle United his well published loyalty) and has similar tastes in music.  I remember him moving into Downing Street with a Fender Stratocaster guitar and amp, which seemed pretty cool to me at the time, and frankly still does.  On the debit side, he went to a minor public school, Fettes, rather than a state school like mine, and thence to St. John's College, Oxford to study Law and then on to the Inns of Court School for Law and a position in chambers, while I left school at 17 with four O-Levels and a CSE without taking my A-levels, and went straight to work as a filing clerk at one of the biggest stockbrokers in the City.  There I earned the princely sum of £675 a year - it took me four years' graft and my 21st birthday to crack the grand a year barrier.  No expensive education and well-paid legal eagle job for this council house kid, I'm afraid - or, perhaps on reflection, glad - to say.

I remember when Blair swanned into No.10 with the gurning missus and kids in tow, waving from the doorstep in the traditional manner of new PMs, and he seemed to me a breath of fresh air.  I had grown up with a succession of both Blue and Red but always grey old men running the show - McMillan, Home, Wilson, Calaghan, Heath, Foot, even John Major, with an interlude of bossy schoolma'am Thatcher, so the sight of someone my own age, with young kids, looking smooth and (sorry about this, but I can't think of another word....) dynamic taking over was exactly what the country needed.  I empathised with what he proclaimed he was going to deliver - a change for the better, a Third Way, New Labour, government for all not just the rich, and all the other spin - using the kind of middle management buzz-words and Cityspeak I heard every day at work, as I had been for ten years or more.  I was suckered in like so many other people who voted in that Labour landslide.....  It was not Labour as I knew it, it actually sounded vaguely Tory - which as someone who had voted twice for Thatcher was fine by me, but I was prepared to give New Labour a chance: God knows a country that seemed to me stagnating under a succession on nonentities was ready for a change.  And besides, his Deputy was the aging unreconstructed Old Labour activist and shop steward John Prescott, who seemed more than capable of rubbing off the media gloss and reminding us what, traditionally, the Party had stood for - which is to say working class values, which coming from the stock I did meant something. 

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Briefly: my mum and dad were archetypal working class, meeting "in service" (her a chambermaid, he a gardener) at Chiddingstone Castle before World War Two, and voted Labour all their lives.  They worked hard after the longtime War separation, lived all their lives in a council house as tennants, never owned a car (though dad had a motor bike he rarely rode).  He had a succession of manual jobs - stoker, coalman, removal man, mill operator - that eventually killed him at a ridiculously young 56, from cancer.  Mum stayed at home, raising me and my two sisters, then worked in a tobacconists and newsagents in my home town, as well as moonlighting as a cleaner in a hotel and the local Nat West Bank.  She lived for another twenty odd years after dad passed away before a cancer took her too.  They were never politically active and seemed to complain about whichever Party governed, but their own upbringings always made them tick the box for the Labour candidate come Polling Day - living in a staunchly Conservative constituency it was always a token protest vote, but to them important.    

I broke the mould.  I passed my 11 Plus and went to a Technical High School (not quite good enough for a Grammar), then went to work in the City - the first person in my family to achieve such elevation, as they saw it: an important job for life, then a decent pension and a gold watch or carriage clock on retirement in due course.  Their pride knew no bounds - but their aspirations turned out to be way off the mark (but that's a different story, one for the memoir I've been beavering away at for the last few years....).  By the time I got the vote, at 21 (just before voting age was reduced to 18), my years at the venerable old stockbroker influenced me to vote Tory, for Ted Heath.  Cue the miner's strike, the three-day week, working by candlelight in a dark and dingy old fashioned Dickensian office, the postal strike....  I voted Labour next time, true to my roots.  Thereafter I vaccilated each election from party to party, trying to find one that I thought best served my needs and those of my own family.  

