The Political Mastery of Tony Blair

Stopping to smell the roses

Andrew Gilligan’s superb ‘review’ of Tony Blair’s new book A Journey is well worth the read. Gilligan himself played a fundamental role in the undoing of the ’45-minute claim’, on which Blair goes into some detail.

But it is, of course, Iraq where the trust issue reached crisis point. Fascinatingly, Blair admits that even by the tests of his own stated criteria for liberal interventionism, as set out in a speech in Chicago, the case for war was “finely balanced”. Again, not something you’d have known from his campaigning certainty at the time.

The disaster that unfolded post-war is described in those Blairish sentences lacking active verbs – implying that it was almost a force of nature, over which we had no control. Evil outsiders, such as
al-Qaeda and Iran, are blamed – with no mention of who created the vacuum for them to fill. The British reconstruction effort is described as “adequate”, and all problems are blamed on the US – a straightforwardly false claim.

Blair does come clean on some untruths – admitting, just as The Sunday Telegraph revealed last year, that military planning began in early 2002 (in July that year, he’d denied to MPs that any such planning was taking place). He makes a very significant admission about the famous 45-minute claim – that the Government “should, in retrospect, have corrected [it]” in the way it was reported. Instead, he and his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, went to war with me and the BBC.

It is mildly flattering to learn that Blair believes his integrity “probably never recovered” from my charge that his staff “sexed up” the dossier and the 45-minute claim. “I’m not saying we handled the allegation well,” he writes, probably the closest to an apology I and the BBC will ever get. We can also perhaps endorse Blair’s description of Campbell as a “crazy person” who by that stage “had probably gone over the edge”.

Yet in telling this part of the tale, there is the same lack of feeling for which the book so rightly criticises Gordon Brown. When Dr David Kelly died, Blair writes, “the media would declare it was a scandal. They were absolutely capable of ensuring that there was one.” Surely Dr Kelly’s death was a scandal, with or without the help of the media.

In a passage about coming to terms with the deaths he inflicted, Blair explains why he cannot express regret: “Regret can seem bound to the past,” he says. “Responsibility has its present and future tense.” This seems unlikely to convince the Army bereaved. And on the wider death toll, Blair says that estimates of 600,000 are wrong – why, it was a mere 112,000!

Read the full article.

I’m sure it’s a great book.  But I’m happy to wait for the paperback, when it arrives at the local library which I’m not a member of.