October 8, 2010
The Passing of Blair Rage
I used to be angry with Tony Blair. Really angry. About the Iraq war (especially). About his continuation of Thatcher’s legacy. About the assault on civil liberties. About the wasted opportunities which followed the two largest Labour majorities in history.
But I’ve recently started to change my assessment of the man himself. And my anger is mutating into something else.
Take David Runciman’s unmissable review of Blair’s memoirs in the LRB. It is focused on two defining features of Blair’s premiership: his 10-year battle with Gordon Brown (or rather, his 10-year resistance to the assassin next door), and his decision to back an American invasion of Iraq. In Runciman’s withering assessment, Blair not only got two of his biggest decisions wrong, he got them the wrong way around.
The time to be decisive and head-strong was mid-2001, after Labour had been returned with a second landslide. Blair could have dispatched Brown there and then. The rest of his premiership, and New Labour’s record, would have been profoundly different. The time for hesitancy and refusal to land a body-blow was 2002-3, when the American war effort was going into full effect. But instead Blair embarked on the worst foreign policy disaster in British post-war history.
Runciman’s assessment is broadly shared by Andrew Rawnsley in his The End of the Party. Yet what comes through most clearly in Rawnsley’s treatment is what a terrible judge of situations, and what an ineffectual decision-maker, Blair was at crucial junctures.
Blair lacked the stomach for a fight with Brown, and mistakenly thought he could charm Bush out of bellicosity. The result was disaster at home and in the middle east. Yet what Rawnsley claims, in particular, is that on crucial occasions Blair made shockingly bad political decisions: he brokered lop-sided bargains with Brown that left him totally exposed; he pledged unconditional support to Bush and thereby forfeited any potential British leverage. There are many more examples.
I had long assumed that image of Blair projected whilst in office reflected the real thing: a supremely talented politician with a ruthless Machiavellian gift for the back rooms of politics, combined perfectly with the buckets of charisma that made him a media-manipulating genius.
What Rawnsley (and to a lesser extent, Runciman) bring out is the extent to which Blair charmed and bluffed his way to the top, believing in his own vacuous rhetoric along the way. Yet when the really big moments came he turned out to be made more of straw than steel. For a politician so obsessed with his legacy, Blair may end up very disappointed with how history remembers him.
But two other things have also influenced my reassessment. First, over at Potlatch Will Davies has a very funny – but also incisive – post suggesting that Blair is incapable of feeling embarrassment. Read it; there’s definitely something there.
Second was Chris Brooke’s epic (and slightly bonkers) marathon tweeting of A Journey. What struck me reading Chris’ summary was the extent to which Blair was apparently deluded in his basic grasp of the world. Indeed I asked Chris if he shared this impression, and he replied:
“Yes — I think he has become a fantasist. He says at the end that he’s much happier now he’s out of office, and obviously part of that is that he doesn’t have to deal with Gordon Brown or the British media every day, but I also wonder whether part of it is that he isn’t so constrained by the real world any more, and so can just live in a fantasy of his own construction.
The final chapter of the book seems pretty delusional to me — as Blair insists he is “progressive” while defending an exceptionally right-wing approach to dealing with the economic crisis which involves low direct taxes on rich people, allowing banks to write new rules for regulation, jacking up indirect consumption taxes, & so on.”
These two factors – the dispelling of the illusion of Blair as political colossus, and the possibility that he may actually be psychologically unhinged – have had the effect of making me considerably less angry at Blair. I’m still – don’t get me wrong – angry at what happened over those 10 years. But towards Blair himself I’m starting to feel something decidedly different: a bizarre form of condescending pity.
Again, I’m fairly sure that’s not the sort of legacy Blair had in mind for himself. Fittingly, that compounds my emotive revaluation of him.
chris said,
October 8, 2010 at 12:06 pm
The possibility that Blair became “deluded” whilst PM is a strong one. But to what extent is it an idiosyncratic feature of the Blair psyche, and to what extent the outcome of the nature of the office? I mean, he’s not the first PM to end up a little loopy: look at Thatcher.
I have often quoted Kenneth Boulding, writing in the early 70s:
“There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.”
I outline some reasons for this here:
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2007/01/hierarchies_and.html
Paul Sagar said,
October 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Chris,
I agree with you. My sense is that politicians who aren’t already mad to begin with my have to become mad to cope with the job and get to the top.
Not least because – epsecially in Blair’s case – living in a world of fantasy is much easier than the one you royaly fucked parts of up.
Chris Brooke said,
October 8, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Chris asks a good question. One of the many curiosities of Blair’s book is that he says at the start that it’s not so much a conventional political memoir, and more a book about the psychology of leadership — which makes you think that he might address precisely this kind of question. But, of course, he’s a more or less totally unreflective man, and so the only contribution the book might make to psychology will be as a particularly gruesome case study.
Gustav Jimenez said,
October 10, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Congrats!
Anger is very powerfull indeed
It carries some blinding energy and insoght to unerstand good and evil, or shall we say lack of embarrasement
It inspired me!
Muy bueno
Desde Chile,
Gustavo
James A said,
October 11, 2010 at 12:25 pm
I rather like something Francis Hutcheson said about this:
“Perhaps never any men pursued vice long with peace of mind, without some such deluding imagination of moral good, while they may be still inadvertent to the barbarous and inhuman consequences of their actions”.
Ideology vs. Fantasy « Bad Conscience said,
October 28, 2010 at 11:42 am
[...] Labour Party) a pretty deranged individual. Tony Blair appears to have taken a long vacation from reality. His wife appears to have joined him, as evinced by her mad-cap schemes to auction off [...]
Windbag « Bad Conscience said,
November 30, 2010 at 9:13 pm
[...] after the full nightmare of Iraq was under way – he had clearly descended into a world of fantasy. One in which the Mesopotamian Adventure had been a triumphant success. Where Britain was safer – [...]