A Journey by Tony Blair #1

Tony Blair’s autobiography, from 2010. This is the most I’ve ever learned about a person while feeling so close to them in heart and mind, and agreeing with them on so much (in as far as I can from this vantage point).

Of course we tend to agree with authors, but I’ve found this experience remarkable. (I do plan on reading Gordon Brown’s autobiography too.)

Here I am noting down some highlights, so I’ll write without expositions of people and events; please look them up if you’re curious. But all the highlights should be digestible on their own.¹

I thought I could manage this book in one post; it’s looking like three; I’ll try for two. In post two I’ll write a bunch more notes, but for now, enjoy Blair:

Through Cherie’s dad, Tony visits Parliament:

I had a complete presentiment: here I was going to be. This was my destiny. This was my political home. I was going to do whatever it took to enter it.

Cherie was rather startled by the effect on me. I was literally pacing up and down the place, drinking in its atmosphere, studying its architecture as if by looking at the building I would discover the secret of how to get there not by invitation, but by right.

I like that he had this moment of inspiration, that his love of politics wasn’t preloaded since teenage years or something.

On one type of people attracted to the Labour Party:

It took me a long time to work out what the problem with this second group was: although they cared for people, they didn’t ‘feel’ like them. They were like the Georges Duhamel character who says, ‘I love humanity, it’s just human beings I can’t stand.’ I don’t mean, incidentally, that they were aloof or unpleasant – they were often charming and fun – but they didn’t ‘get’ aspiration. They were almost too altruistic for their own political good. When injustice and inequality were reduced – in part through their efforts – they failed to see what would happen. A person who is poor first needs someone to care about it, and then to act; but when no longer poor, their objective may then become to be well off. In other words, for such a person it is about aspiration, ambition, getting on and going up, making some money, keeping their family in good style, having their children do better than them. My dad’s greatest wish was that I be educated privately, and not just at any old private school; he chose Fettes because he thought and had been told it was the best in Scotland.

The problem with the intellectual types was that they didn’t quite understand this process; or if they did, rather resented it. In a sense they wanted to celebrate the working class, not make them middle class – but middle class was precisely what your average worker wanted himself or his kids to be. The intellectuals’ belief in equality strayed dangerously into the realm of equality of income, not equality of opportunity. The latter was a liberator; the former would quickly become and be seen as a constraint. The impulse of many of those helped by well-meaning intellectuals was essentially meritocratic, not egalitarian – they wanted to be helped on to the ladder, but once on it, they thought ascending it was up to them.

1993, Tony thinking about running for Labour leadership sometime though not talking about it, but Peter Mandelson can tell after a short chat. And *the feeling*:

‘Hmm.’ He looked back at me and smiled in that Peterish way. ‘I’ll have to reflect on this conversation.’

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ I laughed, concerned that, even with him, I had given too much away.

‘Oh, but I do,’ he said, giving me an affectionate pat on the shoulder and getting into his car.

In truth, I didn’t know what I thought. I wasn’t really analysing, I was just letting my instinct roam. In fact, I feared to stop and think, because I felt with increasing clarity where my instinct was roaming. It was like I was waking each day feeling stronger, more certain. Each encounter with my own party, the other party, the media, the public, would be like another layer of steel bolted on to an already well-fortified casing. I could see the opportunity to take hold of the Labour Party, rework it into an electoral machine capable of winning over the people. I could see it like I suppose someone in business spots the next great opportunity, or an artist suddenly appreciates his own creative genius, or a coach or player knows that their moment for glory is about to come.

It is an extraordinary feeling, in the sense that you feel you can achieve something beyond the ordinary. And you know it. Maybe you won’t do it, but you know at that time, in those circumstances, with those conditions, it can be done. Yes, it can be done. I can see it and I can do it.

