I had been looking forward to Tony Blair’s memoirs since he announced he was writing them, and I recalled what I’d read in Piers Morgan’s diaries.
“Aren’t all politicians’ memoirs boring?” Blair comments to his wife and to Morgan at one point. “Yours won’t be darling” she responds.
Cherie was right. I’ve read plenty of political memoirs and biographies and would recommend almost none. How often they read as no more than hundreds of pages of first person narrative journalism, “On 15th August I met with the Chancellor to settle the matter, although it took a brief tussle with the Home Secretary the next day to come to a final agreement. At the latter meeting, I made the case that …”
Blair’s fantastic new book is a shining exception. He begins by denying he is retrospective, but what makes A Journey outstanding is precisely how well he reflects on people and events. Not a deep thinker about politics and policy (of which far more in a moment), Blair is an intelligent man, able to draw plausible lessons from specific instances and elucidate them to the reader.
So Blair sets out, very persuasively, how those with strongly held views “can always spot whether someone is a true fellow believer or not”. He acknowledges his own selfishness – a quality that leapt out of many pages of his wife’s memoirs. He gives a wonderfully readable account of how he would agree to meet anyone who asked, know his staff to be an insuperable barrier to all but a few of them ever doing so. He mentions that even today, he feels a chill at 11.57am each Wednesday, anticipating Prime Ministers’ Questions. He writes perceptively about how drink can be a problematic crutch in ways that fall far short of alcoholism. He notes how political relationships can be destroyed irreparably the moment a subordinate realises the leader doubts he is up to the job that subordinate covets. He observes the failure of leftist intellectuals to put any value on aspiration. He devotes pages to putting himself in the shoes of Neville Chamberlain at Munich. He predicts the current Coalition will collapse if the No to AV campaign succeeds – and makes clear his opinion of Lib Dems is very much that of the typical Tory or Labour activist. This is a Prime Minister setting out what he thinks rather than narrating what he did. This is how politicians should write their memoirs.
To be clear, the lack of depth to Tony Blair’s political thought certainly hurt the country. But it does no harm to the book – indeed, by revealing Blair’s political outlook so baldly, A Journey goes a very long way towards explaining the man’s failures and disasters. Let’s get to the politics. Blair’s understanding of public opinion and of policy – which he lays bare - in many ways explains everything of any consequence that he did.
The curious thing about Blair’s view of the electorate is that early on he hits on the crucial starting point, extremely well established in political science: almost nobody is paying attention.
The single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh or harrumph or a raising of the eyebrows, before they go back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.
David Blunkett … once told me that even at the height of his fame as Home Secretary, people would approach him and say, ‘Seen you on telly, what do you do?’, or more bizarrely would see him with his guide dog and would know who he was but would say, ‘I never knew you were blind.'
This description surely fits with most people’s common sense and experience. More importantly, it is strongly supported by the evidence, such as a 2004 poll finding that about half the country did not know who Gordon Brown was.
The academic research is clear: there are two types of voters. There is the type who follow politics closely, who can name lots of politicians, and who evaluate political news regularly. Everyone reading ConservativeHome who isn’t here by accident would qualify. Then there are those who have political preferences and usually vote - but who know only basic information about politics and who pay so little attention to political news that the average ConHome reader probably forgets more political news in a week than they are exposed to in months.
The latter group greatly outnumbers the former, and this has massive implications for any proper understanding of the electorate, especially given the former are rarely floating voters.
It’s easy to sound like a sophisticated pundit by sounding off about the political consequences of this or that speech, scandal or cabinet reshuffle. As Daniel Finkelstein wrote last year, the great bulk of political commentary is of this nature: premised on the notion that large numbers of votes are constantly in flux, with almost every piece of news - however trivial and irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people - analysed as if it will have a noticeable impact on the next General Election. But politics just isn’t like that – which makes a nonsense of almost everything Tony Blair writes about voters.
Public opinion, in Blair’s view, is clearly deeply susceptible to very subtle changes in political positioning. He talks about Labour “occupying the centre ground” without asking how many voters think in such terms, or have the requisite political and ideological knowledge to position themselves or political parties along a left-centre-right spectrum. It was “fundamental”, Blair argues, that voters saw that Labour had changed “not because we have to, but because we want to”. On income tax, he “knew [that] if we put up the top rate of tax it would be seen as a signal, a declaration of instinct, an indicator whose impact would far outweigh its intrinsic weight”.
But how can people both be paying next to no attention and also be sophisticated enough observers to pick up on these oh-so-subtle points? Absurdly, he even argues in passing of this year’s election that “Suddenly the Eurosceptics were let out of the cage and indulged, and the Tories did less well in the 2010 election than expected”. He saw the letter of support for the Conservatives from business leaders in the election as crucial, again without stopping to ask how many voters were aware of it.
