Why was it that when I read a big interview with Tony Blair over the weekend – the ostensible premise being to wonder if he’d be pulling the strings of a Starmer government – I found myself humming something from T.S. Eliot by way of Andrew Lloyd Webber? ‘You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air – / But I tell you once and once again, / It’s Tony bloody Blair.’
Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat, of course, is a dyed-in-the-wool criminal who breaks laws up to and including the law of gravity, whereas our former prime minister is as upright and law-abiding figure as you will find in possession of business cards reading ‘Tony Blair’. But they share the ability to be everywhere and nowhere. He’s in and out of the White House. He sidles through the palaces of this and that despotism. An admiring standfirst has it that ‘the Tony Blair Institute’s 800 staff are now helping to run almost 40 countries’.
But let us leave motive aside, too. This really isn’t particularly about Blair himself
My interest here is not so much in the contents of what Tony Blair hopes to achieve in the world with his Institute. Being a social democratic centrist dad of the sort who came of age in 1997, I have always tended to buy a good deal of what he’s selling: managerial, technocratic, ostensibly post-ideological solutions to material problems. There are some for whom he’s always going to be “Tony B. Liar” or some such playground nonsense, and others of a different political stripe for whom he’ll always be a blood-soaked warmongering neoliberal lickspittle, and that’s fine: he has a complicated legacy. It’s not that which I’m interested in talking about now, still less in trying to arbitrate.
No, it’s the form that his actions now take in the world that’s striking. It’s the Institute itself, which in this new interview he characterises as follows: ‘We’re not an NGO, we’re not a government department, and we’re not a charity. We’re a not-for-profit, which means that any of the profits go back into the institute, but we expect people… to deliver.’ Isn’t that a curious thing? A charity would have a determinate and ideally measurable objective. An NGO would tend to have a stated aim of some sort. And a government department is subject to democratic oversight. As Blair describes it, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change sounds more like a perpetual motion machine for interfering in the affairs of the world.
‘Perpetual motion’, here, is more than a metaphor. A security guard who has accompanied Blair on his travels is quoted as saying: ‘You work for Tony Blair and you’re bound to get divorced because you’re on the road 250 days a year, stepping in and out of a private jet every two days. It’s great fun but your marriage doesn’t last.’
Depending on your point of view, you can parse Blair’s role as a sort of private super-diplomat in a number of ways. If you’re friendly to him, you could see it as admirable that he wants to stay in the game. He could have decided to retreat from public life and enrich himself with a vast portfolio of board appointments, and/or jetted around the world making zillions on the after-arms-fair speech circuit. Instead, he continues trying to make the world a better place (at least by his own lights).
Alternatively, you could speculate that he’s a power-crazed egomaniac who stayed in the game because he couldn’t bear to leave the limelight. You could say that, non-profit or not, running the sort of outfit he runs allows for some international browsing and sluicing at a very high level, not to mention some nine-star hotel rooms, in no way precludes him making as much money as he likes on the side, and besides offers a continued high-purity supply of every cashiered politician’s favourite drug: power.
But let us leave motive aside, too. This really isn’t particularly about Blair himself. It seems to me that what’s interesting about the Tony Blair Institute is that it’s a newish kind of thing, maybe even a post-democratic kind of thing. It looks like a thought-through response to the recognition that international policy, in many of the respects that matter, has been substantially privatised.
It has been a commonplace since Blair was prime minister that the largest corporations now have more power than most nation-states. Their influence on tax and regulatory regimes, directly and indirectly, is considerable, and with it, their influence on the direction of national and international policy. Google and Amazon do more to determine the shape of the world and the lives of its citizens than all but a few elected politicians. Davos, conspiracy-minded types aren’t wholly mad in thinking, may be just as worth keeping an eye on as the G7 or the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Blair puts it quite baldly: ‘Democracy can deliver, but it’s got a problem today because it is an old-fashioned politics trying to deal with a very new-fashioned world.’ It’s on this basis that he offers praise to the responses of various autocracies to the Covid pandemic; and it’s on this basis – realpolitik, you could call it – that he defends a policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan. And it’s in this context that he chairs this international organisation – somewhere between a political consultancy firm, a global think-tank and a diplomacy-for-hire outfit – whose only ostensible mandate to make its interventions is the brand-recognition and salesmanship of its leader and the impressive amount of money that flows through it.
Should we welcome the fact that a politician of undoubted skill and apparent good intentions has found a way to influence the political processes of countries all over the world in this privatised, unaccountable, post-democratic era? That whatever else you think of it, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is interested in influencing politics for reasons that aren’t directly connected to its own bottom line or the convenience of its shareholders?
Even as a sometime fan of Blair, I’d respond to these questions with a resounding: ‘um, sort of?’ It’s certainly not likely to be any worse than leaving the field to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the sorts of people who run Google, OpenAI or Boeing. But in terms of the interests, and democratic entitlements, of the ordinary punter, neither seems exactly ideal. Would it not be possible for somebody to think of a third way?
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