Tony Blair E-Book

Steve Richards

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 157

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'One of the shrewdest political commentators we have' Andrew Marr 'Tony Blair was a giant amongst prime ministers and leaders of the Labour party: Steve Richards is a giant amongst political commentators. This riveting and persuasive book describes what happens when they meet head on' Anthony Seldon Was Tony Blair a visionary, impatiently looking ahead, or a leader trapped by his past – Labour's vote-losing 1980s and the dominance of Margaret Thatcher? Was the party's move to the right under Blair necessary in order for them to win, or could they, after 18 years of Tory rule, have afforded to be more daring and more left wing than their leader wished to recognise? In Steve Richards's short, provocative and highly engaging new biography, he argues that Blair was often the opposite of what we remember him being: perceived as a 'moderniser', he sought to strengthen the traditional institutions that partly define the UK, from the monarchy to the military; while to Margaret Thatcher's public appreciation he cemented her economic legacy rather than moved on from it. And, while he was viewed as messianic over Iraq, he was, in fact, being characteristically expedient, clinging to the orthodoxy in which the UK stands shoulder to shoulder with the US in war. But the UK in 2007 was undoubtedly a different country to the one it had been in 1997: from devolution, which played its part in establishing peace in Northern Ireland, to civil partnerships and a revived NHS, Blair left Britain in a much better place. While his legacy has been overshadowed by the Iraq war, Tony Blair re-establishes a more rounded view of his time in office, and shows that the challenges facing Blair were the ones that still face Labour today.

Leseprobe

About the Author

Steve Richards became political editor of the New Statesman in 1996, a year before Tony Blair was elected as Prime Minister. He was also a columnist for The Independent and presenter of ITV’s live political programme, The Sunday Programme, for most of the New Labour era. He interviewed Tony Blair several times and also had many private conversations with him when he was Labour leader and Prime Minister. His books include Whatever It Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour, The Prime Ministers and Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain, from 1945 to Truss.

Contents

Introduction1 · Leader 2 · Power 3 · Blair Wins Another Landslide 4 · Iraq 5 · Final Term 6 · Aftermath

‌Introduction

Tony Blair was easy to misread as leader and Prime Minister. In spite of intense scrutiny from the moment he acquired the leadership of the Labour Party, nothing was quite what it seemed. Blair was seen widely, not least by himself, as a bold radical. In reality, he was often extremely cautious. Over Iraq and some other policy areas he was viewed as messianic when he was being characteristically expedient. He made many calculations in relation to Iraq, but one was to cling to the apparently safe orthodoxy in which the UK stands ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the United States in war. Only Harold Wilson challenged that conventional view, over Vietnam. Oddly, Wilson is seen as a greyer and more deviously pragmatic leader than the seemingly crusading Blair. More widely, many saw Blair as a liar, to the point of criminality. This was simplistic. He took seriously the notion of integrity in public life. He tried in many different ways to form a relationship of trust with the electorate.

Wherever an observer turns there are contradictions. Blair is perceived as a ‘moderniser’ and yet he sought to strengthen the traditional institutions that partly define the UK, from the monarchy to the military. To Margaret Thatcher’s public appreciation he partly cemented her legacy rather than move on from it as far as privatisation and the significance of the private sector were concerned. At the same time, he was a change-maker. The UK in 2007 was a different country to the one it had been in 1997. The changes were not as great as those introduced by Clem Attlee after 1945 or Margaret Thatcher after 1979, but they were of historic significance. From devolution, which played its part in establishing peace in Northern Ireland, to civil partnerships and a revived NHS, Blair left Britain in a better place than it had been. He was also a different type of Prime Minister, partly a consequence of his youth. On his first weekend in Chequers he was photographed wearing a denim shirt, not the Prime Ministerial gear associated with John Major or Ted Heath. He could be both casual and conventional.

Increasingly, Blair sought change by rising above his party. Here was another curious contradiction. He could be appealingly self-deprecating in speeches and interviews, but quite soon his rule became personal, almost presidential – a leader in spite of his party. He proclaimed, often with an apolitical verve, that what mattered was not whether a leader was on the right or left but whether he made the ‘right decision’. ‘It was the right thing to do,’ he explained in relation to a variety of contentious measures. In doing so he was inadvertently challenging the essence of democratic politics, in which parties debate with intensity what is ‘right’ and why.