I was fighting my feelings towards Gordon, which were still of great affection and loyalty, but I also felt the tectonic plates shifting. For ten years, my judgement had been that he should do it and I should be second in command. I liked the notion of counselling, advising, urging, directing behind the scenes, seeing my work flourish. So at that point, no, there was no overbearing desire to move centre stage, although I sensed the change within me and could almost watch my own metamorphosis. I felt on fire, with a passion and a sense of mission. I was straining at the leash, and for the first time in our discussions, I noticed things about him I hadn’t fully noticed before, an intellectual caution that was cleverly coated but didn’t seem to me to match the strategic necessity of breaking emphatically with our past.

Tony has a tendency for presentiments and premonitions, here about John Smith’s health:

Of course I had no knowledge that John would die prematurely. Except that, in a strange way, I began to think he might. I don’t mean I had a premonition or anything odd like that, but if you had asked me, in some private contest with Providence, to stake my life on whether he would or not, I would have hesitated. I kept dismissing the thought. It kept intruding.

In April 1994, Cherie and I visited Paris. I was giving a speech to INSEAD, the business school at Fontainebleau. It was to be our last weekend of normal life. We left the kids at home. Derry recommended a little hotel near Montmartre. The rooms were tiny but pretty, and the hotel was central. I remember waking up the first morning and then waking Cherie. I said to her: ‘If John dies, I will be leader, not Gordon. And somehow, I think this will happen. I just think it will.’ Is that a premonition? Not in a strict sense; but it was strange all the same.

After John died:

As I wandered through the lobby at the side of the House of Commons Chamber, I came across Peter Mandelson. We had spoken briefly on the phone, but in very guarded terms.

‘Ah, I was hoping to see you,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s not run away with all this. Gordon is still the front-runner, still the person with the claim.’

As ever with Peter in a situation like this, you could never be quite sure what he was saying; but I was sure what I wanted to say.

‘Peter,’ I said, ‘you know I love you, but this is mine. I am sure of it. And you must help me to do it.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ he said. For once, there was no playfulness; and for a moment we stood, looking at each other by the green leather-topped table at the north side of the Aye Lobby.

‘Peter,’ I said, putting a hand on each shoulder, ‘don’t cross me over this. This is mine. I know it and I will take it.’

‘You can’t be certain of that,’ he replied.

‘I understand.’ I spoke gently this time, the friendship fully back in my voice. ‘But just remember what I said.’

Someone entered the lobby. As if by telepathy, we moved apart and went in different directions.

On Gordon’s skillset:

Likewise, I was a new type of person altogether for him. I was very non-political in my view of politics. There was more instinct than analysis; or perhaps more accurately, since I did analyse and reanalyse politics, the starting point was instinct. At first, he taught me things all the time: how to read the games within the Labour Party; the lines not to cross with the unions; how to make a speech; when to shut up as well as when to speak up in an internal party discussion. With just a phrase, he taught me the business of politics in roughly the same way Derry had taught me the business of the Bar.

On their friendship (I’m jealous):

Funnily enough, in the years of permanent debate that characterised our friendship up to that point, I was probably more like an analytical lawyer or professor trying to arrange the logic and reason of our positions on policy. He was the master politician. I don’t mean he wasn’t intellectually more able – he was and is, in the sense of who would have got the best degree – but in framing the intellectual case for what we were doing, I tended to have the idea and he tended then to translate it into practical politics. He was also a brilliant sounding board. He could instantly see the force of a point, give you six new angles on it and occasionally make you see something in a wholly different light. I often compare him to Derry in that way. I would always learn from a discussion and come away mentally refreshed, stimulated and enthusiastic. The conversations were long, but there were very few wasted moments. Our minds moved fast and at that point in sync. When others were present, we felt the pace and power diminish, until, a bit like lovers desperate to get to lovemaking but disturbed by old friends dropping round, we would try to bustle them out, steering them doorwards with a hearty slap on the back. Our friendship was not a sealed box exactly, but the sense of self-containment was strong, sometimes overpowering. Under the pressure of leadership it was not easy, therefore, to open it up to the influences – good, bad or indifferent – of the outside world. But of course this was what was happening.

