The great performer leaves the stage | The Economist
The great performer leaves the stage
What Britain's long-serving prime minister did, and why he did it
May 10th 2007
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IT IS hard to be really disappointed by something unless it is unusually good, or at least promises to be so. Tony Blair, who announced on May 10th the date on which he was stepping down as Britain's prime minister, is an exceptionally gifted politician, perhaps the most natural persuader to have occupied the country's highest office since universal suffrage was introduced in 1928. His tumbling approval ratings, which have travelled from plus 65 to minus 40 in the ten years he has been in power (see chart), reflect a scale of disenchantment that afflicts only those who were once truly smitten. And yet, as his popularity has shrunk, Mr Blair's own belief that he is doing “the right thing” has grown ever stronger.
Mr Blair exudes a sense of purpose, but one that does not seem anchored to anything in particular. It is hard to guess why he decided to swap a career as a lawyer for one in politics, or what his early political credo was, beyond a vague desire to make a difference and a sharper one to turn the Labour Party into a winner. As prime minister he has been neither socialist, nor liberal, nor conservative, but has mixed all three together and somehow made the mixture stable.
He came to power in 1997 as a hugely popular leader who offered an end to tough choices in politics: Britain could keep its lowish-tax economy but have excellent tax-funded public services too. More than that, it could feel good about itself, an emotion that 18 years of Conservative government, caricatured as sleazy and heartless, had taken away.
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Bagehot: After Downing Street May 3rd 2007
His government set itself a whole raft of well-meaning targets for everything from eliminating child poverty to reducing carbon-dioxide emissions and increasing literacy and numeracy. Measured against these, he has made some progress, but not as much as he said he would. Schools and hospitals have got better, but have not been transformed in a way that ten years of big parliamentary majorities coupled with buoyant revenues should have made possible. How did Mr Blair manage to make so little of so much?
Early on, his success seemed effortless. When he became Labour leader in 1994, Mr Blair inherited a party that had rid itself of some embarrassing socialist tics but was still demoralised by four consecutive defeats. He picked a fight over a clause in Labour's constitution that said it aspired to nationalise all economic activity. Few in the party really meant it, but it was a symbolic tie to Labour's founders. Mr Blair, who has little feeling for the past, ditched it. He then went further, aligning his party with free trade, markets and consumers.
As a reward, he was accused of being a Tory in disguise. That was wrong. Mr Blair is part of a middle-class, urban, baby-booming Britain which harbours hostility to a privileged Tory establishment that looks down on it, sometimes from the back of a horse. Even so, the accusation did not do him any harm with the electorate. It may even have helped. And his boldness had transformed his party.
New Labour, not-so-new Britain
Mr Blair arrived in Downing Street in May 1997, the youngest prime minister since 1812. But having won power, his government did not know what it wanted to do with it. The years in opposition had been spent thinking about how to change a party rather than how to govern a country. And besides, Britain was hardly sickly. The economy was booming, unemployment falling. In the interval between the fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11th 2001, the West had no life-threatening enemy for a British prime minister to lie awake worrying about. “Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war,” Mr Blair said in Paris that year.
One thing he did know he wanted to do was to win another election, banishing for good Labour's reputation for incompetence in government. From the beginning of the first term, he concentrated on that. Scotland and Wales acquired legislatures that could spend money but not raise much. Hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords, though without a lot of thought as to what might replace them. Above all, Mr Blair pressed for, and got, a deal in Northern Ireland that led, just this week, to proper power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants. With luck, one of Europe's bitterest battles has been ended at his instigation.
Labour's pact with the electorate involved sticking to Conservative spending plans for the first two years in government, so there were few other changes for voters to notice or for Mr Blair to trumpet. His team tried to make up for this by announcing bold new initiatives almost every day, often re-announcing them a few months later. Along the way it acquired a reputation for creative news management, a habit learned in opposition that would hurt Mr Blair later on. He also picked up other vices, such as preferring “sofa-style” and one-to-one meetings to policy discussions with the cabinet of senior ministers that forms the core of British government. And it became clear that Gordon Brown, his chancellor, would at times be obstructive. Mr Blair's chief of staff described his boss's style as Napoleonic. But Napoleon never had a strong neighbour in the Tuileries trying to undermine him.
