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No more Mister Nice-Guy!

By Clark Nida

Just been listening to Tony Blair’s book: A Journey. My first impression when I heard the narrator was: gosh, they’ve found an actor who talks just like Tony Blair! Then I discovered it was the man himself reading his own book.

As someone who has read my own books – and published them – I am lost in admiration for the man’s energy. He must have 20 waking hours in each day. I wonder then if the eight hours minimum shuteye I need doesn’t just contribute to an overly reflective turn of mind, eroding the certainty of my convictions and undermining my confidence in my own judgement?

Blair suffers from no such defect.

As I heard more, however, I began to wonder if I wasn’t listening to an actor after all.

My first impressions were of a thoroughly nice guy: a little too convinced, perhaps, of the irrepressible goodness of human nature, especially his own. He robustly defends his record, and it all sounds convincing until you stop to think about what he’s saying. Soon I found myself mentally reversing the spin on every one of his utterances, like so many subatomic particles. The result didn't sound anything like so good.

But that very realisation makes me more inclined to believe his version of events. There are one or two places where I felt he had missed out a vital consideration, but that could be put down to understandable blind-spots in a busy person, who gets little spare time to go boning up on anything but the matter in-hand. I am convinced that nowhere does he actually say what just isn’t so. Especially when reversing the spin confirms my darkest suspicions. But of course he is a trained barrister, hence he chooses words to show his utterances in the best possible light.

Here is a man who, by his own admission, was prepared to tear down the most time-honoured structures, if he judged them unlikely to deliver the level of performance improvements which he felt he had a right to expect. But in 1997, that’s exactly what we all wanted. Thatcher had laid into time-honoured structures with her hatchet, but all she had to offer to put in their place was private enterprise and “giving people their own money back”. Whyever we fell for that I can’t recall.

But, like Hilaire Belloc, we doubtless wanted to “keep a tight hold of Nurse, for fear of meeting something worse”. Back in those days there was no credible alternative government. Thatcher was forever going on about “there is no other way”, which always struck some of us as rather lacking in imagination. Tony Blair was a self-avowed Third Way progressive – which accepted in principle that there were two other ways besides his own. By 1997 the Conservatives had made themselves odious by their studied neglect of our public services. And all these wonderful entrepreneurs who were going to fill the breach left by the rolled-back State turned out to be carpet-baggers. In 1997 we all thought Tony Blair was such a nice guy – a great guy. The guy to salve our Thatcher-inflicted wounds.

Blair makes two telling remarks, indicative (if they are not exactly diagnostic) of the real nature of the man behind the facepaint. The first concerns his father greeting him back from his first term at Oxford on the platform of Durham station, where the son turns up unwashed and dressed like a hippy. He says “The good news, dad, is that I’m not on drugs,” Dad replies “if you’re dressed like that and not on drugs, then we have a problem.”

If Blair talks as he does in this book and is not a paranoid megalomaniac intoxicated by power, then he has a problem.

The next quote illustrates the point. He quotes Peter Mandelson as telling him “you are far stronger than you know” – and he says it twice. Spin-reversed, that becomes “your adversaries are far weaker than you know”. Relativistically identical, but with opposite spin. Whichever you pick is going to say something about you and your self-image. Never for a moment does Blair contemplate the implications of the second of the two.

Every bit as much as Thatcher’s government, New Labour was marked by its tearing down of distressing structures, at home and abroad, especially those which stood in the way of conflict resolution, or promised further mischief. Tony Blair can justifiably be proud of his decisive intervention in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. He is right to blame the tragedies of Bosnia and Rwanda on the failure of any member of the United Nations to take the initiatives he did. And they weren’t all violent ones: the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland was all about reconciliation.

But tearing down Iraq was one distressing structure too many. It has resulted in over a million Iraqi deaths, and its legality was debatable. It has certainly been debated! It has incurably tainted him in the eyes of many who believe that war for any purpose other than defence of the motherland against invasion cannot be just. Such people aren’t a fringe minority: a million took to the streets in London to protest against the Iraq adventure, which even Blair admits breaks records. But even all this could have been forgiven had it not been undertaken as the junior partner (reverse-spin: stooge) of the USA, whose motives were suspect, to say the least.

HG Wells in the 1930s (The Shape Of Things To Come) condemned the USA as being all too ready to promote the message of Jesus Christ with the methods of Pontius Pilate. But the biggest criticism of America's decision to invade Iraq with less-than-perfect authorisation from the United Nations came from respected commentators within the USA itself: apparently even George Bush (for once) did not want to fight Iraq in the wake of 9/11, and was only driven to it by Rumsfeld, whom many felt was keener to commandeer Iraq's oil than preserve world peace.

When the country had fallen out of love with Blair over this, and when subsequently he tried to introduce student top-up fees, abandoning yet another socialist principle, party resentment crystallised around Gordon Brown, the media savaged Blair and he was at last ready to resign.

He disparages his weakness, but at that stage, in 2007, it is not clear who he represented besides himself and his formidable ego, which he deifies into something he calls his religious interests (he doesn’t actually say his God, but Alastair Campbell saved him from that error once by butting-in with "We don't do God"). Mandelson said to him “you are far stronger than you know”. Was he ever going to say to his old political crony in his darkest hour “please don’t go because whoever we might get in your place is just too awful to contemplate”?

Mandelson, if not Brown, wanted to “keep tight hold of Nurse”.

In the end Blair concluded that to go would be cowardice. Spin-reversed: his ego got the better of him.

Why shouldn’t it, you might ask? What other body of opinion could he count on for support? If you don’t believe in yourself, who else can you expect to believe in you?

Well, England is supposed to be a democracy, and democracy is supposed to be the best form of government for every country in today’s world (otherwise what were we fighting for in Iraq?) So, with party and public opinion against him, where was Blair’s mandate to rule? Does the will of the people only exist when votes are being cast in a general election? Blair is saying, in effect, that he was not a democratic leader – though, calling on his skill as a barrister, he makes it sound easier on the ear. Clear signs of prevalent distrust he treats as something to be toughed-out, and its articulation by individual journalists, not to say the heads of the BBC, he treats as personal spite or puzzling betrayal. But if he had really lost the people’s trust and the party’s patience, the unrelenting attacks by the media, the isolation, the vilification at which he self-pityingly protests – might it all not have had some underlying basis?

But that is not within his brief to admit. He states, elsewhere, that “unreasonable people may yet have reasonable grievances”. Why does he not admit that this could well apply to the whole British electorate in 2007, let alone the Labour Party?

But of course a barrister doesn’t have to preserve continuity of argument across his whole career: just within the confines of the case in-hand. Let his detractors call it “spin” if they must.