One of their meetings about the Labour leadership contest:

Nick had just moved into a big old house and was doing the place up. He kindly agreed to go out and leave us alone to talk. After an hour or so Gordon got up to go to the loo. I waited downstairs. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then fifteen. I was getting a bit alarmed. Suddenly the phone went. As it wasn’t my house, I left it. The answerphone clicked in, and Nick’s voice asked the caller to leave a message. Suddenly, out of the machine boomed another voice: ‘Tony, it’s Gordon here.’ Wow, I was really freaked out. What the hell was going on? ‘I am upstairs in the toilet,’ he went on, ‘and I can’t get out.’

In the building works, the loo door had been replaced but had no handle on the inside yet. Gordon had spent a quarter of an hour on his mobile trying to track down Nick’s number. The soundproofing in the house meant that I never heard him. I went up to the loo. ‘Withdraw from the contest or I’m leaving you in there,’ I said.

Three types of Labour (does Starmer’s Labour feel more plain than modernized? But Tony supports them much more than 2010-2020 Labour):

I assessed that there were three types of Labour: old-fashioned Labour, which could never win; modernised Labour, which could win and keep winning, which was my ambition from the outset; and plain Labour, which could win once, but essentially as a reaction to an unpopular Conservative government. The last couldn’t win on its own terms with sufficient clarity, breadth and depth of support to be capable of sustaining victory through the inevitable troubled times of government. My favourite parable of the Gospel, the parable of the sower, always served as an example: the difference between plain Labour and modernised Labour was the difference between the seed that sprouted but never took real root, and the seed that yielded thirty, sixty, a hundredfold.

When Harriet Harman, then a member of the Shadow Cabinet, sent one of her kids to a grammar (selective) school:

Alastair wanted to send her a letter denouncing her decision. Bruce Grocott, my PPS, was appalled. Even my nearest and dearest in the office thought it pretty indefensible. Only Cherie came close to sticking up for her, since she always put the family first.

My view was absolutely crystal clear: it was her choice as a parent. On this, I was in a minority of one. The press smelt blood. It seems strange now but people really did tell me my leadership was on the line. No one could quite understand why I felt the need to defend her so vigorously.

To be honest, at first I wasn’t sure why either, but as I licked my wounds over PMQs and reflected, I realised why the instinct was so strong: although Labour people would understand why Harriet might have to resign over this, no ordinary person would. Some woman politician decides to send her kid to a grammar school. She thinks it gives him the best chance of a good education. Her party forces her to resign. What do you think? You think that’s a bit extreme; and not very nice; and a bit worrying; and is that what still makes me a bit anxious about those Labour people? Before we know where we are, we’ve really unsettled sensible middle-ground opinion.

I dug in. I went to the PLP the day after the Tuesday PMQs and defended her passionately. I also learned a great lesson: the row passed. Yes, it had been ugly for a while and as ever in the Westminster bubble everything seems so extraordinarily hyper, but in reality the world kept turning and the news moved on.

Tony oddly terrified of a non-political interview, and oddly astonished of its impact, though he often talks about being a normal person in politics:

So, in a sense, for me, politics started with that very ground-level human reconnection of party and people. In late 1996, Alastair, who got all this completely, persuaded me to appear on the Des O’Connor Show. At that time, it was a very unusual thing for a politician to do. I was incredibly nervous. I had to prepare certain anecdotes, and get myself in a totally different frame of mind. It would be utterly unlike PMQs or a party conference speech. I didn’t have to prove ‘fitness to govern’ in terms of economic or social or foreign policy; I had to prove I was normal and could talk normally about the things people like to chat about. It was a risk, and I fear I made Alastair’s life hell in the lead-up to it, but it worked. What astonished me, however, was that from then on, people sublimely uninterested in politics would feel I was accessible to them.

The biggest challenges of governing in his situation, which is not “understanding the machinery of government”:

You are woefully short on what is required to step into government and govern effectively, especially if you come into power after such a long period of Opposition. This is not about understanding the machinery of government; above all, it is about knowing the complexity of policymaking, financial management and prioritising. Knowing the committee structure and departmental highways and byways is no doubt important; but it is far more important to know how to focus on the essential details of preparation for implementing a policy which may seem easy enough stated in a manifesto but, when looked at in the hard light of day, can be horrendously difficult to do. And parties tend to be really under-informed about the nature of how different commitments interact with public finances.

