When Zhou Enlai, Chairman Mao’s premier and foreign minister, was once asked what he thought was the impact of the French Revolution, he famously replied, “It’s too early to tell.” Three years after he left Downing Street, I feel the same way about Tony Blair and this long and consistently readable autobiography has not helped me decide.
I recognise that I am in a minority in this. Blair manages to provoke stronger reactions than any other post-war Prime Minister (Thatcher excepted), reactions that tend to range from the negative (from those on the right who never liked him) to the very negative (from those on the left who feel betrayed by him). One of the many admirable facets of this book is its almost total lack of bitterness. It may be an apologia but it is strikingly free from self-righteousness or malice. Blair is generous about almost everyone. Only the “Drumcree people” (“the unreasonable of the unreasonable of the unreasonable”) seem to be without merit. Even Gordon Brown, about whom the book, media previews told us, was so harshly critical, is often and highly praised. Blair makes no secret of what he sees as his successor’s deep character flaws and misguided politics, but he repeatedly recognises his intellectual weight and moral sincerity. Given how monumentally dysfunctional and acrimonious their relationship was at times, a lesser figure might have used his memoirs to settle scores. It is to Blair’s credit that he does not.
The book ably illustrates Blair’s remarkable political acumen without ever bragging about it. In as far as A Journey has a plotline, it is the story of New Labour: its genesis, success, struggles and eclipse under Gordon Brown. This is clearly deliberate. Blair’s premiership is now remembered chiefly for Iraq. The war occupies three long chapters in the middle of the book and haunts the rest of it. Those chapters are unlikely to persuade anyone with a strong view on the subject and are among the book’s least illuminating. Blair, however, clearly sees as his most important achievement not Iraq (not surprisingly) but the transformation of shambolic, divided Old Labour into a realistic, professional, electable machine, which then instituted genuine, far-reaching and much-needed reforms. This was indeed a stunning achievement, realised in the teeth of bitter opposition, both internal and external.
Blair’s political authority is all the more impressive given his sincere and explicit Christianity. Being a Christian politician is hard enough today but being one in the ranks of liberal left, which seeks religion as at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous, is doubly-impressive. Those Christians who damn him for his insincerity or wooliness would do well to remember the context in which Blair operated.
And yet, this is where doubts start to creep in. Blair is explicit in the biography that religion has always been a “bigger passion” for him than politics. And yet, religion is almost completely absent from the book. Its absence from his premiership was understandable – it was a political lose-lose situation for him when in front of the cameras – but why the silence in the memoirs? How straight is he being with us?
For a man who is so sincerely Christian, he seems to show scant regard for some reasonably mainstream Christian ideas. Leave aside (as the book does) his own voting record on abortion and how he squares that with his conversion to Roman Catholicism, or his (non-) response to the pleas of virtually every Christian leader you can name in the run up to the Iraq war. What about his dismissal of nonconformist opposition to supercasinos as “the worst form of Puritanism”? What about his apparent indifference to the massive increase in income and wealth inequality that grew during his time in Number 10? What about his blasé assertion that “the success of families is not about their make-up”? It is not that Blair’s position on each of these issues is indefensible. Rather it is that opposition to supercasinos was not narrow-minded Puritanism, that inequality really does matter, and that family make-up is crucial to its success, facts of which Blair is airily dismissive. One cannot shake off the opinion that his faith is first and foremost in his own judgement and if religious ethics disagree with that, so much the worse for religious ethics.
At its worst, this trait becomes dangerously self-delusional. Thus, Gordon Brown did not lose the 2010 election because, as Blair claims, he stopped pushing the New Labour agenda. He lost it because he walked into the biggest financial crisis in 80 years and because the electorate was getting tired of the Labour government. Similarly, New Labour’s educational “successes”, about which Blair is enormously proud, were in fact marked – and perhaps achieved – by declining examination standards, multiplying discipline problems and plummeting teachers’ morale. On occasion such delusion – let us be kinder and call it confusion – is so evident as to bewilder. At one point Blair says of Kosovo “it completely changed my own attitude to foreign policy,” before going on to say, two paragraphs later, “from the outset I was extraordinarily forward in advocating a military solution.” Which is it? Was Blair a hawk before Kosovo or because of Kosovo?
To his credit Blair can admit mistakes. The Freedom of Information Act, he says, was idiotic. His government was dangerously complacent about immigration for far too long. The fox hunting ban was a pointless and mistaken bill which he did his best to sabotage. One does not read Prime Minister’s autobiographies for mea culpas and if A Journey admits to only a few, it is a few more than Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Years. Yet if being a Christian means recognising that moral authority lies beyond yourself, which in turn means that you must attend carefully to other opinions and be ready to admit that personal sincerity is insufficient, it seems that Blair’s Christianity may be found lacking.
And so A Journey fails to make up this reviewer’s mind about its subject. That does not mean it fails to entertain or enlighten. Its chatty style makes it wholly readable and it is, on occasion, genuinely funny, such as in his account of the Millennium Celebrations or of Jacques Chirac woes at a G8 summit in 2005. It sustains narrative and pace throughout and some chapters, in particular the one dealing with the G8 summit, Olympic bid and 7/7 attacks are compelling. It just fails to define with any final clarity who the real Tony Blair is. Perhaps it’ll take another two hundred years to find out.
This review first appeared in Third Way Magazine.