Was he a visionary, impatiently looking ahead, or a leader trapped by his past: Labour’s vote-losing 1980s and the dominance of Margaret Thatcher? He was both. Constantly fascinated by politics, he sought always to focus on future challenges, while his vision of what might follow was limited by his narrow interpretation of what had happened to Labour and of the rise of Thatcher in the decades that preceded his elevation to the top.

The Labour Party has struggled to make sense of him, in the same way that the Conservatives are still trying to work out the significance of Margaret Thatcher and whether she should continue to be their model long after she ruled. Was Labour’s move to the right under Blair necessary in order for the party to win, or could they, after 18 years of Tory rule, have afforded to be more daring, more left-wing, than their leader wished to recognise? Keir Starmer, another landslide election winner from opposition, wrestles with the question. Partly he follows Blair, but on some policy issues he is closer to a traditional Labour leader.

In order to pin down the elusive Blair we need to start on the day he became Labour leader. He opened with an inspiring speech of energetic focus that was also shaped by caution. The self-constrained visionary was beginning to take shape.

‌Chapter 1

Leader

When Tony Blair won Labour’s leadership contest during the hot summer of 1994 he became both a youthful leader of his party and the likely next Prime Minister. Most Leaders of the Opposition have to work hard in order to be perceived as the next occupant of Number 10. Some never manage to acquire the flattering aura that tends to feed on itself. In Blair’s case the perception was fully formed from the moment he became leader.

This was not all his doing. The Conservative government was in disarray, torn apart over the issue of Europe and still bewildered by its act of regicide in the autumn of 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was forced from power. Labour was well ahead in the polls before the leadership contest had become necessary. Yet surveys also showed that Blair was unusually popular with the wider electorate. He had a boyish charisma that managed to inspire and reassure simultaneously. He was highly focused, seeming to know where he wanted to take his party and the country, while being humorous and modest. On the sunny morning of 21 July 1994, at the age of 41, the newly crowned leader appeared to be a winner on many levels: in command of his party and with high personal ratings in the country, alongside a media rhapsodising about his attributes. Most Labour leaders rarely experience such a potentially intoxicating brew even in their honeymoon phase. Conditioned to losing elections, Blair was smart enough not to become intoxicated, at least in the early years of his leadership.

His triumphant coronation took place against a background of contradictory forces, impressions and developments. Beyond the seemingly glowing surface there were complex ambiguities. On one level, the circumstances of Blair’s extraordinary rise could not have been more propitious. Like Harold Wilson in 1963, he won the leadership mid-term, filling a vacancy that arose from the sudden death of a leader. Hugh Gaitskell’s death had paved the way for Wilson. John Smith’s death necessitated the contest that Blair had won. Gaitskell and Smith had both seemed to be in place for the long haul. As a result, their successors arrived with a rare streak of dutiful purity. They were filling a gap that had arisen unexpectedly and not as a result of endless scheming. Wilson had been the only Labour leader to win an overall majority from opposition, and had evidently benefited from acquiring the role when mid-term disillusionment with the ruling Conservatives was deep.* That was also the case with Blair in 1994. Only Keir Starmer has won as Labour Leader of the Opposition after having served a full term in that role. Oddly, Starmer was helped in his ultimately triumphant marathon by his obscurity during the period of the Covid pandemic, when he was rarely seen in public. He became prominent as a leader around mid-term, so not very different from Blair and Wilson in terms of exposure as a Leader of the Opposition.

