For students of political archaeology, there is at least one notable event chronicled by Tony Blair in this long awaited (by his publisher) account of His Journey. It is the moment when he decided to become an MP and the course of our nation’s history changed. He can’t recall the date but his father-in-law, actor Tony Booth, arranged for him and Cherie to meet an MP friend, Tom Pendry, at the House of Commons.
“I went up the steps and on my left passed Westminster Hall where Charles I had been tried. I walked into the cavernous central lobby where the public went to meet their MPs and I stopped. I was thunderstruck. It just hit me. This was where I wanted to be. It was very odd. Odd because so unlike me and odd because in later times I was never known as a ‘House of Commons man’. But there and then I had a complete presentiment: here I was going to be. This was my destiny. This was my political home.”
So there you have it. Tony Blair wasn’t really interested in politics, he fell in love with the building. The only saving grace is that, with his later penchant for assembling a property portfolio, he never attempted to buy the Palace of Westminster. Political archaeologists scrabbling around in the dirt of this 700 page tome aren’t going to find many more nuggets. There is no clue to the various missing links of his time in politics, particularly the links missing to the Labour movement, Parliament and political belief. And if A Journey is judged on its literary merits, it would have been remaindered before the day of publication. As early as page 4 he sets the tone by saying of the 1997 election victory: “Hadn’t we impaled our enemies on our bayonet, like ripe fruit?”
To demonstrate his European credentials, he warbles about the “taste of Spain” he experienced in 1960: “tapas, Ducados and Rioja (a bit underage, but never mind).” When musing on Dodi Fayed’s appearance in the life of Princess Diana, he agonises: “For all I know he was a good son and a nice guy; so if you ask me, well, spit it out, what was wrong I couldn’t frankly say, but I felt uneasy.” Uneasy? I felt positively queasy. There is much, much more of this sort of garbage spat out by Labour’s longest-serving prime minister in this highly selective account of his journey from aspirant MP to his exit from Downing Street.
But it is all too easy to dismiss Blair for his foibles and inadequacies without at least a passing nod to the qualities which led him to three election victories. Political autobiographies are always going to be self-serving and self-justifying and there is no way Blair would collapse into humility and regret at this stage of his career. What this book does unwittingly expose is the inner Blair, the real figure behind the mask, what Leo Abse called The Man Behind the Smile. A Journey confirms that, deep down, Tony Blair is shallow. He is Superficial Man, understanding little, believing in less. And yet, and yet… though we mock and sneer, his shallowness allowed him to relate to ordinary people in a way few politicians can. It is easy to describe A Journey as an appalling book with no significant insight or historical perspective, let alone honesty, but I can imagine holidaymakers who wouldn’t normally touch a political book reading this one on the beach.
Tony Blair, for all his faults, had a remarkable common touch. Something you can’t teach however hard you try. Which brings us neatly to Gordon Brown. The media has made much of Blair’s savaging of his successor, all of it perfectly justified, in my opinion. He knew what his Chancellor was like, he knew he opposed virtually everything Blair wanted to do, he knew Brown’s attack dogs were mercilessly undermining everything coming out of No 10, particularly Blair himself. Yet the most powerful man in the country was scared to move against him. He excuses this as preferring, in Lyndon Johnson’s words, to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. But what he got was Brown in the tent pissing all over him. What is the harshest thing Blair finds to say about Brown? “Gordon is a strange guy.” What mind-numbing banality.
Blair does indicate that he always believed Brown would be a hopeless Prime Minister but he stood aside when the time came and let him move unchallenged into No 10. The consequence is that we now have a Conservative (well, a Tory-dominated) government because Brown was the difference between Labour winning and losing.
Almost as incredible is his revelation that he knew Alastair Campbell was mad, which he excuses because, he says, it was “creative madness”. Sorry, but mad is mad. If a boss knows that a subordinate in a key position is crazy, he should gently move him aside. Instead, Blair left Campbell in place. He needed him, of course, because his creative madness allowed him to make the case for invading Iraq.
The section on Iraq is dissembling, disingenuous, dishonest nonsense. Blair starts by asking whether it was right to go in. Of course it was, he answers, and then proceeds to give statistics for the number of people Saddam Hussein is supposed to have killed so they can be balanced against those who have subsequently died. These include 600,000 fatalities during the Iran-Iraq war, which he doesn’t seem to know was encouraged and financed by the Americans who backed Saddam to undermine Iran; and the 75,000 Iraqis killed by the Allies during the first Gulf War. So A Journey is, in part, a move from dodgy dossiers to dodgy statistics, but presented with the same brazen insouciance. You can visualise the pained look on Blair’s face when his “facts” are challenged.
The book is almost as annoying for what it leaves out as for what it includes. I looked eagerly for references to John Birt, the frightening figure in the attic (well, working from an office in Thatcher’s old flat above No 10). He was central to Blair’s policy development, churning out an endless stream of blue sky thinking on which the sun never set. Yet there is not a word about him. Not even a name check. The same can’t be said of that other notable political figure, Bob Geldof. Blair asks: “Bob. What can I say about Bob?” and then devotes half a page to saying it. That’s nothing, though. Bono gets a whole page.
We can consider ourselves fortunate he doesn’t start on Mick Jagger. There is almost nothing on Europe, the greatest failing of his premiership, and the failure to go into the euro is dealt with in one line on page 536. History, shmistory.
The most offensive thing about A Journey, though, is Blair’s continued espousal of New Labour which he raises to messianic status. He blames the loss of this year’s election on what he sees as a drift away from the holy grail, even though Brown was responsible for some of the worst aspects of New Labour, particularly PFI and the love affair with the City. Those of us who cynically thought New Labour was simply a marketing gimmick were wrong. Blair believed and still believes it is a major political creed. This is so gob-smackingly delusional you wonder if even Alastair Campbell would now describe Blair as mad. New Labour was a juggernaut led by a slick messiah and fuelled by focus groups, opinion polls and pacts with assorted devils. It all but destroyed the Labour Party as a nationwide movement of ordinary, generally decent, people. If A Journey does nothing else, it reminds us of the bumpy ride we have been on over the past 15 years and the journey we are about to undertake with another learner driver at the wheel.