If the first term was largely wasted as far as reshaping schools and hospitals went, a distinctive Blairite foreign policy nonetheless emerged. In Kosovo and Sierra Leone British forces intervened, preventing many civilian deaths and helping to topple unpleasant regimes. In a speech in Chicago in 1999 Mr Blair outlined his new thinking, revealing a typical reluctance to be captured by the past. Once upon a time, he said, America and its allies had either to sit back and let bad governments do bad things, or risk destabilising states by interfering in their affairs. Now rolling news channels had made it harder to look away, and borders were so easy to cross that foreign problems quickly became domestic ones. Bad people could be deposed and the world made safer at the same time.
Yo, BushAP
Such philosophising played little part in the second election victory in June 2001, against lacklustre opposition. Mr Blair now had two big tasks to match another big mandate. Having got rid of the fledgling market-oriented reforms in health care and education introduced by the previous Tory government, he went back to something similar, refining the earlier approach and pouring in money. By introducing competition and choice, he would improve public services and shore up support for them among middle-class taxpayers who might otherwise opt out. At the same time, he would settle Britain's tetchy relations with the European Union by joining the euro. At the height of his power, he looked capable of doing both.
The ride of the neophiles
A few months later, two planes were flown into the World Trade Centre in New York. As when Princess Diana died in 1997, Mr Blair found the right words, mixing grief and sympathy for America with toughness on terror, in those hours when George Bush seemed to have gone missing. He had a prescription, too. All democracies must join together to fight terrorism, he said on September 11th, adding that Britain, like America, would “not rest until this evil is driven from our world”.
Mr Blair joined America to invade Afghanistan. Again a bad regime was toppled, and a process started that was designed to lead to democracy. Those who suggested that, on past experience, Afghanistan was tough ground for invaders seemed to have been proved wrong. Mr Blair had driven out evil, and done good, again.
At this point in his premiership, he had not experienced failure. The looming prospect of war with Iraq at last presented him with a political challenge commensurate with his talent and sense of purpose. It was not a new problem, though. Mr Blair had discussed what to do about Saddam Hussein's flouting of UN sanctions and expulsion of weapons inspectors with Mr Bush long before the September 11th attacks. In 1998 Mr Blair and Bill Clinton had ordered bombing raids aimed at wiping out Iraqi weapons programmes. And so in February 2003, when UN inspectors gave their last, inconclusive report, Mr Blair was faced with a dilemma: either join America and provide useful political cover for a nation nervous about going it alone, or stay out of the war.
The decision was easy for him. First, he believed that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. In a speech in Parliament on the eve of the war that still makes convincing reading, he listed the weapons Saddam Hussein had possessed at the end of the first Gulf war, and the many occasions on which he had impeded inspectors. Intelligence officials reported that in 1991 Saddam had been within a few months of building a nuclear weapon. Was it credible that someone with his record of violence and rule-breaking would have given these things up voluntarily?
Second, Mr Blair had a good relationship with Mr Bush. Though their politics were different, Mr Blair found Mr Bush easier to work with than Mr Clinton. In that relationship Mr Blair was the less experienced leader, and Mr Clinton frustrated him over Northern Ireland and Kosovo. Mr Bush, by contrast, was straightforward to deal with, and tended to do what he said he would. On the other side of the argument were Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, whom Mr Blair had found opportunistic and untrustworthy at European summits, and Jacques Chirac, the French president, whose reflexive anti-Americanism annoyed him.
Third, the invasion of Iraq fitted into the view of Britain's role in the world that Mr Blair had formed by now. The problem was of the same type as Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, only bigger. That made the potential upside bigger too. Mr Blair saw the invasion as the first step in a remaking of the Middle East which, with America's backing, the establishment of a Palestinian state would complete. Once again appeals to history were raised, and Mr Blair dismissed them.
Several hundred thousand lives and no weapons of mass destruction later, the decision looks like a terrible one. First, although he appeared to play a central role in the war, Mr Blair's influence was marginal. He could neither stop America from invading Iraq nor stop the other big European powers from opposing the invasion. His haplessness was made worse when a government weapons scientist named David Kelly, who was caught up in the argument about what the government knew about Iraq's weapons, committed suicide, and an inquiry showed that the government had presented its case for war as stronger than it was. America's humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and its holding of dozens of suspects without trial at Guantánamo Bay, suggested awful parallels between the liberators and the regime they had deposed. And every day the number of Iraqi civilian dead continued inexorably to rise. Still Mr Blair refused to say that the failure to find WMD cast doubt on the justification for going to war.
