The rise and rise of Blair Inc

4 September 2010

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This memoir is not a requiem for Tony Blair’s past, says Fraser Nelson. It’s a manifesto for his future — as a highly paid freelance statesman with no electorate to hold him back

And spin is what makes Blair Inc tick. His is an industry based on reputation management — a lost cause at home, perhaps, but certainly not abroad. It is as if he believes that boundaries, of party politics and nationality, are losing their power and he is rising above both. And that the princes of this new globalised universe will be those who acquire global reputations — by whatever means — and can move freely without having electorates to hold them back. Blair appears to regard Bono, the pop star turned aid worker, as a good example: ‘He could have been a president or a prime minister standing on his head.’ Bono may be Irish, but he is now a global citizen. As Blair aspires to be.

Indeed, Blair looks and sounds less British with each of his increasingly rare appearances in the country. The glottal stop which he would deploy on the campaign has vanished. In its place, a slight Atlantic twang. But Blair Inc aims to be as busy in the East as the West. ‘I now travel to China frequently,’ he says in his memoirs. ‘Its economic and political power, already vast, is a fraction of what it will become.’ And Blair Inc wants a slice of it. Not by accident does the Faith Foundation operate in 12 countries. It presents him as an unashamed believer (which works well in America), yet a respecter of Islam (which satisfies the Arab world). This is a version of a rather fuzzy faith designed to be as effective in Kuala Lumpur as it is in Kansas.

Just as Blair divined a gap in the market for British politics — and filled it with New Labour — it is as if he now sees a gap in world politics and wishes to fill it with Blair inc. ‘I enjoy my new life far better than my old one,’ he says. And this is the point of A Journey — No. 10 was, for him, only a staging post towards his final destination. His unwritten epilogue is that the world has not heard the last of Tony Blair.

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Steve

September 2nd, 2010 4:51pm Report this comment

This is bad and will do nothing to enhance his post-premiership reputation despite what Mr Blair seems to think.

That being said, an old buddy of mine served in Afghanistan and said that Blair's fairly regular visits, even after he stood down as PM, were appreciated by the troops and did not receive much publicity. History will judge him harshly, but he has at times shown great character.

Tony Makara

September 3rd, 2010 2:47pm Report this comment

Tony Blair works overtime in an attempt to cultivate an image for himself. As a contemporary Prometheus, all-knowing, foresighted, and with a Weltanschauung based on a contrived version of Liberal Democracy that has to be imposed in the most absolute top-down style.

This is the mindset of a man who places himself above cause and consequence. A man who perceives of people as being bit parts in a chess game of the political Gods.

One might rightly conclude that Mr Blair is a man who has truly become divorced from the real world, detached from the feelings of others, in his relentless drive for auto-adulation.

Indeed a man for whom the manipulation of others has become his very raison d'etre.