The Blair Years

"This is an expurgated version covering the period from 1994 to about 2003. There are, I believe, four more volumes to come, which will probably contain a lot of things that he didn’t feel able to put in the edited version. If there’s a change of government at the next election I guess that’s something we can look forward to. The thing about Alastair is he did enjoy total access at the highest level – in public Blair always appeared utterly self-assured and totally confident, but when you read these diaries a slightly different picture emerges. He was always ringing up Alastair to seek reassurance at all times of the day and night, often many times on the same issue. Yes there is – Alastair’s reliability is pretty high actually because he was recording on a day-to-day basis. Obviously he had his own prejudices but I don’t think he made things up, and you can’t really dispute the fact that he had a very high level of influence because he was right at the centre. What he isn’t able to do, of course, is step back from it, in the way that somebody further removed from the centre can, and assess where we’re going or where they’re going, because he was bound up in it every day, and things moved at such speed you never really got to concentrate on an issue for very long before you’d moved on to the next one. I guess that’s a feature of life at the top. He’s had mixed reviews but I think most people agree that because of his level of access and frankness they are going to be an important part of the historical record. I’m sure people writing about this era will refer back to them constantly."