Making time as Prime Minister:

Creating time for a leader is a near-sacred task. The person in charge of it is one of the most important in the team, and they have to be completely ruthless in saying no. The leader has always got to be the good guy. You bump into someone; they ask for a meeting; you agree, of course. What can you say? ‘You’re too tedious, too unimportant and have nothing of any interest to say’? Of course not. You have to say yes. It’s the job of the scheduler to say no. ‘But he agreed to see me.’ No. ‘But he said he wanted to see me.’ No. ‘But he said he had been meaning to call me himself to fix a meeting.’ No. ‘But . . .’ No.

We used to have a phrase in the office called, in mock severity, ‘SO’, which stood for ‘sackable offence’. It applied to scheduling a meeting with people who were never to cross the threshold. It applied even if I had agreed to the meeting. It applied – I am a little ashamed to say – even if I had expressed to the individual concerned my deep frustration with my own office for defying my wishes and not scheduling the meeting.

There was a particular old Labour grandee who used to nobble me in order to give me ‘sound advice’. He was a lovely man, but really. I naturally expressed my intense interest in seeing him. Kate, my PA, who was a hugely efficient naysayer, went AWOL for some reason or other. Someone else was temporarily manning the gate, and he got in to see me. After about thirty minutes of ‘sound advice’, I was just about boss-eyed with boredom when the temporary gatekeeper put her head round the door and said, ‘Time’s up.’

‘Oh, really,’ I said, ‘what a shame. I was really enjoying this.’

‘Well, in that case,’ she said, ‘I could leave you another half-hour because your diary has changed.’

Tony’s first weekend visiting the Queen at Balmoral in 1997:

The blessing was the stiff drink you could get before dinner. Had it been a dry event, had the Queen been a teetotaller or a temperance fanatic, I don’t believe I could have got through the weekend. But this stuff – I was never quite sure what it was – was absolutely what was needed. It hit the spot. It was true rocket fuel. The burden and the head got lighter. The courage returned. The easy conversational intercourse with the royal family seemed entirely natural. The first two annual visits were, nevertheless, trying at all levels.

And:

Indeed, one of the perpetual embarrassments at Balmoral used to be the Sunday papers laid out on the drawing-room table as you had pre-lunch drinks. Inevitably there would be some screaming headline about me or her, sometimes both of us, which would lie there prominent yet unmentionable. Over time, as the media looked to cause trouble, and without having much scruple about how they did it, there would usually be some ‘story’ timed for those very weekends about me insulting Her Majesty; or missing the Highland Games, the Saturday event to which the prime minister is invited (which I fear we did); or going to the Games, where one time the camera caught Cherie yawning . . .

Start of Northern Ireland peace talks:

I went over on 13 October to have my first meeting with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Up to then, no British prime minister had met either of them. It was a big moment. A crucial question was whether or not I shook hands with them (no Unionist leader did until 2007). I decided just to do the thing naturally. So they walked in, we shook hands.

When asked about it afterwards, I said I treated them like any other human being, but later the same day I got a taste of Unionist sentiment. I was invited by Peter Robinson, the DUP deputy leader, to visit a shopping centre in his constituency. I was never sure whether he set me up or not. I’ll assume not.

The place was full of the most respectable elderly grannies doing the shopping. Like something out of a bad dream, however, they suddenly morphed into very angry protesting grannies, shouting, swearing, calling me a traitor and waving rubber gloves in my face. I was perfectly happy to listen to them, but the RUC – with what I thought was a trifle too much eagerness – turned it into a major security incident and physically carried me into a room for my own safety.

Amusingly, I didn’t get what the rubber gloves were about at all. I thought they had just finished doing the washing-up or something. When I told Jonathan, he roared with laughter and said, ‘No, it’s because you should have worn rubber gloves when shaking hands with Gerry Adams.’