Blair’s victory was further proof that, after four successive election defeats, Labour’s membership was opting for steely pragmatism. During John Smith’s leadership Blair increasingly stood out as a ‘moderniser’ who, along with his close colleague Gordon Brown, had looked for inspiration from President Clinton’s victory in the United States. Clinton won the election in 1992, the same year that Labour had lost yet again. In 1993, Blair and Brown flew to the United States to spend time with senior Democrats, seeking to find out more about how Clinton had won and what the lessons were for their party. Their visit caused considerable internal tensions at Westminster. The moody shadow cabinet member John Prescott referred to Blair and Brown dismissively as ‘the beautiful people’ while they were away. He was not alone in wondering what they were up to. As a new Labour leader, Smith handled such tensions with considerable skill. Self-confident enough not to worry about the motives or ambitions of colleagues, he gave Blair and Brown space to pursue their ‘modernising’ ideas and also allowed the likes of Prescott to fume. Smith’s self-confidence was much missed when he died, even if some followers of Blair and Brown saw this rare quality in a Labour leader as complacency. He gave colleagues room to breathe. Quite a few of them breathed noisily, but he did not feel threatened as they did so.

In this context Blair was becoming increasingly prominent. Under Smith he was Shadow Home Secretary and had acquired distinctive definition with the sound bite ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, a slogan that no previous Labour leader would have disagreed with and yet one that Blair managed to make fresh, not least in the view of the mighty Conservative-supporting newspapers. Brown was its author, but it was Blair who benefited from the juxtaposition in the perception of colleagues and the media.

His approach as Shadow Home Secretary was part of a pattern. As Shadow Employment Secretary under Neil Kinnock’s leadership, Blair had campaigned to reverse the party’s support for the ‘closed shop’, in which employees were compelled to join a trade union. He continued to speak to journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers when the Labour leadership had instructed MPs not to do so in the 1980s. Blair was the most articulate campaigner for changing the way Labour elected its leader, a highly charged issue during the Smith era. The party did revise the rules at its conference in 1993, and Blair became the first leader elected under a partial version of what was known as ‘one member, one vote’, in which the block vote of unions was replaced with individual union members casting direct votes, alongside MPs and party members, each group comprising a third of the total. He was constantly challenging perceived orthodoxies within his party.

In slightly different ways, Blair, Brown and Peter Mandelson, who had been Labour’s media guru in the 1980s, were seeking ways to widen the party’s appeal by reforming its internal procedures and revising policies. Of the three, Blair’s background was the most unusual for a potential leader. As he described it himself in a speech in April 1995, ‘I wasn’t born into this party… I chose it.’ His father had been a Conservative. Blair had attended Fettes, a grand private school in Edinburgh, Scotland’s equivalent to Eton. At Oxford University he was not politically active. It was only afterwards, in the mid 1970s, when he met Cherie, his future wife, and senior Labour-supporting lawyers, including Derry Irvine – who became a cabinet minister in Blair’s first government – that he become fascinated by the party and addicted to politics. While active in Hackney in north London, he had the outsider’s capacity to analyse how the party at national and local level might be seen by those who were not part of the various internal battles in that stormy decade in which a Labour government often ruled precariously, with no majority. As he recalled in his memoir, while he searched intensely for a seat in the build-up to the 1983 election – he had been willing to move from London to the north-east in the hope of securing one – he ‘took care not to depart too far from the party mainstream opinion at that time, much to the left of where it had been; but I was nevertheless aware from the beginning that we were in the wrong place’.

At Oxford, Blair was detached from party politics, attracted to the ideas of a charismatic Australian Anglican vicar, Peter Thomson, who spoke inspiringly on ideas around Christian socialism and communitarianism, but largely disconnected from the debates raging around the Labour Party. The art of performance, an important part of his later political personality, was learned playing in rock bands rather than at the Oxford Union.