Voters do seem to notice and to care a lot about whether such things as crime, unemployment, immigration and household incomes rise or fall. So they care about the consequences of policies, and many will based vote on this, in a simplistic pro- or anti-incumbent fashion. Nonetheless, Blair is obviously correct to write that voters don’t really take any deep interest in the finer details of policy as it is being made. But it’s an enormous mistake to think that just because ordinary people aren’t policy wonks, poring over consultation documents for fun, that therefore they are interested in trivia about politicians personalities’ or persuadable in large numbers by headlines, flashy press conferences and sound bites. They’re largely oblivious to this, too – and very unlikely to be affected by them, or even remember them, on polling day weeks or years later.
Blair is obviously obsessed by the press and mentions the media literally hundreds of times in his memoirs. He felt that media attacks both did great harm in themselves and submerged the government’s agenda.
Yet he never explains why - given people haven’t worked out who David Blunkett is – he thinks they are imbibing and remembering so much political coverage. And if people really aren’t paying much attention, why worry so much about jumping to the press’s tune? In a typical passage Blair argues that:
“… the pace of modern politics and the intrusion of media scrutiny – rightly or wrongly of an entirely different order today than even fifteen or twenty years ago – mean that decisions have to be made, positions taken, strategies worked out and communicated with a speed that is the speed of light compared to the speed of sound.”
But why rush crucial policy decisions for the sake of good press coverage if “most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long”? Surely for that very reason getting the policy right is of paramount importance, even from a purely political standpoint?
A further feature of Blair’s political analysis is an almost juvenile historicism. For him, the “modern world” isn’t just another way of saying “the present”. It appears instead to carry with it some kind of political and moral force, single-handedly declaring Blairite views victorious and rendering irrelevant right- and left-wing perspectives alike. How nice for him.
A telling example is his take on the miners’ strike:
“When Arthur Scargill became leader of the miners and the strike of 1984-5 began, it was plain that the choice was between on the one hand a very right-wing prime minister who was nonetheless democratically elected as leader of the nation and also correct about the excesses of union power; and on the other a leftist union leadership that was obviously out of touch with the modern world.”
Tempting as this analysis might be, I think it gets reality backwards. After all, one of the early criticisms of Thatcher made by many a ‘wet’ was that she was unrealistic to challenge the notion that anyone could govern modern Britain without the consent of the trade unions. The only reason that Scargillite strikes seem now to be part of the past is because Margaret Thatcher ignored such historicism and fought and won the miners’ strike. (The resurfacing of union militancy shows that such victories are never final).
If Thatcher had lost, as Ted Heath had a decade earlier, we might easily see her views rather than Scargill’s as the anachronisms of another age. After all, it’s just as much 2010 in France as it is in Britain, and all manner of policy changes across the Channel cannot happen without the consent of the unions. However much it may seem this way, there was nothing inevitable about Thatcher’s victory – and insofar as it was predictable it was because Scargill made bad rather than good tactical decisions unrelated to what year it was.
In one of the book’s most entertaining anecdotes, Blair mentions making a similar argument to his constituency party in 1983 – sneering at them for “attitudes from the age of black and white TV” and for holding to “adages learned on your grandparents’ knees”. Dennis Skinner, the other speaker, savages him, and soon one party member after another rises to talk about the gratitude they feel for the love, courage and dedication of their grandparents. Blair is sharp enough to realise he needs to be more diplomatic in future. But he seems oblivious to the idea that he was also wrong intellectually to think that either sneering at the old, or hailing the (supposedly) modern, is some kind of argument for his brand of politics.
Blair’s broader analysis of policy is scarcely any deeper than his model of the electorate.
When he differs from the conventional wisdom (as on the wisdom of the Iraq War, to which he devotes three dreary chapters) he fights back hard. When he agrees with the conventional wisdom (as on the success of the surge, for example), he doesn’t bother to defend it.
Possibly he genuinely believes that whereas left-wingers only care about a policy being left-wing and right-wingers only care about a policy being right-wing, he alone thinks it’s a good idea to look at the consequences of the policy and see how it is working out. Certainly, though, his references to ideology read as a gross caricature of ideological perspectives of both left or right.
Blair boasts of how his “abstinence from ideological dogma” meant he was open-minded. He doesn’t seem to realise that whatever the merits of refusing to listen to an argument because it is ideological in nature, to do so is closing one’s mind not opening it. Blair obviously cannot see how those who identify as being on the centre can be ideological, too – as well as unquestioning of all manner of received wisdom and unwilling to pose the most fundamental questions. This is certainly true of him. Blair complains irritably that “the latest offerings from various highly reputable academic or scholarly quarters” would recommend major policy shifts rather than technocratic tinkering, as if no one could doubt such tinkering is sufficient. One imagines Tony Blair stuck in a hole, whining about the ideologue who tells him to stop digging when all he wants is advice on the best spade to use to get himself out. There are strong parallels with Iain Martin’s recent account of Ted Heath’s inability to believe that, once he had come to what was obviously the best decision for everyone, he still faced fierce opposition.