The Thatcher shadow
The cost of supporting America has greatly exceeded the £4 billion ($8 billion) bill for the war so far. Had Britain stayed out, it might have been able to send troops to right wrongs in other, more tractable places. At home, Mr Blair was distracted from pushing through important but complex reforms to public services.
Yet though Mr Blair's stance on Iraq left him unpopular, he was now, if anything, more prepared to take risks. His argument alone forced through a bill to allow universities to charge their students variable tuition fees, which came within five votes of defeating his government. In 2005 he won a third election, something no Labour leader had done before. It was a grudging endorsement, however. Although the Tories waged a miserable campaign, Mr Blair and Labour received only 36% of votes cast.
Once again, Mr Blair's authority was boosted by a perfectly-judged response to tragedy: this time, to the bombs that killed 52 people in London on July 7th 2005. And then he threw himself into public-service reform with the energy of someone who knew he had wasted time.
Exactly how long he had left was unclear. In the autumn of 2004 Mr Blair spent a night in hospital being treated for a heart murmur, and also announced, coincidentally, that his next term would be his last. He said he would serve it out to the end, which would mean staying until 2009 or 2010, but straight after the election he came under pressure to say when he was going. Relations with Gordon Brown, the chancellor, which had improved for a while, deteriorated again.
Mr Blair did manage to pass another education bill, which allowed schools a bit more independence from government. But it needed support from the Conservatives to pass, and the final version was weakened by Mr Blair's own MPs. Even after a decade as their leader, he had not persuaded them that swapping uniformity—which they called equality—for competition would benefit those who sent their children to state-run schools or had kidneys replaced in state-run hospitals.
But what brought Mr Blair's exit nearer was not anything that happened in Britain. In the summer of 2006, when Israel invaded Lebanon in retaliation for the killing of three Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of two others, Mr Blair refused to condemn this as a disproportionate use of force. He saw Israel's actions as those of a democratic state acting in self-defence against terrorists, and did not doubt which side Britain should be on. The Labour Party saw its leader aligning himself, yet again, with the hated Bush administration.
Not long before, a conversation between the two leaders had been overheard at a G-8 summit in St Petersburg. “Yo, Blair,” said the president, carelessly, as Mr Blair apparently bent to do his bidding. This was too much for many Labour MPs. Taking advantage of the prime minister's isolation, a handful of junior ministers sympathetic to Mr Brown resigned, trying to force Mr Blair into naming a date for his departure. The result of this mini-putsch was a draw. But it shortened Mr Blair's political life expectancy. On May 10th he announced that he would leave office in the middle of this summer. He will have spent just one year less than Margaret Thatcher in Number 10.
One door closes, another one opensAFP
Lady Thatcher stayed on too long; her capability was waning even faster than her popularity. Mr Blair too was slow in political terms to seek the exit, and did not sag as badly. Judged narrowly as a politician, he has been a great success. He restored competition to British politics by making Labour electable again. He refused to budge from the political centre and, by doing so, made it his own. Government expenditure has crept up, and none of the main parties talks about reducing it. Both Mr Brown, Mr Blair's likely successor as Labour leader and prime minister, and David Cameron, the new Conservative leader, are working hard to imitate him.
The hand of history
Assessing Mr Blair as a prime minister is harder. The policies on schools and hospitals that he put in place too late in his premiership are broadly promising but have yet to produce real results, and they have cost a fortune. He gave more autonomy to the non-English parts of the union, but at the cost of national cohesion. His government was too quick to pass new laws in the name of public safety. Pushing for peace in Northern Ireland, to which he was personally committed throughout his time in office, is likely to be seen as his greatest achievement.
But unlike Lady Thatcher, who took over when Britain needed rescuing, or Clement Attlee, who became prime minister when it needed rebuilding, Mr Blair was not required to effect the kind of transformation that his political talents seemed to demand. His challenge was more modest: first, to do no harm. Then the Iraq war held out the possibility of greatness. Failure on that front has changed Mr Blair from a man who wanted to be liked into one who is content to be proved right eventually. What happens on the banks of the Tigris over the next few decades will determine whether he can be.
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