There’s a scene at the beginning of The Special Relationship, the third part of Peter Morgan’s Tony Blair trilogy, in which Hillary Clinton offers Blair some advice. ‘People tend to remember you for one thing,’ she says. ‘You have to make sure you define what it is.’
Presumably, Blair’s main reason for writing A Journey is to put a positive spin on his premiership, but he’s left it a little late by Hillary’s standards. The scene above takes place when he’s been in office for less than a month. The point of view of the film — echoing the conventional wisdom — is that Blair will chiefly be remembered for his part in the Iraq war. Morgan depicts him as a vainglorious popinjay whose obsession with his ‘legacy’ led him to embark on a disastrous military adventure alongside a Texan halfwit.
I haven’t read A Journey yet but apparently Blair devotes a fair portion of it to defending his decision to commit British forces to the War on Terror. Not surprisingly, the journalists who’ve been gutting the book have completely ignored this section. We’ve heard all these arguments before, most recently during the Chilcot inquiry. The chances of him revealing a vital new piece of information that will radically alter people’s assessment of him are vanishing-to-zero.
The focus of the newspapers’ attention has been Blair’s attacks on Gordon Brown, whom he describes as ‘maddening’ and ‘difficult’, a man with ‘zero emotional intelligence’. Blair hasn’t been able to resist drawing attention to his three election victories in contrast to his out-for-a-duck successor, but this won’t go far when it comes to shoring up his legacy. It’s not the ability to win power that’s at issue. It’s what you do with it once you’ve got it.
So what has Blair nominated instead of Iraq as the one thing he wants to be remembered for? Education? His memoirs probably include some guff about the percentage of children who now get five GCSEs at grade C or above, but no one outside the educational establishment takes GCSE results seriously any more. We’re wise to the New Labour ruse of making exams easier to give the impression that standards are improving. The gig is up.
True, Blair deserves some praise for the academies programme, but his education reforms were neutered by the unions, the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party and his toxic rival at the Treasury. (Just like his other attempts to ‘modernise’ public services, in fact.) His inability to triumph in this internal battle is not something he should draw attention to.
What’s left? Tackling crime? Statistical evidence is dodgy. Raising the minimum wage? Would have happened under any government. Reducing the percentage of the population living below the poverty line? Bit Old Labour, that — more Brown’s territory than Blair’s.
What he should have flagged up, but hasn’t as far as I can tell, is his transformation of the British political landscape. Not only did his success at the polls force the Tories to tack to the centre, it prompted them to appropriate large chunks of his political philosophy as well. In office, David Cameron really has proved to be the ‘heir to Blair’, with his talk of fairness and inclusion. If Blair hadn’t been such a successful politician, it’s unlikely the Conservatives would have transformed themselves to such an extent that the Liberal Democrats are now willing to get into bed with them. Without Blair, it’s hard to imagine a right-of-centre government asking the public to judge its policies according to how ‘progressive’ they are or the impact they’ll have on ‘the most vulnerable’. The coalition is Blair’s legacy.
Problem is, he can’t take credit for the decontamination of the Tory party without seeming to endorse the coalition. ‘Same old Tories’ is the official Labour line and he doesn’t want to jeopardise the cause of the Blairite faction (particularly David Miliband) by deviating too far from that message. He has to maintain the pretence that Cameron is something much more sinister than Blair Mark II if he’s to hold on to his base.
Blair’s difficulty, in A Journey as in his political career, is that he’s a centrist. His true legacy is to have revealed the essentially centrist nature of the British electorate, a message that both Labour and the Conservatives are still reluctant to embrace.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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