Admittedly, as became obvious during Blair’s term of office, he eventually became sick of how ineffectual his tinkering approach proved and confesses that his initial consensual efforts to please everyone made real change impossible. He recounts looking back at his 1997 election pledge card and laughing at its modesty: “New Labour, New Britain? It was ridiculous”. He asks, “where was the scale of reform [of public services] to match the scale of the investment coming on stream?”.
Quite. But how could he ever have believed that piddling and determinedly non-ideological policies, designed to scare no horses, were remotely commensurate with the scale of the problems they were supposed to solve? Maybe if he’d given certain ideologues a fair hearing he’d have found some real answers. He notes that by the end of his term of office he faced “a sort of Daily Mail/Guardian alliance, whose only real point of unity was dislike of me” as if it vindicates him that he was opposed by right and left alike. I rather believe it shows instead that nobody ends up liking failing governments whose policies barely achieved anything. That is the real electoral danger to governments of all stripes, not adverse press coverage.
This sort of muddled thinking plainly infected Blair’s foreign policy. His chapter on Kosovo begins with page after page of embarrassing waffle. This ahistorical ‘globaloney’, insofar as it means anything, is Blair’s way of saying that almost nothing that happens anywhere in the world fails to affect Britain’s vital interests. Certainly there is no logical threshold given for when it makes sense to send in our troops to protect these interests and when it does not.
Blair notes without argument that the world had changed on 11th September 2001. This is hardly an indefensible view, but he doesn’t make the argument. One is tempted to recognise this as yet another manifestation of Blair’s preference for believing that the right approach in the modern world is self-evident, and his discomfort with the idea that he must, like any other leader, wrestle with the same old, age old problems.
It would be fascinating, for example, to read a detailed rebuttal of the likes of Edward Luttwak, who argues that the whole Middle East is globally important mainly because we persist in treating it as if it were. But Blair doesn’t bother – he simply drones on about global media, an interconnected world and so on.
In his analysis of the Iraq War, Blair breaks the rules that make the rest of the memoir such a good read and spends most his ink on dull narrative. But even the narrative raises more questions than it answers. His warped understanding of how in the 1980s “we had armed Saddam to be a brake on Iran” flies in the face of the fact that Britain and the United states combined supplied less than 1% of all Iraq’s arms between Saddam taking power and the start of the First Gulf War. He is right to distinguish between the initial invasion in 2003 – “a relatively short one to remove Saddam” - and the prolonged conflict that followed in which “horrendous numbers of casualties were suffered”. But once one separates the laudable and successful objective of removing Saddam Hussein from the tremendous loss of British and American life that occurred during subsequent efforts at nation-building, the argument for the latter appears to be weakened rather than strengthened. Blair doesn’t even consider the option of withdrawal shortly after Saddam was toppled. He complains bitterly that people are impatient with high casualties, but it is scarcely an unhealthy instinct at least to ask whether any particular war aim is worth the lives of so many British troops.
Blair’s Europhilia shows even less sign of serious consideration – with no indication given of him ever having called the European project into question. “Europe was a simple issue”, Blair waffles: “It was to do with the modern world.” Needless to say, the polls don’t support his insistence that Euroscepticism is an electoral problem.
Insofar as he explains why he supports European integration, Blair justifies it with an uncharacteristic paranoia about the rest of the world. “In time, and a time fast approaching, no European nation, not even Germany, will be large enough to withstand pressure from the really big nations unless we bond together.” He fails to set out precisely what pressures concern him – or how the EU solves that problem. Certainly there is something comical about arguing that ancient nations should surrender their sovereignty to Brussels because otherwise they may one day face pressures to do what they’re told by people in foreign capitals. His account of Europe speaking and fighting as one on the world stage really boils down to: ‘Imagine for a moment just how lovely it would be if everyone in the EU 27 always agreed. Now let’s set up our institutions as if that were in fact the case”.
Just as absurdly, he writes as if Russia and Brazil were greater global powers than the United Kingdom or France, arguing that that Europe should “play a role positioned not between but alongside the US and China, India, Russia, Brazil and the other emerging powers”.
Northern Ireland is confined to one readable but troubling chapter. As Dean Godson has established so well, the reason the IRA sent a private message to Downing Street in 1993 stating "The war is over, but we need your help to bring it to an end" is because they were beaten. That is how the peace process took off. Our intelligence services had infiltrated and undermined the organisation from top to bottom, with the IRA’s long-serving head of counter-intelligence himself a British spy. Her Majesty’s Armed Forces were unapologetic about killing those who bombed and murdered others, to the point where by the early 1990s, the death toll on the Republican side was the highest. Blair’s account is heavy on the details of savvy negotiations by all sides and painful concessions to terrorists, but to read him one would think this alone brought peace (or a close approximation).