Into the peace talks, at the ugly Castle Buildings at Stormont which Tony hated and was inside of for four straight days:

Here I discovered another piece of bizarre psychology about the whole thing: it was a zero-sum game to all of them, and not only in terms of negotiating detail – ‘You suggest this. We oppose. You like this. We don’t’, etc. Walking around the building they would spot the other’s expression. If one looked happy, the other looked for a reason to be sad. If one was down, the other immediately went up. It was unbelievable. At crucial moments, when we had just scrabbled one party back on board, I would be terrified in case they went out of the room looking satisfied in front of those waiting to come in for the next meeting.

Close to a deal:

The surreal issue was the Unionist desire to close down somewhere called Maryfield. At first there was confusion, since we thought that the Unionists were saying ‘Murrayfield’ had to close, and even I winced at the prospect of demolishing the Edinburgh home of Scottish rugby that I had visited often as a teenager. But it was a measure of our now complete isolation in the negotiating cell that I neither asked why Unionism might want to erase a rugby pitch, nor was unprepared to do it.

After a few minutes, we elicited to my relief that Maryfield was in fact the name of the secretariat established under Mrs Thatcher’s hated Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s. The secretariat basically did nothing, and in any event would be superseded by our agreement. Maryfield was just an office, so the whole business was entirely symbolic. Then it transpired they didn’t simply want the secretariat shut – that would happen anyway – they wanted the physical building closed. ‘Fine, we’ll use it for something else,’ I said.

‘No,’ they said, ‘we want Maryfield shut. Closed. No longer in use. For anything.’

It was as if the building had become a political manifestation of the dispute, which I suppose in a sense it had. By now, I didn’t care. I would have taken a crane and concrete block round and demolished it myself if it meant they signed up.

The Northern Ireland Office cavilled. ‘Why do they need it closed? Can’t we use it for filing?’

‘Guys,’ I said, ‘please don’t ask why. From now on Maryfield is a thing of the past. It’s over. Part of history. Raze it to the ground.’ I never did find out what happened to it. Probably everyone forgot about it.

IRA decommissioning:

We went to Hillsborough after much negotiation, while John [de Chastelain] was taken to witness an IRA ‘act of decommissioning’. We were to await the news that the act had taken place – a bit like in the old days when crowds gathered to hear the news that the king’s marriage had been consummated. John then disappeared off our radar – literally. The IRA held him incommunicado, and while they let him witness the act, they wouldn’t let him describe it at all, in any way.

Finally poor John turned up to do his heralding. It immediately became clear that he, as a man of integrity and honour, felt bound by the IRA stricture on total confidentiality. We decided nonetheless to field him to a press conference, whose only lasting historic significance is that it should be compulsory viewing for all students of press conferences.

John gave them the bald statement that in effect it had happened, but he resolutely refused to say more. In answer to the question ‘What was decommissioned?’, he replied: ‘Well, it wasn’t a tank’ – a bit like the herald, when asked with whom the king had consummated his marriage, saying, ‘Well, it wasn’t a donkey.’

A-la Dominic Cummings on the Civil Service (for some reason I don’t get tired of these):

Here, too, there was a gap, which was between what we thought the Civil Service problem would be, and what it turned out to be. In Labour mythology, the Civil Service is made up of closet Tories, snakes in the governing grass, lying in wait for the naive Labour minister whose radical policy is strangled before it can perform. In this fantasy – and it is fantasy – they are the Establishment’s ideologues and the Establishment is the Tory Party, the true party of government, the fuddy-duddy repository of the old Britain of colonies, aristos and fox hunters. In this scenario, the senior mandarins are forever poised to strike down the progressive action a Labour government wants to take and propel forward the heinous plots of the right wing.

God, if only. The reality was not they were poised to strike, sabotage or act. The problem with them, as I indicated at the beginning, was inertia. They tended to surrender, whether to vested interests, to the status quo or to the safest way to manage things – which all meant: to do nothing.

Wholly contrary to the myth, they were not the least in thrall to the right-wing Establishment. They were every bit as much in thrall to the left-wing Establishment. Or, more accurately, to a time and a way and an order that had passed, a product of the last hundred years of history.

