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Tony Blair's 'Journey' (Bill Jones)

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Tony Blair's 'Journey' (Bill Jones) Tony Blair’s ‘Journey’ (Bill Jones) An Analysis of Tony Blair’s period in office based on his book, A Journey, Hutchinson (price varies but big discounts usually offered) ‘I voted Labour in 1983. I didn’t really think a Labour victory was the best thing for the country and I was a Labour candidate.’ Tony Blair, A Journey. Tony Blair has been a feature of British life for almost two decades but still manages to be highly controversial; his 3 year in the writing, 700 page memoir- A Journey- has underlined this point emphatically. The fact that it made the bestseller lists before even being published is further evidence of an enduring public fascination with the man. Personally I have met countless people who confess how they at first perceived him as the nation’s saviour after 18 years of Conservative misery, then became disillusioned after Iraq and his ‘poodling’ to Bush, but could never quite extinguish a degree of interest or even regard for this fluent and charming public figure. I am particularly taken by this, I suppose, as I occupy a similar category. How readers react to the book I guess will more than usually with an author, depend on how they view him: friend or foe, villain or hero. Before addressing the memoir itself it has to be said that since leaving power, Blair has not won many additional friends by appearing to have an inordinate interest in matching the fortunes of the super-rich whose company he seems so much to enjoy. His property portfolio now comprises: five homes including a £3.7m des res in Connaught Square, subsequently ‘knocked through’ to absorb an adjacent mews property, itself worth close to a million pounds; two posh London apartments for sons Euan and Nicky and there is, of course the $5.7m country pad, once the home of that other great actor, Sir John Gielgud. In addition to this there is: the hugely remunerative part-time work for the likes of JP Morgan and Zurich Financial Services and all those after dinner speeches in USA, China and elsewhere, at £150-200,000 a pop. Tony Blair Associates has been shown to have a structure of such byzantine complexity that it seems clear he did not want his financial affairs to be especially transparent. Given that Cherie was brought up in relative poverty, it could be that his tastes were to some extent influenced by a wife who sought the security of relative riches; I tend to think, however, it was as much his tendency as hers. Those Labour supporters, like me, who think their party leaders should opt for modest lifestyles(one thinks wistfully of Attlee and Bevin or even the tea-drinking Tony Benn), not a Grand Canyon’s width from those of ordinary voters, have deplored this tendency whereby Blair became a ‘celebrity’ prime minister, aiding and abetting the ‘filthy rich’ and losing much moral authority in so doing. Blair sheds some light on why he entered politics and on the side of Labour. His Political epiphany, when the bolt of lightning struck him was shortly after he met Cherie andvisited the Commons to meet Tom Pendry MP. Waiting in the ‘Cavernous Central Lobby…’he writes, ‘I was thunderstruck. It just hit me. This was where I wanted to be…I had a complete presentiment: here I was going to be.’ 1 So Blair, never seen as a ‘House of Commons man’, owed his lifetime obsession to the magic of the place. Later on a piece of Tony Benn’s leftwing oratory also inspired him. Why Labour and not the other side, less guilty about the high life and the party too for which his own father aspired to be an MP? One story is that two leading Tory MPs rather thought the same and when Blair arrived in the Commons took him out to dinner to sound him out. Their conclusion was that the answer, on this occasion was indeed his wife, Cherie, daughter of the leftwing actor, Tony Booth. Her own ambitions to enter the House, were reflected in her candidacy for Thanet South in1983 but thereafter, says her husband: ‘As I became more passionate, she saw herself more as a barrister’. Blair soon made his mark in shadow roles and when John Smith tragically died in 1994, he had to decide whether to stand for the leadership or to defer to the man who had so effectively stood in for Smith following his earlier heart attack. His reaction to this dilemma expressed vividly why he became leader and Brown did not.: ‘The truth is I was out in front, taking risks, and this was a time for risk-takers. I spotted that; he didn’t.’ More on Gordon later. Blair allows an insight into his psyche when he relates a scene in Schindler’s list, a film which moved both him and Cherie. In it, the commandant, played by Ralph Fiennes shoots dead a camp inmate while chatting to his girlfriend. She continues chatting as if not involved. ‘Except that she wasn’t. There were no bystanders in that situation. You participate whether you like it or not. You take sides by inaction as much as by action. Why were the Nazis able to do these things? Because of people like him? No, because of people like her.’ This story, in effect a variation on Edmund Burke’s "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." helps explain his attitude towards ‘humanitarian intervention’; laid out in his Chicago speech in 1999. This was a plea to ‘bring down a despotic regime on the grounds of the nature of that regime’ and is, I think, a key to understanding this complex politician. He argued that, providing it is doable and all other expedients have been tried, it behoves peace- loving states to remove tyrants and liberate otherwise benighted peoples. His memoirs relate the examples of Kosovo, which brought down Milosevic and Sierra Leone, which helped bring down Charles Taylor, dictatorial leader of adjacent Liberia. Both forays into military usage involved risk but both proved successful and seemed to fulfil Blair’s views on the duties of principled bystanders to evil. Blair’s account of the Iraq decision and subsequent events serve to add it to his ‘enlightened’ line on the morality of states. He tries hard, and with some success I thought, to convince us that his available intelligence on WMD was wholly convincing at the time and that the chances of it being true were too great to ignore. He also seeks to argue that, given the atrocities inflicted on Iran, the 2 Kurds and his own people, the human costs of the war can be justified by the removal of a vile and monstrous dictator. The impression I get from his book is that after his earlier successes, he somehow thought he had discovered the means to fulfil his ‘destiny’ to reshape the world for the better; some have described this as his ‘messianic tendency’. But Iraq, tragically, proved a case where massive risk failed to come off, producing extended tragedy instead of heroic success. He doesn’t either satisfactorily explain why he was so content to follow the lead of George Bush. That he liked and admired him is clear to see but to follow the American president’s judgement so blindly many of his supporters see as his greatest crime. I also wondered why he did not deflect some of the blame-either in his book or evidence to Chilcot- for the awfulness of Iraq onto the way in which the war was planned and implemented. Rumsfeld’s naïve belief the job could be done with half the troops advised by his own military plus his ignoring of advice regarding the need to retain internal security in the wake of victory not to mention the requirement to rebuild the shattered country, are surely more culpable than anything Blair might have done or not done. Blair does not really address the ‘poodle’ accusation. Journalists like Andrew Rawnsley (see The End of the Party (2010, Viking) argue that, apart from urging Bush to involve the United Nations he never threatened to withhold full support of what the US went on to in Iraq. Rafael Behr, reviewing George Bush’s Points of Decision in the Observer 14th October 2010, makes a shrewd point about these two authors of the Iraq invasion: .” It is easy to see how he and Tony Blair got along so famously. Their memoirs, published weeks apart, corroborate each other's accounts of characters that clicked easily together. Both men have an evangelical sense of grace within that makes their choices immune from criticism because, whatever the outcome, the intention was honest. It is a brilliantly circular and impregnable defence – the test of a policy is not whether it works, but whether it is morally authentic, and the arbiter of authenticity happens also to be the author of the policy.” Blair’s account of the domestic agenda is inextricably entangled with his relationship with Gordon Brown. Both men had evolved the idea of New Labour along with Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould but whereas some saw it as political expedience, with Blair, it seemed New Labour achieved the status of strongly held principle. It had begun with an acceptance of Thatcherite economics regarding tight control of inflation plus minimal regulation of market forces, thus advantaging the City and related financial sector. After Labour’s failure in the 1970s this was adopted as the new bedrock of the party’s economic thinking, embraced by both Blair and Brown.
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