Whatever Blair Is, He’s Not Normal

In a video hyping the publication of his memoirs, Tony Blair promised a “frank account of my life in politics.” And A Journey is that. But I wonder if the former British prime minister recognizes that the book is revealing in ways that he might not have intended. The intrigue and the infighting, the political triumphs and controversial foreign adventures are all there. But they are recounted in a language and manner that point out the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the author—a man who is neither the lying scoundrel so detested by large swaths of the British population nor the great transformational political leader he seemed to be when he burst upon the British political scene in the 1990s.

Blair inadvertently says as much in his book, with a false modesty that will fool no one: “My greatest strength was my greatest weakness. I am normal.” Of course he’s not “normal”—not the man who became the most successful leader of the Labour Party, who brought peace to Northern Ireland, who sought a “third way” to promote combining economic growth with social justice, and who all but destroyed his reputation at home by going to war in Iraq. But as A Journey makes clear, he’s a man of more shortcomings than you might expect of someone with so many accomplishments.

There’s a glib self-confidence to A Journey (whose original title, speaking of hubris, was The Journey) that very much reflects the politician who occupied 10 Downing Street for 10 years. As prime minister, Blair prized instinct over intellectual rigor. He was not without vision—take his belief in humanitarian intervention, for example, or his unshakable determination to modernize the Labour Party—but in office he was happy to have others do his thinking for him before he moved in to make the final decision.

Most of the writing in Blair’s memoir is conversational, to put it kindly; if not quite verb-free like some of his old party speeches, the book is often loosely argued and anchored lightly to evidence. Oddly, he refers to everybody, all the time, by first name, from George (Bush) to Guy (Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister). He says he wrote the book himself, in longhand, though some of it sounds dictated. Blair is no diarist (he kept a diary only for a short time in the 1980s). Nor was he writing this book amid piles of other people’s memoirs and the works of contemporary historians. Direct quotations of any length from characters who populate the book are few and far between. Tellingly, it is in the Iraq sections of A Journey that Blair, with the help of a team of researchers, marshals shedloads of evidence to justify his actions.

Blair is in a sense the opposite of his nemesis and rival, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer who succeeded him as prime minister. Blair, a man who can charm and chill from one moment to the next, writes that Brown has “zero” emotional intelligence. Blair, his critics will argue, is all emotional intelligence—the sort of leader who might have let success in the war in Kosovo, which he championed, dazzle him into underestimating the difficulties in Iraq. A Journey is in this way an important revelation. Or as Blair writes breezily of a wartime cabinet meeting: “Anyway, you get the picture: the usual mix of the historic, the transient and the trivial.”