The Blair Legacy edited by Terrence Casey
Palgrave Macmillan, £21.99
THE late George Brown, for the only time in my experience, once said something wise about politics. “A government that gets it right 70 per cent of the time is doing pretty well,” he said. This was not liked by his Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who rarely conceded a success rate of less than 100 per cent. Not in public, anyway.
By the George Brown standard, The Blair Legacy, a collection of dry and dispassionate essays by a group of British and American academics, shows that Tony Blair did “pretty well.” We shouldn’t accept all we read in the papers. The other, present day, G Brown would be fortunate if he could claim the same and be believed.
Consider: Blair won three consecutive general elections with overall majorities of 177, 165 and 64. He saw off four Tory leaders – John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard – where James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and John Smith all failed, though Smith died before he had a chance to win. For four years after his first victory, Blair never lost a by-election. His government’s policy achievements were remarkable, if now largely forgotten by those who don’t want to be reminded that he wasn’t responsible for the credit crunch.
That fall in successive majorities reflected a decline in Blair’s popularity with the voters. What wouldn’t Gordon Brown give for that kind of unpopularity today or, more pertinently, next year? Why, he might even regret the festering resentment which fired him to one of the longest, disastrous (for the party) but eventually successful campaigns (for him) of disloyalty in modern political history, or at least since Mrs Thatcher’s departure.
Blair, says one essay, “is now widely reviled in the very circles that once treated him as their golden boy.” Too true. Because in 2007, faced with the choice of being lions or lemmings, the Parliamentary Labour Party ditched Blair and, joyfully clutching their John Lewis catalogues, rushed madly to the cliffs hoping a new leader would give them parachutes and a soft landing, thus preserving their seats, salaries and expenses.
Some hope and a fateful choice. The parachutes turned out to be a shroud, a dismal end to the new dawn that began in 1997. The lemmings now are led by headless chickens, exhausted by government and not knowing where to turn to find the Blair touch again. David Attenborough could devote a whole programme to this wildlife phenomenon. I have always resisted forecasting general election results more than a month before polling day, but unless the voters match the collective cowardice of the PLP with collective amnesia, many of our MPs next year will discover what this year’s newly unemployed already know.
The Blair Legacy reinforces the view of why he was forced out of office: party activists and MPs, assiduously promoted by Gordon Brown and his fawning acolytes, spread the word that he wasn’t a socialist. Not in the Keir Hardie sense, anyway. As Robin Cook, once in favour of using force against Saddam Hussein until he faced the reality of it, and no friend of Blair’s, put it in 2002: “The danger for Tony is that the sole reason he has retained the affection and support of the party is that he has delivered phenomenal popularity for the party. The risk is that if he ever loses that popularity there will be no other reason left for the party to give him their support.”
Cook was right. Blair was not an ideological man and as soon as things started to go wrong (Iraq and then “cash for honours”) and he began to look like a loser he was given the heave-ho, with the Brownites (with a maturity more suited to the Brownies) doing the shoving. They naively believed their virginity was about to be restored (though they never said what they would do about Saddam Hussein or where the money was to come from to ensure future Labour victories). Now they could all be socialists again, good again, high-minded again, spinless and gimmickless; so uplifted by the son of the manse, they could even contemplate going to church again.
Thus they cheered the departure of Tony Blair. Who’s cheering now? Is it dawning upon them yet that Brown was even less of a socialist, even more pro-American, than Blair? Don’t take my word. Listen to Chris Mullin, an old favourite of all Tribunites. In his new book, A View from the Foothills, a glimpse from the inside and as different from The Blair Legacy as it would be possible to find, he writes of Brown, apropos a minor crisis: “Once again, the trail leads back to Gordon. Of course, if it all goes wrong, Gordon will be nowhere to be seen.” And again: “Goodness knows Gordon never does anything for ideological reasons”, a judgment to dismay the newly pure in heart. And again: “Gordon ought not to be given a clear run. The trail for many of our difficulties – the rows over lone-parent benefit, the 75p pension increase, the ludicrous spinning that did so much to undermine our credibility in the early days – leads back to him. As for Iraq, he would have backed Bush. He is even more in love with America than The Man” – Mullin’s favourite description of Blair.
I well remember when I lost any faith with Brown as a politician. I was chairing my local management committee and a couple of irate pensioners were telling me that they would leave the party if the Chancellor (GB) did, as forecast, raise the old age pension by only 75p a week. “Don’t worry”, I said, bringing all my experience in the party and government to bear upon them, “no Labour government would ever dream of such a miserly increase.” They were right, I was wrong, they resigned and I didn’t blame them. Cynicism triumphed again.
When all else fails, defenders of Brown fall back on the granting of independence to the Bank of England, the surprise masterstroke which made his reputation as a Chancellor of genius. But was it even his idea? Have they never seen or remembered Alastair Campbell’s diaries, particularly the entry for Friday May 12 1995, two years before the first election Blair won: “TB and I discussed the need for a proper plan re the Bank of England. He was sure independence was the answer.”
Well, it is all in the past now. Blair has gone. But though his image fades in a cloud of guilt, President Obama still preferred to see him before he saw Gordon Brown. How that must rankle. However, Brown is in charge. We sink or swim with him. God bless those who make it to the shore. One of them, and perhaps sooner rather than later, will be the party’s new leader. I hope that he or she will forget some of the things Tony Blair did which were wrong and remember the only time George Brown got it right.
Joe Haines