This resulted in votes for both Labour and the Liberal Party and even the Social Democrats (before the Liberals swallowed them up and morphed into the LibDems) before returning to the Tory fold for the election of Thatcher.  There followed my boom years, as well as the country's.  The City opened up and became one of the biggest and most influential in the world, and I was swept along with it.  I bought property, jumping from a two bed mid terrace semi-slum, through a three bed end-terrace in a very nice neighbourhood, to a brand new three bed semi in a new town.  I bought shares in the privatisations and duly took my profits (typically to buy more stuff, have holidays or pay off credit cards), passed my driving test and went from a Fiesta to an Allegro (no, honestly!), to a Maestro, to a Montego Estate, then a brand new Montego Estate company car (so top of the range, power everything) as my family grew and my career advanced.  Then it hit the buffers, soon after the three-bed semi was replaced by a big 4 bed detached with a big garden, so the company (and the car) went, replaced by a third hand Montego saloon bought at auction, that part exchanged for an old Volvo Estate, and finally a Renault Savannah estate, through a succession of temp jobs, until I settled again in a German bank and my career got back onto some kind of track.  At which point: Blair's election in '97 and we're back on track.......sorry for the diversion!

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I was very busy during that first term.  Settling into a new job, moving between different positions in the organisation, getting heavily involved in an IT rebuild project (my first experience of such a thing, and it turned out to point up a new career direction), plus the needs of a growing family meant that I didn't really take too much notice of what Blair and his government were doing, or how it performed.  I remember very little, to be honest, except for the way he seemed to step up to the plate after Princess Diana died: I remember his eulogy, sppsrently off the cuff but in retrospect carefully scripted, when coming out of his local church that day and being impressed by his words and his performance, and I felt he handled the aftermath through to the funeral very well.  But beyond that: the changes he had promised seemed to have receded and we faced the same old slog.  Neither the country nor my life changed significanlty throughout those early years, let alone the overnight we had perhaps been led to expect.  But ok, I thought, it will take time: carry on, Tone.

Come election time and I happily ticked the Labour box again (although of course the Tory, as usual for my constituency got in by a big - but reduced -  majority).  Another landslide, and the New Labour Project continued.  But I had noticed that Blair seemed to spend more time travelling to summits all over the place, and welcoming leaders and Oasis to Downing Street, and pontificating on every subject under the sun rather than engaging in the daily Commons rough-and-tumble.  But then he'd already had a tendency to do that anyway.  It seemed all very Presidential, the kind of stuff Bill Clinton was doing, so I figured this must be one of Blair's promised "changes".   The constant rows he was having with trades unions, and with some people within his own party, notably grumpy Gordon Brown, all seemed a bit petty, but I figured it was all part and parcel of political life (and rivalry).

I changed jobs again, then again, just in time for the Millenium and chuckled at the uncomfortable expression on the Queen's face next to Blair at the New Year Celebration in the Dome: clearly she wasn't fully in tune with the New Labour administration.  And then I started zooming off all over the place in my new IT project career that lasted in one guise or another for the rest of my working life.  So a lot of the ills that were still evident, and not being fixed, receded because I wasn't there.  By the end of 2000, my personal circumstances had changed and, through work, I was what today is termed a digital nomad, no longer living in Britain and working pretty much remotely via the internet and new fangled mobile phones.  I saw no prospect of that changing, all of my property, cars and stuff, was sold or on the market, the kids had left (or about leave) home to start their own lives. so naively and selfishly I stopped really taking much notice of what was going on at home, in Britain.  I was too wrapped up in my own new life....

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9/11 happened, the day before I was due to travel home for a weekend visit, and shocked me just as much as it shocked everyone else.  I got into my flat, after work ground to a halt early, and switched on the tv, just in time to see the two Towers fall, and felt sick.  Later, when the shock had worn off a little, I called BA and confirmed my flight the next day was still happening, and despite pleas from various people not to do so, headed off to the airport after breakfast, convinced air travel would be the safest form of transport for the foreseeable future......   I expected security to be a lot tighter, but wasn't expecting the tank on the approach road to the terminal, or the armed soldiers in combat gear roaming around inside.

The aftermath of that atrocity has changed international travel, especially by plane, for ever.  The tanks and the troops may have gone (at least in most places), but the security lines and x-ray machines and bag searches that resulted are still with us, and probably always will be.  Blair's premiership was also changed forever, as he immediately pledged the country's support to George Bush whatever happened in the future, as the American launched his War On Terror - and the two remained in lock-step for the remainder of their terms in office.

