Steve Richards: Blair the politician

A conjuror who lost touch with his party

Friday, 11 May 2007

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At the end, Tony Blair looked back to the beginning. During his resignation speech yesterday, he admitted that expectations might have been too high when he first became Prime Minister. He had no need to make the qualification. As Blair came to power, hopes were so irrationally high that he was doomed to disappoint.

In May 1997, Blair won the biggest landslide since the Second World War. For at least a year, it was almost impossible to meet anyone who confessed to not voting Labour. During the longest political honeymoon in history, former Tories, lifelong Labour supporters and large parts of the media hailed what the youthful Prime Minister had called a new dawn.

In retrospect, there were many clues in those heady days as to what would follow. Almost nothing that happened in the next 10 years should have come as a surprise. From the beginning, it was all there in front of our eyes.

First of all, look at the varying types who were celebrating Labour's victory on that famous night. Newspapers that had cheered Margaret Thatcher were saluting Blair. Left-of-centre newspapers were equally excited. Out in the country, voters in solid Tory constituencies were raising a toast to the incoming prime minister. Labour supporters were also on a high.

Early on, Blair declared that the "entire country was our core constituency". He had constructed a big tent full of ardent supporters who had irreconcilable opinions on policy areas, from Europe to the future of the public services. Blair resolved to place himself in the centre of the big tent. Newspapers on the left and the right were wooed assiduously. He insisted that Britain would be pro-European, and the closest ally of the US. Public services would improve, but the era of high taxation was over. Often Blair spoke of hard choices, but sometimes his political purpose was to avoid making them. There was a third way in which all could follow.

Acquiring such a wide range of followers was both liberating and a dismal constraint, the source of Blair's strength and the cause of his undoing.

Most fundamental of all, his broad appeal gave Labour three big election victories, an extraordinary achievement in a country that had elected a right-wing Conservative party for 18 years. He also has a legacy to compare with any of the other relatively long-serving prime ministers.

There were wide-ranging constitutional reforms. Investment in public services finally caught up with the rest of Europe and is starting to transform the quality of some people's lives. Socially, Britain is an incomparably more tolerant society. In the 1990s it was a big news story when the gay actor, Ian McKellen, visited John Major in Downing Street. Much of Major's party despised him for meeting a gay figure. Under Blair, there were gay people in the Cabinet, and civil partnerships. On many fronts the Tory leadership was forced to appear more liberal and humane, leaving its activists stranded in the past.

From an economic perspective, nearly everyone has more disposable income. The poor are less impoverished and pensioners have done much better than recent controversies would suggest. But what excited Blair most were the initiatives that alarmed his party and tended to please the right wing of his big tent. As he entered Downing Street for the first time, he announced that he had won as New Labour, and would govern as New Labour. This was a warning to his own party and a reassurance to his new supporters on the right, in business and elsewhere, that he would lead a different type of Labour government. It was almost as if he entered Downing Street with the ghost of Harold Wilson on one shoulder and of Margaret Thatcher on the other.

Like a leading player in a film noir, Blair's determination not to be old Labour, to be seen to be different, led him into a set of traps as grisly as those that gave nightmares to his predecessors. Business leaders disapproved of old Labour. Blair wooed them uncritically, viewing their support as a form of vindication rather than a cause for concern. Some of the scandals that whirled around Blair, even if they were hyped up by a hostile media, arose from his relations with the very wealthy.

Blair was determined also not to let the Labour Party determine the direction of his government, as happened in the 1970s. He therefore acquired too much control, even by- passing Labour's treasurer when raising cash for the last election. Cue the "cash for honours" affair, a police investigation that haunted his final year in power.

Similarly, his support for President George Bush and the war against Iraq was fuelled partly by a fear of being seen as anti-American. Labour was unilateralist in the vote-losing 1980s. Labour must be new now, supporting a Republican president and going to war. For all his protestations about taking decisions out of conviction, political positioning played its part in Blair's fateful decision to support the war against Iraq.

Long ago, Blair had concluded that while Conservative governments could rule from the right, Labour administrations could govern only from the centre. But his persistent determination to hold the centre ground quite often failed to provide a clear path in policy terms. After the 2001 election, Blair was confident that there was no need for tax rises to pay for more investment in public services. Brown, and Blair's more politically rooted advisers, knew that more cash was required. Without Brown's careful planning for a tax rise in 2002, the investment Blair now cites as part of his legacy would never have been raised.

