THE UNFULFILLED PRIME MINISTER: Tony Blair and the Quest for a Legacy
by Peter Riddell
Politico’s £15.99 pp256

So how has the lad done? Has Tony Blair met with triumph and disaster, and treated both imposters just the same? Has he steered the Third Way or has it all been, as Jack Straw said of the Iraq dossiers, “a bit of a Horlicks”?

Assessing Blair’s legacy after just two-thirds of his self-allotted span is more than presumptuous. It is like hindsight before the event. The man might reasonably protest, “Hey guys, give me a break.” The tooth-fairy, patron saint of Blairism, has yet to depart the stage.

Both Anthony Seldon and Peter Riddell are seasoned political observers, but both are vulnerable to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. They try to measure Blair’s position and his motion at the same time, and from no fixed point of their own. Only a fool could assess this government in terms of its 1997 objectives, a jumble of vapid abstractions and schoolboy targets such as “halving world poverty”. Judgment soon falls back on lists of “for and against”.

Central to any assessment of the 2001-5 government is Riddell’s bald truth that new Labour was always “an electoral rather than a governing strategy”. Seldon and his authors remark time and again that, as the first Blair term was about regaining power, so was the second. Government under Blair was a continuous election campaign, with the spotlight always on the star performer. Although pundits keep asserting that Blair was not really presidentialist, it is a distinction without a difference. Blair’s name is everywhere.

As a result, he does not emerge well. He is, as Roy Jenkins once told him, an alpha politician but with a beta brain, vain, media-obsessed, mildly corrupt and strangely ill-attuned to the ways of government. He is West Wing, not Yes, Minister. He never seems to grasp that “what Tony wants” he cannot always get, and ends by whingeing about “the forces of conservatism . . . and the scars on my back”.

Seldon’s subtitle, A Wasted Term?, appears to answer itself.The defining challenge of the 2001 parliament was to deliver on public service reform, yet it was still the defining challenge of the 2005 one. Blair was saved from humiliation largely by Gordon Brown’s gargantuan appetite for public borrowing from 2002 onwards, much of it hidden by being private and its cost postponed. After September 2001, this was overshadowed by Blair’s entirely personal decision to join America’s “war on terrorism” and the invasion of Iraq.

The book, the fourth in a series on modern British governments, is encyclopaedic. Seldon’s authors, half of them academics, half journalists, are competent and fall down only in their often jejune judgments. Dennis Kavanagh depicts Blair as the supreme election strategist, “yet one might have looked for more”. David Smith watches Brown scrupulously avoiding Labour’s bane of economic crisis and boldly taking Tory monetary policy to its logical conclusion in Bank of England control of interest rates. Yet the overall impact, “after seven years of Labour government, is to leave inequality effectively unchanged”. Kitty Stewart and Howard Glennerster are more approving of advances in health and social policy, albeit at a monumental cost.

More outspoken is Tony Travers’s account of Blair’s failure to resolve the balance of power between central and local government. Stephen Glaister devastates the abortive 10-year transport plan, as does Alan Smithers the government’s recent waffle about “choice and diversity” in education. Robert Skidelsky explains Blair’s Iraq exploit as rooted in a vaguely religious missionary zeal. Vernon Bogdanor compares it to Gladstonian imperialism, “fighting not for territory but for values”.

All this Seldon sums up by finding Blair’s second term disappointing, the product of a brilliant politician who “lacked the intellectual equipment to devise a coherent agenda of his own”. His sofa government or “denocracy” was composed of second-raters, impresarios of an opportunity lost.

Riddell is too canny to be trapped into any such conclusion. Blair, to him, is a wayward schoolboy who “must try harder if he is to do himself justice”. The prime minister’s ambition is to make the present parliament his “legacy agenda”, but this can only be on the basis of the second term’s achievements.

Yet Riddell is a scrupulous lobby man. If Blair’s achievements were mostly “confused and patchy”, so his attackers are mostly exaggerated or simplistic. Glaister’s savaging of transport policy is reduced to “not much progress so far”. We are assured, three times, that, on Iraq, Blair could not have “knowingly” lied. As for playing fast and loose with the constitution, to Riddell this is all just “a matter of style”. If Seldon’s authors seem lost in the statistics of disappointment, Riddell raises his eyes to the hills. Almost alone among observers, he writes as if he likes Blair. His book is the more enjoyable for it.

I admit to emerging from more than 600 pages on Tony Blair with a slight softening of the brain. On any showing, he is one of the masterly political figures of our time. That he could, unscathed, take his country into an illegal and unwinnable war is a measure of his supremacy. If he is hard to pin down it is because he is ever the Cheshire cat, receding when approached into the merest smile. His power may have been wasted (Seldon) or unfulfilled (Riddell), but history has uses for such men.

What those uses are is too soon to tell. Both books judge Blair as a textbook prime minister, as party leader and Downing Street “first among equals”. He is not on that planet. He is an eccentric, an outsider who hijacked the Labour party (an institution he clearly detests) to win power. He then hijacked Thatcherism (an ideology he clearly loves) to keep it. He made government more centralised and bureaucratic, but his essential legacy has been to entrench the 1979 Thatcher settlement. He has “social-democratised” Thatcherism.

Whether that rates him a success or failure must await Britain’s experience of the valley of the shadow of Brown, which lies ahead. Who knows but that the phrase “golden age” may yet come to mind.

DOWNHILL SLIDE

Although Blair has a way to go as prime minister, Seldon doesn’t hold out much hope for his final years: “Where British governments in history [have] been radical, the progress [has] come early on in the life of a prime minister rather than in the middle, and still less in the twilight years”.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First prices of £13.49 (The Blair Effect) and £14.39 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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