BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007

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BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007 Page 101

by ANTHONY SELDON (edt)


  true, and an important structural truth about British European policy;

  but the truth is also that Blair himself never dared to face down the

  unelected newspaper proprietors and editors on whom New Labour had

  depended so heavily throughout. He left that to his successors – who will

  probably also duck the challenge.

  This sketch of Blair’s world would not be complete without dwelling

  for a moment on its other side: the world’s Blair. For Blair is one of relatively few world leaders who has had a major resonance in the political

  imagination of other countries. This is not just a matter of those directly

  affected by his interventions, like the people in Pristina, Kosovo, who

  expressed their gratitude with a graffito proclaiming ‘Thank you Tony

  Bler’, or the people in Sierra Leone who said they owed their lives to him,

  or those in Iraq, many of whom were initially grateful to him, but with

  time came to regard him as an author of their current misery.

  Well beyond these places, whether in the United States, Germany, France

  or Italy, there was a strong image of Blair and of something they called

  Blairism, Blairisme or Blairismo. (No one, to my knowledge, ever talked of

  Majorisme or Callaghanismo. ) Sometimes these images were at a considerable remove from the real personality and policies of Tony Blair. Often they

  were projections of local hopes and preoccupations. Many Americans, for

  example, saw him as a more articulate and moderate exponent of toughminded views on combating terrorism. For them, Blairism was, so to speak,

  Bushism with a human face – or at least, with unmangled syntax. Some

  Democrats could never forgive him for siding with George W. Bush, but

  others remained admiring. Many Republicans adored him precisely

  because he sided with Bush. Both Democrats and Republicans remembered

  his swift and unwavering solidarity after the 11 September 2001 attacks.

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  In continental Europe, Iraq and his closeness to Bush cost his reputation dear. Many concluded that Britain had not changed as much as they

  had initially hoped in 1997. When push comes to shove, they sighed, the

  Brits will always side with the Americans. Yet even then, some admiration

  remained. As Blair approached the end of his decade in power, I asked the

  Italian Foreign Minister and left-wing reformist Massimo d’Alema for his

  verdict. Blair, he said, was ‘the greatest moderniser of the Left’.2 Iraq had

  been a big mistake, to be sure. On Europe, he thought Blair was genuinely

  a very pro-European leader in his thinking and speaking, but ‘less so in

  his actions’. A very balanced judgement.

  What many Europeans continued to see as the greatest success of

  Blairism was the ability to combine a dynamic market economy with a

  strong welfare state. It was in this sense that both the leading candidates

  in the French presidential elections of 2007, Ségolène Royale and Nicolas

  Sarkozy, could be described as Blairist – although the candidate of the

  right was much happier to wear that label than the candidate of the left.

  Most historians would argue that this domestic, socio-economic achievement cannot be ascribed solely to Tony Blair. It owed at least as much to

  Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown. It was, in substance, ThatcherBrown-Blairism. But he was in the happy position of being identified

  with it. In politics, such perceptions are also realities. And these positive

  images of Blair and Blairism were themselves also part and parcel of

  Britain’s soft power.

  Tony Blair was therefore, amongst other things, a rather successful

  British cultural export, and like many cultural exports, he acquired new

  meanings abroad. In other countries, people saw in him what they

  wanted to see, made of him what they wanted to make. Beside Blair’s

  world, there was the world’s Blair.

  This leads me to one final reflection. As he prepared to leave office,

  Blair professed himself happy for the historians to write the verdict on his

  record. When I invited him to list his three greatest successes and failures,

  he replied: ‘I don’t do the successes/failures thing . . . I leave that to you

  guys.’ But, even if that was his basic attitude, it could not be the reality.

  For a start, unless all the rumours were incorrect, he would surely give his

  own version of this history in his memoirs. And then, as a relatively

  young ex-leader, there would be a whole life after No. 10, as there was for

  Bill Clinton after the White House. How he used the opportunity of his

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  Remarks following the annual European Studies Centre lecture at St Antony’s College,

  Oxford, on 8 May 2007.

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  worldwide fame, what broad international themes he chose to promote

  and how he went about promoting them – this would also shape the way

  the world looked back on his years in power. What Clinton did after he

  left office undoubtedly changed, and probably improved, many people’s

  views of him, his period in office and his legacy.

  The same might be true of Blair. He had every qualification for being a

  most adept elder statesman, and a skilled teller of his own tale. His place

  in history would be determined partly by the emergence of new documents, the longer-term consequences of his actions while in office, and

  the judgements of ‘you guys’ on those documents and consequences. But

  it would also be determined, in no small measure, by what he himself said

  and did for the rest of his life. The Blair premiership might be over, but

  the history of the Blair effect had only just begun.

