BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 101
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.
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
12
Remarks following the annual European Studies Centre lecture at St Antony’s College,
Oxford, on 8 May 2007.
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
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
&nb
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.
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
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’
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
&n
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
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.