As part of that campaign came the invasion of Iraq, despite the fact that there were no Iraqis involved in the 9/11 attack: the majority of the funding, planning and execution was carried out by Saudis, including all but two of the suicide bombers (the remaining pair were from the UAE).  But somehow, Rumsfeld and Cheney convinced Bush that Saddam's Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (iit didn't) and had to be stopped at all costs: the link between that reasoning and 9/11 remains obscure to me 20 years later.

For the rest of that second term and into his third, Blair's attention wandered far from the NHS, from education, the cost of living, and all the other concerns British people had.  Even defence spending (or the lack of it) was parked, despite it being quite obviously crucial to the armed forces that he had pledged to aid Bush being hampered by the lack of equipment.  Blair became messianic about getting rid of Saddam, for the security of humanity, and as a leader of special brutality (which he was) and a sponsor and leader of Radical Islam (which he wasn't).  Saddam had to go.  The war was short and not sweet, but America and Britain got their way, and Saddam was toppled, went on the run, was eventually captured, went on trial in an Iraqi court, found guilty and promptly executed.  The tragedy remains that neither Blair nor Bush had any plan to deal with the power vacuum and civil war that the fall of Saddam inevitably triggered.  Blair left it to Bush, who wasn't interested because he wanted to turn next to Afghanistan, the next target in his War On Terror......and of course Blair went along with it.

That didn't end well either.  The campaign in Afghanistan dragged on until last year and ended inconclusively with the Taliban regaining control and turning the clock back several hundred years.  British and American casualties numbered in the thousands, in both deaths and life-changing injuries, the cost to civilians even higher.  Militant Islam has not been destroyed, the War On Terror a failure.  Bush has shuffled off into retirement and made a decent sum from publishing his memoir, Decision Points.  Blair, meanwhile, eventually abdicated in favour of Gordon Brown, who didn't last long, so that in some form or fashion Conservatives have remained in power since 2010.  New Labour has long gone.

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Blair has done pretty well out of it all, at least financially.  He too published a memoir, called rather grandly A Journey that made him several million quid.  I read it, and it's a well written but self serving whitewash in which he paints himself as a great leader let down by his weak and unruly lieutenants and unfairly villified by his opponents and the public at large.  Of particular frustration to him is the poor picture painted of his conduct in the lead up to Iraq, with accusations that he misled Parliament (or lied if you prefer the word, hence the derogatory Tony Bliar nickname) thus taking us into an illegal war without the required UN Resolution.  As a result of the casualty list, especially amongst British citizens serving in the Armed Forces (Iraq's far higher number of civilian victims usually left out of the charges) he is widely considered to be a War Criminal......whatever that is: I'm not going to discuss it here since I'm not qualified to do so (not being an international lawyer).  What I will say, as a purely personal view, is that if the same criteria had been used historically, then pretty much any leader that takes his (or her) country deliberately into conflict is a war criminal - be it Thatcher, Eden, Chamberlain, Asquith or Blair himself.  Or Churchill, for that matter, thinking of some of the awful decisions he made during World War 2.  It seems to me a slippery definition.  But on the major points of dicussion, I noticed that his views and conclusions matched very closely those of Bush's.....collusion?  Who knows?

I also read the two volume biography written by Anthony Seldon, which is very good and covers in  detail Blair's early life and pre-political career, plus a lot of detail of the key events during his premiership, but does not cover what happened next since the first volume came out in 2004, while he was still in office, and the second in 2007, shortly after handing over to Brown.  There is thus no mention of the Chilcot Report from which much of the animosity came to the fore and was given justification, nor Blair's role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives, nor his highly lucrative public speaking career (for example, when asked to fulfil one engagement of a 20 minute speech he demanded a fee of £250,000 plus first class hotel and travel expenses and a private plane; when offered £25,000 flat he refused the gig: a rarity apparently).  Similarly there is no mention of Tony Blair Associates, his consultancy firm selling his influence and political know-how to banana republics world wide and its affiliate Faith Foundation (performing a similar service but wrapped up as a religious charity), nor of the multi-million pound property portfolio - all of this controlled through a complex network of shell companies and offshore accounts.  All of this is discussed in great detail in the book that heads this piece.

None of it is really a surprise, I suppose: he is not the first former PM to make a fortune from publishing memoirs and engaging in various consultancy positions with international banks and manufacturing businesses, nor will he be the last.  It's one of the (unwritten) perks of the job, and as far as I'm comcerned provided it's all done after leaving politics and does not peddle any state secrets or in any other way damage the country, then it's a perfectly acceptable way of earning a living and of course benefiting the country's economy by paying taxes.  The concerns only come, rightly, when that doesn't happen, at least in my view.

