Review of Tony Blair’s story – perhaps it would have been good to do some closer analysis of his time in office | Tony Blair

eThe first episode of Michael Waldman’s new three-part autobiography is subtitled “Who Are You?” In addition to his usual work of collecting archival clips and interviewing his subject’s colleagues and rivals to build a picture of past events, Waldman interviewed Tony Blair, his wife Cherie, and several of their children in an attempt to capture the character of the politician who was twice re-elected as Britain’s prime minister. The question is: What kind of man is Blair?

It’s an approach that many political filmmakers find impossible to resist. Detailed factual arguments can become tedious, and comprehensive theses about the power structures that elevate politicians to office can take a long time to explain. But a novel based on the psychology of an individual, where major events occur because the character imposed himself on the world? This is a source of drama that is easily relatable.

So, we go back to Blair’s childhood, where a contemporary at the private Fitz College school in Edinburgh reported that “school teaches you how to survive – it brings out a lot of emotions in you.” While at school, his father suffered a stroke, which quashed the old man’s dream of expanding his political activities beyond the local Conservative Party. Then, when Blair was reading law and researching religion at Oxford in the 1970s, a close friend died by suicide – in an interview here, a fellow student says Blair returned the next new semester with his long hair cropped short and his cheerful counterculture tendencies replaced by a steely drive for achievement.

Blair began politics in the early 1980s and pledged not only to become a Labor MP, but also to lead a deep reform of the party. Waldman learns how Blair repeatedly outmaneuvered those who seemed to have superior experience: he became an MP instead of his more politically involved wife, Cherie, who was unwilling, and then became Labor leader instead of his most staunch ally, Gordon Brown, who did.

As well as charting the individual battles won by the always ruthless Blair, Waldman asks about the precise and terrifying premonition Blair apparently had in 1994 that the then Labor leader, John Smith, was about to die of a heart attack; He also questions all of the Blair family about whether they felt the weight of the responsibility they took on when they moved into 10 Downing Street after Blair won the general election in 1997. Blair asserts that it was difficult for him to enjoy his first days in power, because of the gravity of the task, and because his mother, who died while he was graduating from Oxford University in 1975, was not there to witness his achievement.

Such feelings will be felt by a person having such experiences, but in the context of Blair as one of the leading political figures of the era, they take up time that could be spent on broader questions. You cannot become prime minister without a lot of powerful people agreeing to it, no matter how capable and convincing you are and the traumas that lie behind your ambition. But the Tony Blair story often seems to be reporting from a world where this is not the case. Apart from a comment suggesting that Blair had been selected by a pre-existing group of ‘modernisers’ within the Labor Party – the person mentioning this is none other than Peter Mandelson – and a section that looks critically at the meeting Blair felt necessary to have with Rupert Murdoch in 1995, it is all Tony, doing it himself. Without discussing the interests that his social and economic policies served – a vague assumption that he changed Britain for the better – we focus on Northern Ireland and Kosovo, which are presented as triumphs of Blair’s unique personality.

All of this builds toward the pivotal second episode, a long critique of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In Waldman’s telling, Blair developed a messiah complex, believing not only that he could solve discrete problems, but also that he could win the great battle between good and evil: under the frenetic pressures of the post-9/11 “war on terror,” Blair tragically overstepped his bounds. In its desire for psychoanalysis, the program blurs a crucial distinction – between Blair’s belief that it was right to depose Saddam simply because the Iraqi dictator was a bad man, and his belief that the facts provide a strong justification for war. It ends up strengthening Blair’s position that he did what he honestly believed was right: the Chilcot inquiry showed that a close examination of the facts cast doubt on whether he really believed his war bulletin was truthful, but such close analysis is not in keeping with Waldman’s style.

We see here that Blair was content to reshape the political terrain rather than worry about what current circumstances would allow, which essentially made him prime minister in a way that none of his successors had done. But the story of Tony Blair finds the cult of Blair’s personality a bit alluring.