The Sir Humphrey character in the TV series Yes, Prime Minister was a parody and a fiction, but he was the closest parody could get to fact. Sir Humphrey wasn’t left or right; he just believed in managing, in keeping things upright, in the status quo, not so much because of the status but more because of the quo; a quo he knew and could understand and one that to move from was a risk. And risk must at all costs be avoided.

The Civil Service doesn’t understand New Labour and thinks it’s a trick:

They also, along with the judiciary, bought the idea that New Labour’s and my preoccupation with antisocial behaviour, family breakdown, asylum, etc., was a preoccupation born of our driving desire for the right levels of populism to get and retain power. They didn’t see it as born of a genuine wish to improve lives in a world in which the old ways of doing so wouldn’t work.

This is a crucial motif. Tony says that large parts of the Labour Party and Gordon never saw New Labour as fully genuine either.

On Neville Chamberlain and fundamental questions:

Chamberlain: denounced by history. A comparison to Chamberlain is one of the worst British political insults. Yet what did he do? In a world still suffering from the trauma of the Great War, a war in which millions died including many of his close family and friends, he had grieved; and in his grief pledged to prevent another such war. Not a bad ambition; in fact, a noble one.

One day, meandering through the bookcases, I had picked up his diaries and begun to read the account of his famous meeting with Hitler prior to Munich, at the house in Berchtesgaden high up in the Bavarian mountains. Chamberlain described how, after greeting him, Hitler took him up to the top of the chalet. There was a room, bare except for three plain wooden chairs, one for each of them and the interpreter. He recounts how Hitler alternated between reason – complaining of the Versailles Treaty and its injustice – and angry ranting, almost screaming about the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the enemies of Germany. Chamberlain came away convinced that he had met a madman, someone who had real capacity to do evil. This is what intrigued me. We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness.

I tried to imagine being him, thinking like him. He knows this man is wicked; but he cannot know how far it might extend. Provoked, think of the damage he will do. So, instead of provoking him, contain him. Germany will come to its senses, time will move on and, with luck, so will Herr Hitler.

Seen in this way, Munich was not the product of a leader gulled, but of a leader looking for a tactic to postpone, to push back in time, in hope of circumstances changing. Above all, it was the product of a leader with a paramount and overwhelming desire to avoid the blood, mourning and misery of war.

Probably after Munich, the relief was too great, and hubristically, he allowed it to be a moment that seemed strategic not tactical. But easy to do. As Chamberlain wound his way back from the airport after signing the Munich Agreement – the fateful paper brandished and (little did he realise) his place in history with it – crowds lined the street to welcome him as a hero. That night in Downing Street, in the era long before the security gates arrived and people could still go up and down as they pleased, the crowds thronged outside the window of Number 10, shouting his name, cheering him, until he was forced in the early hours of the morning to go out and speak to them in order that they disperse.

Chamberlain was a good man, driven by good motives. So what was the error? The mistake was in not recognising the fundamental question. And here is the difficulty of leadership: first you have to be able to identify that fundamental question. That sounds daft – surely it is obvious; but analyse the situation for a moment and it isn’t.

You might think the question was: can Hitler be contained? That’s what Chamberlain thought. And, on balance, he thought he could. And rationally, Chamberlain should have been right. Hitler had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was supreme in Germany. Why not be satisfied? How crazy to step over the line and make war inevitable.

But that wasn’t the fundamental question. The fundamental question was: does fascism represent a force that is so strong and rooted that it has to be uprooted and destroyed? Put like that, the confrontation was indeed inevitable. The only consequential question was when and how.

In other words, Chamberlain took a narrow and segmented view – Hitler was a leader, Germany a country, 1938 a moment in time: could he be contained?

1. I’m still unsure of what to do when there are many highlights that I feel are truly good. I want to have this repository, and posting it online forces me to make it neater and more comprehensive. And I want to share all this with people, and connect with people that are already into it.

The sheer amount feels a bit crazy, but the alternative is crazier to me — to privately hold all this stuff “on my own”, in my head. (My friends are obsessed with different things, not this.) I do get inner strength from this book whether I post or not, but this whole experience feels much better when I write and quote. It’s how I’m wired.