The Tony Blair Story review – Fails to do justice to the complexity of Iraq

Blair is a fascinating subject, but this Channel 4 documentary is a lopsided look at the former PM’s rise and calamitous fall

“You’ve got to be strong enough to withstand the praise as well as the condemnation,” Tony Blair, now aged 72, tells audiences in the new Channel 4 documentary series, The Tony Blair Story. This, as the show demonstrates, is a man who knows a thing or two about praise and an awful lot about condemnation. And from his childhood in Scotland, through Oxford and county Durham to Downing Street and beyond, the story of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair proves easier to tell than to judge.

Over the course of three episodes – succinctly titled “Who Are You?”, “Iraq”, and “The Loss of Power” – The Tony Blair Story charts the course of one of Britain’s most impactful post-war premierships. Beginning with Blair’s family life, education and political conversion (his father was a lifelong Conservative member), the show develops alongside its protagonist. It canters through his election in Sedgefield in 1983, the forging of a stunningly effective pact with Gordon Brown, and his elevation, in 1994, to leader of the Labour Party. That all serves to arrive, midway through the first episode, at the landslide of the 1997 election. A “radical”, in the words of the author Robert Harris, he was “the Labour equivalent of Margaret Thatcher”. But, as with most political biographies, the arc of The Tony Blair Story soon begins to nosedive towards calamity.

At the heart of all this is the figure of Blair, who sits for an extensive interview with the film’s director and narrator, Michael Waldman. “It’s very important to understand about me,” Blair warns, “I’m not into psychoanalysis.” It’s a (telling) fact that he repeats a couple of times over the course of the narrative, and it vacates much of the introspection to his friends (Anji Hunter, Alastair Campbell, Sally Morgan) and critics (Clare Short, Jeremy Corbyn). Quickly, the show becomes about Blair’s contested legacy, particularly in relation to the Iraq war, about which he remains unapologetic. “I think he’ll go to his grave genuinely thinking it was the right thing to do,” Campbell judges his old boss, while Blair himself offers a series of exsanguinated opinions. “History goes on a long time,” he proposes, rather lamely.

And while Waldman is attempting to do a thorough first draft of the Blair years, The Tony Blair Story feels lopsided. The simplicity of the three-act structure (rise, decline, fall) means significant foreign policy achievements in Northern Ireland and Kosovo are skated over, while almost no room is left for domestic considerations like the economic growth or the rise in environmental and equalities legislation. The show is in a rush to get to Iraq, where the human drama of New Labour reaches its most frenzied pitch. But the narrative gets trapped between breaking its stride for a longer rumination on the foreign policy debacle, which makes the Iraq segment feel overlong, and failing to do any sort of justice to the complexity of the conflict (existing, as it does, in the shadow of the BBC’s excellent Once Upon a Time in Iraq series). This is a frequent issue with documentaries that employ a dogged linearity: the pacing makes everything feel perfunctory.

Aiding the series, however, is access to the man himself, as well as his wife Cherie and three of his children (Euan, Kathryn, and Leo). There are some notable absences (both Gordon Brown and George W Bush are much discussed, but aren’t interviewed), and time has robbed us of the testimony of figures like John Prescott and Robin Cook, who might’ve curbed the sycophantic tendency. But international figures like Bill Clinton and Condoleezza Rice offer a global perspective, while most of the key voices from the administration (Campbell, Jonathan Powell, and Peter Mandelson, appearing in spite of the recent allegations concerning his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein) give their opinions. Like Blair, the show isn’t much interested in psychoanalysis (“[Blair] provokes a kaleidoscopic range of opinions,” Waldman’s narration concludes somewhat unimaginatively), but ranges confidently through the years, largely retaining its focus on the self-possessed figure at its heart. And Blair makes for a fascinating subject. Depicted with unflinching consistency through the years, he comes across as the opposite of a chameleon; someone able to change the world to match his colours.

Blair’s detractors may find themselves disappointed at the profile’s soft touch and respect for the former leader. His fans will, doubtless, think the show overindulges in his failures. In reality, the series might have been more creatively successful if it had tried to tell a smaller story, either the early years that informed his political ideology and the birth of New Labour, or his new life, having left office, grappling for influence in occasionally unsavoury ways. Instead, The Tony Blair Story takes the third way – a middle path – and, like the man himself, focuses more on delivery than motivation.