The fall and fall of Tony Blair

Never has a former prime minister so tarnished their own reputation

Whatever happened to the other Tony Blair? You know the one. The young Labour leader who won three consecutive general elections. The postwar prime minister who, like Margaret Thatcher, chose to make the political weather rather than shelter from it. The internationalist who championed the spread of liberal democracy. The sponsor at home of a minimum wage and of a surge in resources for the National Health Service. The author of the at once obvious and revolutionary notion that social democrats do not have to choose between an open economy and social justice.

The other day a thoughtful Channel 4 documentary offered a reminder of why the country fell so completely under Blair’s spell. Who else could have persuaded IRA and loyalist paramilitaries to end their 30-years war in Northern Ireland? When last did a political leader so skilfully harness the nation’s optimism. New Labour, New Britain, Cool Britannia - it was nonsense, but it did not feel so at the time. And why, even after an unpopular war, did the country keep voting for him?

The flashbacks are fleeting. Even as the credits rolled on Michael Waldman’s three-part political portrait, the news programmes were showing the new Blair. There he was in Washington, straining to smile as joined a grim assortment of the world’s despots and autocrats paying homage to Donald Trump as members of the US president’s grotesquely misnamed Board of Peace. How much further, I wondered, could this once singular politician fall.

One of the nation’s youngest prime ministers, the 72-year old Blair now looks his age. Never mind. Whatever the costs in compromised values or personal dignity, he will never willingly step off the stage.

A big part of prime minister Blair’s self-declared mission was to persuade the country that it could be comfortable as part of Europe. Britain could join France and Germany as one of the continent’s “big Three”. Had the continent not splintered over the Iraq war the strategy might have worked. And now? Blair cannot be blamed for Brexit, but the Washington line up spoke eloquently to the company he now keeps. No sign of Friedrich Merz or Emmanuel Macron. Instead he now stands shoulder to shoulder with Hungary’s pocket-Putin, Viktor Orban.

Many if not most people in Britain, of course, made their minds up about Blair a long time ago. For a large swath on the left, he is the “war criminal” who lied about weapons of mass destruction to take the country to war alongside his pal George W Bush. For others he was a closet “Tory” all along, hijacking the Labour party in the cause of laissez faire economics. In reality, the story of his premiership was much more complicated. But those (and I count myself among them) who thought that, the Iraq war apart, the record was laudable are inclined to keep their counsel.

As political editor and then a columnist for the Financial Times, I knew Blair from the beginning. The FT was a newspaper he wanted to court (though not so assiduously as Rupert Murdoch’s Sun) so I had privileged access. He enjoyed regular one-to-one conversations with pundits. It is often said his premiership was all about media “spin”. What the critics missed was that courting the media was a means to an end - it advanced, rather than substituted for, a policy agenda.

The war with Iraq was an unmitigated disaster - one for which young soldiers and their families paid a grievous price. But all a big lie on Blair’s part? From many conversations before and immediately after the invasion I am as sure as I can be that he believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I recall one encounter soon after the fall of Baghdad. What about the WMD, I asked? Blair’s response came with a string of expletives. The rage was real. Iraq was falling to chaos. Why weren’t the Americans doing more to find and secure the stockpiles before they was destroyed or fell into other hands? Did he recklessly exaggerate the immediate danger from WMD? Yes. Invent it, No.

Blair’s sin was one of Manichean certitude. It was his duty, he would say, to stand with Bush in the face of Islamist terrorism. And it was the job of the international community to end Saddam’s defiance of the UN. Invading, the mantra went, “the right thing to do”. Competing judgements were lost to the self-absorption. Put another way, he was right, others wrong.

The war was a shadow he could never escape. He might in his second life have added some competing light. Instead the real fall began when he left office. After a decade on the world stage he had grown accustomed - some would say addicted - to the idea that he could “make a difference”. Denied by the fractures over Iraq the big job he wanted as chairman of the European Council, he was lost.

His response was the manic quest for private riches and public approbation - a role, courtesy of Bush, as the United Nations representative on the Middle East quartet, his own international foundation, Tony Blair Associates (latterly the Tony Blair Global Policy Institute) to keep him in the news, and a series of expensive advisory contracts to fill his bank account..

The boundaries between private profit and public service were obscured. When Blair travelled in the Gulf it was never clear if he was wearing his UN hat or drumming up personal business. Nor did he discriminate in his choice of clients. Kazakhstan’s tyrannical president Nursultan Nazarbayev was an early, and lucrative patron. So too were the oil-rich emirs of the Gulf States.

The old Blair would have backed the democratic awakening marked by the Arab Spring. The new Blair fell in with the despotic regime of Egypt’s Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. You could call it following the money. Thus his supposedly independent policy institute is now more or less the property of its principal donor, the far right billionaire Larry Ellison. The founder of technology company Oracle, Ellison is one of Trump’s leading cheerleaders.

It’s hard to see why he ever really needed all the money. Other prime ministers have managed to make a more than comfortable living without making a bonfire of their principles and dignity. Others - think of David Cameron, Boris Johnson or Liz Truss - had nothing much of a reputation to defend. No, for Blair it has been all about demonstrating, as he told his Channel 4 interviewer, that his voice is still needed on the international stage - that he can make a difference. Except that it’s an illusion. What’s left for the historians is a blackened shell.