A Journey: My Political Life

"Blair is an interesting figure. He’s a bit of a chameleon, and he spanned two periods. First, the period of huge faith in globalisation – the pre 9/11 optimistic period, capitalism and the third way, which he jointly developed. Then he outlasted Clinton, and became George W Bush’s great ally in the War on Terror – the much darker American world view that followed 9/11 . He tried to span both and fit them into a common conceptual framework. And he is important when it comes to the global market, and the tension between globalisation and the state. Blair isn’t a particularly profound thinker. He’s highly intelligent, but he tended to embrace the conventional wisdom as it formed, and then build on it but not really make a breakthrough. Of course, in terms of the Labour party, he was radical because he forced them to reconcile Thatcherism at home with globalisation and modern capitalism. But he was just getting them to accept the zeitgeist – he didn’t remold the zeitgeist in the way that Thatcher did. The other reason I chose this book is that it’s fun to read. Political memoirs tend to be quite heavy going – the Thatcher memoir, the Reagan memoir, they’ve got an official quality to them. Whereas with Blair you can actually hear his voice. He writes with an informality and a sense of humour that makes it fun to read. Of course, like any politician he is shaping his legacy, but he can at least simulate frankness. Very shrewd, actually. He’s a good reader of people and situations. What he says in the book about what his opposite number is thinking, or how to deal with people, is always interesting. He’s a very good politician in that respect. He can size people up, see where they are coming from, he understands what they want to hear. There’s a nice bit in the book where he talks about when to interrupt someone saying something absolutely outrageous, and when to just let them rattle on. It gives you the sense of an active political mind at work. A lot of the book is about those decisions, how he wrestled with them, and it doesn’t really differ from what else he has said publically – that he felt it was a fundamental moral issue, that he had been concerned about Iraq since before 9/11, and why he still thinks it was the right call. Although it was a very contentious decision, my suspicion is that most British prime ministers would have made the same call. In a way it was a conventional decision, because I think that British foreign policy has long been trying to maintain a special relationship with the United States, and a very close relationship with our European neighbours, and not to have to choose between them. But I’ve always felt that if that choice was forced on the Brits they would go with the Americans, for historical and cultural reasons. And that, in a sense, was the choice that Blair faced in 2001. He had a controversial American president charging off in a direction that was deeply disapproved of in Berlin, Paris and Brussels. Which way does he jump? It doesn’t surprise me at all that he jumped with the Americans. That’s a bit of a cliché. Because of language and history, clearly the British have a better network of relations in the US than, say, the French. They share some of the ideas and intellectual traditions of the Americans. So in quite a practical way, Britain can be a bridge between these two worlds they know quite well. But they actually know the American side much better than the European side."