Perhaps there was always one echo from his Oxford days. Blair’s overt pragmatism was always layered with a tonal evangelism. Even before he became an MP in 1983, he was fascinated by the power of language in politics, the potency of the well-framed argument. In his memoir he describes hearing the former cabinet minister Tony Benn speak on behalf of Cherie, who was standing in Thanet North, a safe Conservative seat, in the 1983 election. Benn was then the most prominent figure on the left of the party and had been for more than a decade. He was a spellbinding orator, as Blair remembered: ‘I sat enraptured, absolutely captivated and inspired… What impressed me was not so much the content – actually I didn’t agree with a lot of it – but the power of it, the ability to use words to move people, not simply to persuade but to propel.’ This is an astute analysis of Benn’s skills as a speaker. As Blair suggests, even then his politics were different from those of the Labour left, but by the time he became leader he deployed the power of words more effectively than any other British politician of the time. Like Benn he could cast a spell over a room, each word carefully chosen, employing humour as a political weapon to bind speaker and audience even more closely. There was a melodious quality to Blair’s delivery, as there was to Benn’s. The difference was that Benn sought to put the case for sweeping, radical change, whereas Blair’s mesmeric exhortations hailed small, incremental reforms, an accommodation with the long period of Tory rule rather than a huge leap away from it. In a way, Blair’s speaking skills were even more impressive than Benn’s. He made the cautious seem exciting.

In his opening speech as leader he was at the start of a journey, a term he later used as the title of his memoir. He cited the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ several times and rooted himself on the ‘left of centre’. Soon these terms were no longer to feature as part of the Blairite lexicon. Before long he claimed to be at ‘the radical centre’, a term that manages to sound exciting and reassuring while lacking precision. The references to socialism rarely got a look-in. They did so in his first speech as leader, delivered at the University of London’s Logan Hall on 21 July 1994, but couched firmly in a context in which Blair was already navigating what became known as ‘the third way’:

We need neither the politics of the old left nor new right but a new left-of-centre agenda for the future, one that breaks new ground, that does not put one set of dogmas in place of another, that offers genuine hope of a new politics to take us into a new millennium. I said then that socialism was not some fixed economic theory defined for one time but a set of values and principles definable for all time.

The juxtaposition between old and new was in place from day one of Blair’s leadership. Soon this was to become a clever and more precise assertion. He was leader of ‘New’ Labour. The past was ‘old’. The new divide was not left versus right as much as a chronological one. He was moving on, choosing neither old left nor new right but a politically safer path:

On the economy, we replace the choice between the crude free market and the command economy with a new partnership between government and industry, workers and managers, not to abolish the market, but to make it dynamic and work in the public interest, so that it provides opportunities for all. On education, that we do provide choice and demand standards from the teachers and schools, but run our education system so that all children get that choice and those standards, not just the privileged few. On welfare, that we do not want people living in dependency on state handouts, but will create a modern welfare system that has people at work not on benefit.

The speech conveyed a sense of purpose and confidence that Blair had noted in Benn’s address in Thanet. Here was a framing of an argument after which the policies would make more sense.

Blair’s confidence was partly based on a deep knowledge of the Labour Party’s capacity to lose elections. Elected in 1983 when Labour was slaughtered, he had seen firsthand how the party had repeatedly been defeated. Indeed, he endured an earlier experience of Labour’s unpopularity, having contested the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982, shortly after the Falklands War. Blair noted then how many voters in the safe Conservative seat saw Thatcher as a great Churchillian leader following her victory in that conflict, not least compared with a Labour leadership regarded as ‘soft on defence’.

Sharing an office with Gordon Brown, also elected for the first time in 1983, he observed closely the leadership style of Neil Kinnock, whose epic attempts to change Labour only resulted in failure in 1987 and 1992. In particular, the 1992 election had a decisive impact on Blair. Shortly before the vote, Kinnock had been snubbed by President Reagan on a visit to Washington, while Thatcher was treated like a revered equal when she made trips to the White House. At the start of the election campaign the then Shadow Chancellor, John Smith, had unveiled a shadow budget that included some increases in income tax for higher earners. The Tories and the media leaped on the proposals and they became ‘Labour’s tax bombshell’. The reason Blair was ready to lead in 1994, when the vacancy had arisen so suddenly and unexpectedly, was that he, Brown and Mandelson, by then an MP, had talked constantly for years about what Labour leaders were doing wrong and what in their view was necessary to put it right.

Both Blair and Brown were drawn to Mandelson with a near-unqualified admiration, and he reciprocated, identifying the duo as the party’s most telegenic communicators, with a clear sense of the need for Labour to change. Mandelson’s impact shines much light on Labour’s relations with modern media before and after his arrival. He had been a producer on ITV’s Weekend World