Yet Blair pulled off an extraordinary political conjuring trick as he clung to the centre ground. With a theatrical flourish he claimed always to be bold, when often he was cautiously reinforcing orthodoxy. The themes of his monthly Downing Street press conferences are illuminating. In quite a few of them he openly welcomed the fact that the left-of-centre was unhappy with his policies. Much of the time he preached the overwhelming importance of Britain standing "shoulder to shoulder" with the US. Sometimes he chose to highlight the importance of the private sector in running public services. On one occasion he hailed the end of the permissive 1960s. Margaret Thatcher was preaching the same messages for 18 years. Britain was ready to hear something new, but Blair had served his political apprenticeship in the 1980s, and in his chosen public themes he gave the country more of the same.

Even so, the limited space he occupied on the centre ground still gave him some scope for constructive activity, and in one instance a breakthrough of historic proportions. The peace settlement in Northern Ireland was a stunning example of politics at its best. On an issue that took him away from his normal worries about the media and how the Conservatives might respond, Blair took risk after risk in endless hours of talks. Those that accuse him of being casual about death because of Iraq have to explain why he took so much time seeking peace in Northern Ireland.

He was also the most pro-European prime minister since Ted Heath. Heath was out of power soon after he took Britain into Europe. Blair's approach to Europe was tested over 10 years. Every prime minister, even Thatcher, starts with the intention of working constructively with Europe. Only Blair has stuck with it, engaging on virtually every issue, seeking to work well with most EU leaders. Blair looked comfortable and stylish on the European stage and while many British voters became disillusioned, leaders across Europe took him as a model to follow. The leaders that did so include many from the right.

Blair's resignation speech yesterday explained why he was too uncritically at ease with right-wingers such as Bush and Berlusconi. His words in Sedgefield were presidential and apolitical. There was little attempt to connect progressive values to his decade in power. Instead he insisted vaguely that he sought to do what was right and in relation to Iraq was "alone with his instincts". He need not have been alone, and could have listened to warnings from some in his cabinet and party.

He chose not to do so.

During the Blair era there was much misplaced reporting about sleaze and spin. Blair was a well-intentioned leader and more interested in the substance of policy than is widely recognised. The oddity, worth much more examination, is that for more than a decade Labour was led by a figure who was not on the left of centre and yet not a Conservative either. Although the voters turned away, Blair sought always to be the leader of the entire country, his core constituency.

A career in numbers: key figures from the past 10 years

33,809,482 the number of people who have voted for the Labour Party under Tony Blair over three general elections.

28% Blair's satisfaction rating after 10 years in office, up from 25 per cent at the start of the year. Margaret Thatcher's approval rating after 10 years in office was 40 per cent, although by the time she left Downing Street in 1990, it had slumped to 26 per cent. (ipsos-MORI)

71.2% share of votes Tony Blair won in his Sedgefield constituency in the 1997 general election, giving Labour a majority of 25,143.

58.9% share of votes Tony Blair won in his Sedgefield constituency in the 2005 general election, giving Labour a majority of 18,457.

37 the number of times Blair has visited Northern Ireland during his premiership. He has taken various political companions with him, including John Major in 1998, President Bill Clinton in 2000 and Gordon Brown in 2002.

£775,000 the estimated value of free holidays taken by Tony Blair and his family. These include six visits to Sir David Keene's 12th-century French chateau, three visits to Prince Girolamo Strozzi's 50-room villa in Tuscany, four visits to Sir Cliff Richard's mansion in Barbados and one visit to Bee Gee Robin Gibb's home in Miami. A Downing Street spokesman said Mr Blair donated money to charity for each holiday, but would not reveal how much or to which charity.

£3.65m cost of Connaught Square house the Blairs purchased three years ago. Earlier this year, they also acquired an £800,000 adjoining mews house.

700 number of times by which Tony Blair's annual carbon footprint exceeds that of the average Briton. As a family, the Blairs emit at least 8,127 tons of carbon dioxide a year, compared to 11 tons for the average British household.