A Journey by Tony Blair

The real revelation in Tony Blair’s autobiography is his unnerving
conviction that, in politics, he has been answering destiny’s call

Robert Harris.12th September 2010 Sunday Times
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/non_fiction/article389803.ece

This is a very strange book, by far
the weirdest political memoir I have ever read — part spiritual confession,
part legal brief for the defence, part celebrity gossip, part primer for
would-be world leaders. It will rightly be read by anyone interested in
politics; it could also serve as a standard text for psychologists. “Messiah
complex” was how Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, used to refer
to his boss’s leadership style — “I think jokingly,” adds Blair.

But after 700 pages of Blair’s tortuous self-revelation, the reader may well
decide that Powell was being perfectly serious.

There is disappointingly little on Blair’s influences during his first 40
years, and nothing at all about God: only at the very end does he confess
that he has “a passion bigger than politics, which is religion”. But clearly
he sees himself as an instrument of divine Providence. Take, for example,
his description of his time as shadow home secretary in the early 1990s: “I
felt a growing inner sense of belief, almost of destiny…I could see the
opportunity to take hold of the Labour party, rework it into an electoral
machine capable of winning over the people. I could see it like…an artist
suddenly appreciates his own creative genius.”

On a weekend trip to Paris in April 1994, two more blinding revelations are
vouchsafed unto him. “I remember waking up the first morning and then waking
Cherie. I said to her: ‘If John [Smith] dies, I will be leader, not Gordon.
And somehow, I think this will happen. I just think it will.’ Is that a
premonition?” Later that same day, the couple go to a cinema and watch
Schindler’s List. “I was spellbound throughout the whole three and a quarter
hours. We sat through it, missed our dinner, and talked about it long into
the night.” The moral Blair drew from the film was that as long as there is
evil in the world there can be no “bystanders”: “You participate, like it or
not. You take sides by inaction as much as by action…Not very practical is
it, as a reaction? The trouble is it’s how I feel. Whether such reactions
are wise in someone charged with leading a country is another matter.”
Indeed.

“I returned from Paris exhilarated, and again, with this curious sensation of
power, of anticipation, of prescience. Then John did die.” On the day of his
death, Blair chillingly describes how he encountered Peter Mandelson, then a
supporter of Gordon Brown, in the lobby of the House of Commons. They
discussed the leadership. “‘Peter,’ I said, putting a hand on each shoulder,
‘don’t cross me over this. This is mine. I know it and I will take it.’”

Three years later, Labour duly won the election and Blair prepared to enter
Downing Street: “I was alone. There would be no more team, no more friendly
clique, no more shared emotions among a band of intimates. There would be
them; and there would be me. At a certain profound point, they would not be
able to touch my life, or me theirs.”

To which my first reaction was that of Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall:
“I have to go now, Duane, because I’m due back on the planet earth.” But on
reflection, perhaps it’s not that funny. If these quotations really do
genuinely reflect Blair’s feelings at the time he entered office, then the
impulses that led to Britain’s involvement in the disastrous Iraq war six
years later were present from day one: a reckless feeling of invincibility,
arising out of a solip­sistic sense of personal destiny; an almost ludicrous
penchant for self-dramatisation; a deluded detachment from the advice of
colleagues and officials; and, above all, an oversimplistic view of the
world as a place of good versus evil, drawn in part from a Hollywood film.

One cannot rid oneself of the uneasy feeling that Blair enjoys war — its stark
simplicity, its historic drama, its emotion. Informed of the attacks on the
World Trade Center while he was preparing to address the Trade Union
Congress in Brighton on September 11, 2001, Blair claims to have felt
“eerily calm…There was no other course; no other option; no alternative
path. It was war… And it came with total clarity. Essentially, it stayed
with that clarity and stays still, in the same way, as clear now as it was
then.”

And although he insists he is not a neo-conservative, when he sets out his
vision of what needs to be done to defeat militant Islam he certainly sounds
like one: “It requires a whole new geopolitical framework. It requires
nation-building. It requires a myriad of interventions deep into the affairs
of other nations. It requires above all a willingness to see the battle as
existential and to see it through, to take the time, to spend the treasure,
to shed the blood.” All this from a man who can’t bring himself to sign
copies of his book in central London in case of protests!

The colossal joke history has played on those of us who supported Blair back
in 1994 was that he appeared to us at that time to be the quintessential
normal guy — refreshingly sensible, modest, non-ideological, sympathetic,
pragmatic. That was why he was elected so overwhelmingly, first by the party
and then the country: because his instincts and ambitions seemed so in tune
with what might loosely be called middle England. How were we to know that
he would turn into this crazed millennialist who, not content with one
pre-emptive war against Iraq, now blithely advocates a second against Iran?

A Journey is said not to be the work of a ghostwriter, and this at least one
can be-lieve: no self-respecting ghost would leave in so many redundant
phrases (“anyway, I digress…don’t get me wrong…I kid you not…if you know
what I mean”) or allow such curious digressions, so that, for example, a
description of Andrew Smith’s resignation pops up in the middle of an
account of the Kosovo crisis. And if Blair’s commitment to the war on terror
is absolute, so is his relentless campaign against the normal rules of
English grammar and punctuation: in places, I can report, the subordinate
clause has been all but eradicated.

There are some excellent descriptions, particularly of prime minister’s
questions, some funny anecdotes and some slippery evasions, not least in his
account of Mandelson’s sacking as Northern Ireland secretary and his own
complicity in the naming of Dr David Kelly. On some issues, such as the
euro, he writes almost nothing; on others — “I like to have time and comfort
on the loo,” for example — we learn far too much. Michael Levy (Blair’s
fundraiser-in-chief, weekly tennis partner and special envoy in the Middle
East: a pivotal member of the court for at least a decade) gets barely a
dozen words. John Birt, his “blue skies thinker”, isn’t mentioned at all.
Brown, who should be a huge presence in the book, somehow isn’t — perhaps
because we have heard all the stories before.

No: it is Iraq that rightly dominates Blair’s memoirs. He made the cross. He
dragged it into position. He hoisted himself on to it and he nailed himself
in place. With nobody else to blame he is nevertheless full of self-pity,
lamenting “the demonic rabble tearing at my limbs”. But I fear the reader’s
sympathies are more likely to be with the 100,000 or more Iraqis who died in
the aftermath of that unnecessary, vainglorious and ill-thought-out
adventure. “To me,” he writes, with characteristic mawkishness, “the only
meaning was in being true to myself. I might be in a minority of one, but it
would be a one I believed in.” The phrase just about sums up the central
disaster of his premiership. Let it be his epitaph.