What did surprise me was how poor Tony Blair was at doing the job of Prime Minister, how little respect he had for his Ministers (and, frequently, they for him).  I hadn't realised quite how poor many of his Cabinet choices were, how totally unsuited and downright incompetent they were, and in certain cases how downright mendacious they were.  His reshuffles were rarely thought through, his appointments seemingly pulled out of thin air.  He had little or no concept of the details of how, say, the NHS worked, or why the armed forces needed more finance, or why no matter how much money was thrown at education schools and pupils continued to underperform.  Worse, he wasn't that interested.

He was primarily an ideas man, and surrounded himself with a handful of special advisors whom he trusted to come up with the policy detail which he then signed off (typically without reading or really understanding).  But he had a charisma and skill as a public speaker (not unusual in a barrister used to performing in a court of law) and was able to use that skill to sell the "policy" to his Party and, at least initially, adoring public.  His Cabinet meetings typically lasted less than an hour, senior civil servants from the various government departments ignored, and even the daily grind of debating in Patliament shunned wherever possible.  

Incredibly, in the run up to Iraq and Afghanistan he did not appoint a War Cabinet (the first Prime Minister in history to go to war without doing so), preferring instead to consult with a handful of intelligence chiefs and armed forces commanders who always had competing agendas and advice and often disliked one another, plus his two key aides, Jonathon Powell and Alistair Campbell (who had absolutely no military experience whatever), to plan the campaign.  Even the Secretaries of State for Defence and the Foreign Office were excluded from these discussions, along with their senior Civil Servants.  Experts in the Middle East and Arab politics and religion were completely ignored too. 

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There is much else in Tom Bower's book, but the above points are my key takeaways.  Most of the content has been taken from several hundred detailed interviews with the surviving key participants and thousands of official documents and other resources, and the entire sorry tale presented in more or less chronological order, and the focus is solely on the premiership and Blair's life since then.  And that's quite enough.

If there is any truth in even half of the revelations - and as many were hinted at it in Seldon's version of events it suggests that is indeed the case - then my contemporary was very very VERY far from the man I gave him credit for.  I've defended him and his (apparent) legacy in the past, because much of it was created while I was elsewhere in the world and thus relied on news reports and after-the-event accounts, and not formed as a front row spectator.  I regret that now: jumping to conclusions is never the right thing to do, but often the easiest.  My mistake.

But what I am sure of is that, perhaps unwittingly, Blair changed the way Prime Ministers operate.  Cabinet decision making seems to be rarer now.  Of Blair's successors, Gordon Brown didn't last long.  Cameron took over as Prime Minister, forming a Tory-LibDem coalition that in my view was a tad dysfunctional with the LibDem part of it largely marginalised and in minor roles, to be followed by a Tory majority government.  Cameron was another slick ex-public schoolboy (Eton of course) so undoubtedly knew better than anyone else what was needed (says the cynic in me), and employed similar snake-oil salesman oratory to Blair.  He then lost an uneccesary Referendum on EU memberhip and within hours took the cowardly route of resignation.  His replacement Theresa May tried to administer Cabinet government again, but was hamstrung by Brexiteers in key positions (and infesting the back benches) and was replaced by serial liar and another Old Etonian contemporary of Cameron, Boris Johnson, who continues to go his own way, leading with the reward of an overwhelming Commons majority from a grateful ex-EU British public that allows him to do pretty much as he wants. And that, frankly, he cares not too hoots about. 

But all of them, every single one, failed and continue to fail to govern by consensus, master their briefs or listen to what the electorate, the British people, actually think or want or, most importantly, need.  To that extent, they are Tony Blair Lite.  In it for themselves, not public servants, lining their own pockets and planning for a wealthy post-Westminster career.  In fairness, Theresa May does seem to be an exception, continuing to work dilligently from the back benches on behalf of her constituents and trying to act as the voice of reason against the government's excesses.

Blair wanted his legacy to be a New Way in British politics.  In that, he seems to have succeeded.  But it's the wrong way.

The country suffers as a result.