  Commentary

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  Tony Blair was the most accomplished politician of his generation. A

  gifted communicator with an intuitive grasp of the national mood, he

  was the dominant figure in British politics for more than a decade. Three

  consecutive election victories assure him a place in the history books as

  Labour’s most successful leader. Margaret Thatcher apart, no other prime

  minister since the Napoleonic Wars can claim an uninterrupted ten years

  in 10 Downing Street. Like Thatcher, Blair changed the political weather.

  The rest, if we are to believe the angry epitaphs that mostly accompanied his departure in the summer of 2007, was disappointment and

  deceit. Brilliant performance was not the same as solid achievement. A

  capacity to articulate the nation’s fears and aspirations was one thing, the

  ability to shape them another. Above all, though, the story of Blair’s premiership was of political genius squandered to a disastrous and deeply

  unpopular war in Iraq.

  Few politicians have so enraged the metropolitan intelligentsia who

  penned these first drafts of history. A decade earlier many had flocked to

  Blair as the politician who would return power and prestige to the

  drawing-rooms of the thinking centre-left. The talk was of social democracy reinvented, third ways discovered, political ideas reclaimed for liberalism. That, of course, was before Blair made common cause with a hick

  Republican in the White House.

  There is an element of exaggeration here, but only an element. In the

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sp; latter years of his premiership to defend Blair in the company of London’s

  self-selecting political classes was often to feel one was talking about an

  entirely different politician. It was obvious, wasn’t it, that he was a neoliberal Thatcherite – never mind all those tens of billions spent on health

  and education. Clearly he had lied over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – forget the copious evidence otherwise provided by the numerous

  independent inquiries. Of course, he had sold honours for cash – pace the

  failure of the intrepid Inspector Yates of the Yard to provide the evidence.

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  The BBC never did get over the scorching indictment of its journalism

  provided by an honest judge from Northern Ireland.

  None of the above is to say that Blair was a politician without flaws. He

  had many, some of them grave. It was not enough, as he sought to imply

  in a parting self-justification, that he had believed deposing Saddam

  Hussein had been ‘the right thing to do’. Politicians do not absolve themselves of responsibility for errors of policy by protesting the honesty of

  their intentions. But history will produce a more balanced, nuanced

  judgement than the recent spluttering of those mourning their own loss

  of intellectual relevance.

  Britain, it must be said, fell out of love with the youthful fortyfour-year-old who stood on the steps of Downing Street in May 1997. In

  the afterglow of that first famous general election victory of May 1997,

  Blair shattered every record for prime-ministerial popularity. By the end,

  his ratings touched the low points on the pollsters’ graphs. Elected in the

  euphoria of expectation, he departed, as had most others who have survived so long in office, in the shadow of experience.

  Such is the familiar narrative of politics: exaggerated expectations prefigure predictable disillusion. Longevity runs against the reputation of

  political leaders. As time passes, the soaring rhetoric of their trade grinds

  ever more painfully against the immutable realities of the modern world.

  Trust – and Blair had bucketfuls when he first entered Downing Street – is

  sacrificed to the grubby compromises of office. Hard now to think of a

  European, let alone a British, leader in modern times who has departed in

  the warmth of popular approval.

  Yet this tells only half the story. Angry as many were – about Iraq especially – the people of Britain seemed otherwise content. Even as they

  cheered his leaving, more than half thought that, all in all, the Prime

  Minister had done a good job. The same voters who repudiated Blair

  seemed to be saying they wanted to hold on to Blairism. The organising

  idea on which he built his extraordinary political success – that in an age

  of globalisation the role of government is to link strong economic performance with a fairer society – seems as prescient in 2007 as it was at the

  birth of New Labour. Strange though it is to say in these jaded times,

  things did get better in the decade from 1997. The Britain Blair left

  behind felt a more modern, progressive nation. Much of what was

  deemed radical at the outset had been quietly absorbed into a more open,

  and yes, liberal national consensus.

  The images in the summer of 2007 of the Democratic Unionist Party’s

  Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness – the firebrand unionist

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  and the IRA commander – side by side at Stormont were the most vivid

  demonstration of how the exceptional can become almost the unremarkable. A decade ago to suggest such a reconciliation between the extremes in

  Northern Ireland would have been to invite guffaws. Now the province’s

  decision to exchange violence for politics is all but taken for granted.

  Northern Ireland saw Blair at his best – the patience, the resilience and the

  genius for persuasion. But – or perhaps it was because – Blair knew all along

  that there were no votes in this extraordinary enterprise to build peace.

