I don’t care about Tony Blair’s book.
I don’t care about Tony Blair’s book. I’m sorry, but I just don’t. Unless I really think about it, it’s frankly quite hard to remember who the man was. He’s just become this pious lurking bit-part character in tedious books by other people that I’ve forced myself to read. As though they all lived in houses with attics suffering chronic infestations of Sir Cliff Richard.
Didn’t Cherie write a book already? I can’t quite remember; I suppose she must have done. Everybody else did. Now I think of it, there was some story about her forgetting to pack her ‘contraceptive equipment’ on a visit to Balmoral, wasn’t there? That must have been her own book, unless Carole Caplin wrote one, too. It can hardly have been in David Blunkett’s. Although I didn’t read that one. I don’t think anybody did.
What do we learn from these books? I mean, properly learn — learn so we remember it years later, without having to use Google? Precious little. A forgotten dutch cap. A punch that Peter Mandelson threw at Alastair Campbell at a party conference, because Tony Blair didn’t want to wear a certain pair of trousers. Gordon being invariably peeved about something, and not that nice to work with. John Prescott making himself sick, hahaha, join the club. And that’s the big ones, the real insiders. Don’t forget the ambassadors, the wonks, the affiliated businessmen, the party officials, the backbench MPs. Or rather, do forget them. Doubtless you already have.
It’s like one of those laborious 1990s indie films, in which you see similar events over and over again, from a variety of perspectives. Blair’s perspective will be the dullest of all; like watching Pulp Fiction through the eyes of the suitcase. I don’t care if he thought George W. Bush sometimes sounded surprisingly clever. I don’t care what Blair thought about Gordon Brown, because everybody else has already told us. I don’t care which Miliband he prefers, and why, because I can figure it out, and it doesn’t matter much anyway.
Once I start to think about it, though, there are some things I’d love to hear from Tony Blair. Only I don’t think he’s going to put them in. For example, I’d like to know what he thought he was playing at before the Iraq war. I’d like to know how mad he started to go — proper, breakdown-style doollally — when it all started to go so staggeringly badly.
I’d like to know, genuinely, how it feels when you are an egalitarian socialist from the British Labour movement, and the people you call your allies are illegally detaining and effectively torturing other people, and you have to pretend they aren’t. I’d like to know about him lying in bed at night, crying, staring at the ceiling, knowing, knowing that he’d done something terribly wrong. I’d like to know whether, if it hadn’t been for that sort of thing, he’d still have been so keen on becoming a Catholic. It’s a bit salacious that last one, I know, but genuinely, I would.
I’d like to know how he felt — and indeed, how he feels now — that the philosophy behind his great humanitarian interventionist successes of Kosovo and Sierra Leone was so irretrievably squandered on such a lunatic and egotistical act of misadventure. I’d like to know whether he looks at the places where the international community could today make an enormous difference, but now doesn’t have the balls (such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, say) and thinks to himself, ‘this might not be happening, if it hadn’t been for that Iraq thing. Oops.’
The book is called Tony Blair: A Journey. So, this is the journey I’d like to read. I’d like to know more about the role he has now, on the Mideast Quartet. According to almost anyone you ask, he’s brilliant at that, really gets it, genuinely has made an enormous difference in the Palestinian territories. I’d like to know about the personal motivation somebody has to have to do that, when a few years earlier they were the person who legitimised the Iraq war.
It’s not global apologies I’m after, or even self-loathing. It’s a final, honest confession from somebody who tried to change the world for the better, and got it badly wrong, and has not yet ever, to the best of my knowledge, acknowledged this in any way at all. Now that would be a book worth reading. A bit Oprah’s Book Club, maybe, but God, I couldn’t put it down.
I can’t lie. I’m a bit disappointed by this so-called recession. We were supposed to be wearing rags by now, weren’t we, huddled around braziers, boiling up soups made out of our belts and holding up our trousers with twine. For all I know that’s actually happening up north, wherever that is, but down here in London, a small house in a moderately desirable area near a decent school will still cost you almost three quarters of a million pounds.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. ‘Hurrah!’ I thought to myself, a couple of years ago. ‘Poverty and misery pend for thousands! They shall lose their jobs, and be unable to afford the mortgages on their small houses in moderately desirable areas near decent schools! And I shall reap the benefits!’
Look, don’t judge me. We all thought it. Misery for yourself is no fun at all, but misery for others comes with potential benefits. Or at least it’s supposed to. By now, the housing market was supposed to have plummeted. Why hasn’t it? What possible excuse has it got for not having done so? I don’t care if interest rates are at an historic low; people are supposed to be gratefully saving the difference. They aren’t supposed to be taking advantage of it, to move in to Crouch End’s answer to bloody Southfork.
Now, in our so-called recession, the gap between the value of the flat I own and the prices of the houses I’d like to own is, roughly, four times my annual salary. Call me a nihilist, call me selfish, but I’m deeply hungry for a property apocalypse, to narrow that down to something marginally less insane. Not that it will happen. According to the National Housing Federation, prices are likely to dip by 3 per cent next year, and then continue rising steadily. How can they? Where have they got to go?
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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