He has just as much a blind spot for the Unionist side. At one point he writes of a terror summit in Belfast between leading Palestinian and Sinn Fein terrorists – and the fact that by the next day every house in Unionist areas of the city appeared to be flying the Israeli flag in response. Rather than see in this gesture a laudable sympathy for fellow victims of terror thousands of miles away, Blair writes of it in sadness, as evidence of how fiercely the communities differ.
“Here was a strange phenomenon about the difference between the two sides,” Blair begins one digression. He then describes – as if he were exploring some fascinating cultural difference - the way in which Unionists politicians would disagree with one another openly and fiercely during negotiations, while Republicans always put on a united front. Blair gives no sign of it so much as occurring to him that such different attitudes to the leader might possibly be related to the fact that the Ulster Unionist Party is a democratic political party, whereas Sinn Fein/IRA is a terrorist group packed with murderers. I don’t suppose John Gotti’s lackeys contradicted him in public very often, either.
Blair mentions regularly his fondness for particular people – especially those like Rupert Murdoch one might expect him to disagree with. Ian Paisley is one man Blair came to like, and Paisley emerges well from the book. But there is something unsettling about Blair’s apparent indifference to Paisley’s role as a vigorous defender for so many years of discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Worse, we learn that Blair came to like both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness “greatly”. Perhaps he simply couldn’t help himself. But one wonders if he would take the same view if he could identify better with the hundreds of parents who lost their children, children who lost parents and wives who lost husbands to these men. Perhaps he’s never seen Norman Tebbit at some or other Westminster event, pushing the wheelchair of his wife Margaret. Blair’s ability to put personal feelings so much higher than the objective evils for which these men were responsible shows a great callousness about others’ lives.
There’s something equally unsettling about what Blair implies with his description of the Real IRA’s Omagh bomb as “a supreme human tragedy brought about by an evil beyond understanding”: that the Provisional IRA’s bombs were mere humdrum and comprehensible tragedies. By the way, Blair’s claim that “Martin McGuiness condemned the attacks unequivocally” omits to mention that McGuiness actually told a radio interviewer at the time that he would do nothing to help identify the bombers: “I’m not an informer” was his justification.
Law and order is a recurring theme, and Blair covers it well. The degree to which the Labour Party recovered as it moved rightwards on law and order issues is a greatly underreported part of the New Labour’s story, partly remedied here. There is no denying that Blair gets the issue in a way that few of his political colours do. He has an excellent and plausible account of how the wealth of some criminals “gave them a cachet and status within the neighbourhood.”
“Young men looked up to them. People feared them; and worse, some admired them. They were top dogs. The effect on the local community was awful.”
At no point in the book does Blair indulge the ivory tower liberals who congratulate themselves for their kind and non-punitive attitude to criminals – thereby helping inflict so much misery on so many.
Blair’s account of his time as Shadow Home Secretary does, however, glory far too much in one sound bite and reflect far too little on why Blair, in the early 1990s, was such a different type of politician to what had been seen in previous decades. His claim that his “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” approach was “a new politics beyond old right and left” is highly misleading. In reality he was probably to the right on crime of every Tory Home Secretary since 1979. Certainly the “tough on crime” element was the new part - the view of the Whitelaws, Hurds, Clarkes and so on was always anti-prison and averse to pushing back against the left’s view of crime’s causes. It was only when Michael Howard become Home Secretary that liberal Tory approaches to crime were overturned, and crime began to fall. Blair acknowledges that he was very worried that if he failed to follow Howard’s approach he would alienate voters – a clear admission that the public preferred Howard’s unequivocally tough approach.
That as early as 2006, Blair picked out law and order as a point of vulnerability for the Conservatives is telling – James Forsyth’s recent warning should be heeded.
Blair’s concluding comments on British politics post-Blair contain a few surprises. I was impressed by his opposition to any new Keynesian consensus in favour of big government, and politically I suspect he is surely right to warn his party against thinking the financial crisis shows it is time to embark on a massive new programme of expanding government.
Blair’s much-reported thoughts on Gordon Brown are insightful in places, but it is striking how every one of his efforts to blame Brown for Labour’s poor performance in 2010 is evidence-free speculation, without a single piece of polling data.
We’ll have a somewhat better idea in a week’s time, when Labour’s new leader is declared, what Tony Blair’s domestic legacy will be. But we already know and wrestle today with its main features: crushing political correctness; our boys bogged down in the Middle East, overstretched and ill-equipped; and a much larger and more expensive (but no more effective) government than the one he found. A Journey is a unmissable explanation of how we got there.