  Elsewhere, a national minimum wage, a parliament in Scotland, an

  assembly in Wales, incorporation into British law of the European

  Convention on Human Rights, the defenestration of most of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords, a step change in spending on health

  and education, the introduction of same-sex civil partnerships, equality

  in the workplace: all were effortlessly absorbed into the national mindset.

  The Britain of the Blair years made its peace with the cultural liberalism

  that respects the growing diversity of modern societies. It adjusted better

  than most of its European neighbours to the competitive winds of globalisation. The tensions remained, and in places sharpened: the disruptions,

  economic and social, of large-scale immigration, the economic insecurities and widening income inequalities flowing from borderless trade and

  capital flows. But the government showed broadly the right instincts,

  combining openness to global change with help for those left behind by

  the outgoing economic tides.

  Blair’s domestic record was far from unblemished. Missed opportunities jostled with achievements. The Prime Minister had more than his

  share of good fortune in a relatively benign economic environment, and

  in Gordon Brown’s stewardship of the Treasury. For all the energy with

  which he latterly gripped the notions of choice, competition and diversity, the initial approach to public service reform was painfully timid.

  Many of the extra billions poured into modernising schools and hospitals

  were wasted. Elsewhere, good intentions went unmatched by practice.

  Blair never mastered the mysteries of management: the ability to turn

  political intention into administrative achievement. Intuition is not a

  substitute for careful deliberation. He can claim that he introduced

  unprecedented transparency into the conduct of government and the

  funding of politics. Yet he did not properly respect the spirit of his own

  rules. Ten years on, that first promise that his administration would be

  ‘purer than pure’ left a bitter taste.

  Blair did remake the landscape of politics. The shallow, if fashionable, reflection on the past decade is that Blair’s redefinition of politics’

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  boundaries did little more than soften the edges of Thatcherism. That

  judgement was belied by unprecedented investment in health and education, by a discretionary increase in taxes and by a determined, albeit only

  partially successful, effort to reduce poverty. The central political insight

  was to separate the enduring ‘ends’ of a left-of-centre government – a

  fairer society with a wider spread of opportunity – from his party’s

  century-long addiction to the socialist ‘means’ of an ever more mighty

  state. What-works pragmatism elbowed aside outdated ideology.

  Here, the leader’s distance from his own party – he never respected

  Labour’s rituals nor was comfortable in its tribalism – was a strength and

  a weakness. A strength because it reassured the middle classes within the

  New Labour coalition that compassion need not elbow aside aspiration; a

  weakness because it amplified the accusations of betrayal from those in

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bsp; his party who would always prefer the purity of opposition to the necessary compromises of government. For all that he dazzled them, the Prime

  Minister was never much loved by the Labour MPs who rose on his political coat-tails. Some simply never forgave him for winning.

  The better gauge of his political legacy comes from David Cameron’s

  Conservatives. During three general elections – the last fought in the dark

  shadow of Iraq – the Prime Minister forced the Conservatives on to the

  arid margins of the far right. Only after a decade did a young Tory leader

  begin to rescue his party from threatened electoral oblivion. Cameron,

  reclaiming the political centre ground, has broadly accepted the New

  Labour settlement. He presents himself as much as an heir to Blair than

  his ideological adversary.

  The complexities of this record held up a mirror to the many strands

  of Blair’s character. Criticised at the outset as a flimsy product of New

  Labour’s image-makers, mesmerised by the ebb and flow of public

  opinion, he was latterly condemned as one too messianic in his convictions. His charm and persuasiveness co-existed with a ruthlessness that

  saw him more than once dispense with the services of close friends and

  allies. The low politics of sofa government in 10 Downing Street sat

  uneasily with his profession of a devout Christian faith. The Gladstonian

  interventionist willing to gamble his political future on rescuing Kosovo

  later became a prisoner to belief in his own righteousness.

  Abroad, for all the furore about Iraq, Blair mostly beguiled. In the

  select club of world political leaders, electoral success is the most important measure of peer-group prestige. Winning three times earned Blair

  special status among fellow presidents and prime ministers. Iraq soured

  some relationships – notably with France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s

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  Gerhard Schröder – but for the most part Blair remained at the centre of

  the international argument. A strong relationship with Ireland’s Bertie

  Ahern was a key to securing a settlement in Northern Ireland. His closeness to George W. Bush never dented an enduring friendship with Bill

  Clinton. Angela Merkel lamented the impending departure of ‘my friend

  Tony’, a sentiment shared by the newly elected Nicolas Sarkozy in France.

 

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