The strange brilliance of Mr Blair

YOUR blogger spent 11 hours in the (paper and ink) company of Tony Blair yesterday, and a very odd experience it was too. The former prime minister's memoirs were published in the morning, leaving just enough time to read the whole thing, then write a print column for this week's newspaper (it was a late night). Bagehot should perhaps start with a confession. Perhaps because I watched Mr Blair from abroad for almost the entirety of his term in office, I have never quite fathomed the visceral loathing he inspires in so many British people. I think his term in office was a disappointment in many ways, and regret that he only came to see the need for deep structural reforms of the public sector once it was too late, and his political capital was almost all spent.

I can see how divisive a figure he was, even before the defining crisis over Iraq. He has a staggering self-belief, which comes across in his memoirs, and he has a taste for the finer things in life which sits awkwardly with British ideas of how left-wing politicians should behave. He himself admits in his book that he is manipulative, and that he was ready to trim and shade on the truth to advance his political goals. But none of these flaws make him unique as a politician. Yet he inspires unique levels of dislike.

In my print column, I ponder the thought that part of the reason is his elusive, shape-shifting nature. The question "Just who does Tony Blair think he is?" is as much an accusation to British ears as a philosophical enquiry. He claimed the mantle of a "progressive" Labour leader who cared about the poor and the hungry of not just Britain but the world, yet freely admits to preferring five star hotels to two star lodgings and revels in the company of other world leaders. In his book, he admits not just to relishing holidays on private Caribbean estates, in the villas of Tuscan aristocrats or at the residences of various heads of state and government, but to arriving "mob-handed" too, meaning that he descended with his wife and children, plus his mother-in-law and nanny and assorted other attendants (or in the case of the poor Spanish prime minister, sending his extended family in his stead). He sent his children to selective Catholic schools, while leading a party bitterly opposed to pupil selection. He forged deep friendships with first Bill Clinton then George W Bush.

It is not just that his behaviour opens him to charges of hypocrisy. It is also the impossibility of pigeon-holing him. In speech, he could sound like the middle class, private school and Oxford educated north London barrister that he once was, or sound almost working class, dropping his Hs and dropping "y'knows" and "gottas" into every sentence. He is at once blessed with what could be an almost telepathic instinct for the British public mood, and is capable of being remarkably obtuse: in one moment of rich comedy, he complains of the Queen assuming "a certain hauteur" with him (clue for TB: she's the Queen).

But this goes beyond the common charge that he was a phoney, or a liar. Reading Mr Blair's memoirs in one go, you come away with the abiding impression that he is, among other things, quite a strange person: perhaps one of the oddest to reach high office in the history of modern British politics. Mr Blair says he wrote the book himself: it is sufficiently strange in style that I think I mostly believe him.

There are passages of rather brilliant political analysis. Progressive parties, he writes at one point, are "always in love with their own emotional impulses", starting with the idea that if power is placed in their hands, they will use it for the benefit of the people: thus the more power, the more benefit. Hence, he says, their affinity with the state and the public sector. They fail to see, however, that the state and public sector can be vested interests too, and that as people become better educated and more prosperous, they don't necessarily want anyone else making their choices for them. The additional problem with intellectual left-wingers, he argues, is that they care for ordinary people, but struggle to feel like them. They do not, in his matey phrase, "get aspiration".

There are passages of flip, breezy name-dropping, eg, Nelson Mandela is saintly but can be "as fly as hell when the occasion demands". There are bits of insane, very un-English candour: we are told that Mr Blair likes access to a good bathroom when travelling, because jet lag plays havoc with his digestion. We are not just told about his teenage son getting drunk one night, but told that around 2.30am he insisted on coming into Mr Blair's bed, then spent the rest of the night alternating between apologies and throwing up.

He is adamant that his instincts and values are progressive, and naturally of the left. But on the defining crisis of his time in office, the war in terror, he almost defiantly tramples on the instincts and values of his party. He is not just generous about Mr Bush. He is, literally, kinder about Dick Cheney than he is about several colleagues in his own cabinet, saying that there is much to be said for Mr Cheney's central insight that the war on terror is a war, and that America faces a threat from a single ideological enemy, namely extremist Islam.

His long, self-justifying chapters on Iraq are pretty unconvincing. He begins by seeming to apologise straightforwardly for the fact that faulty intelligence was offered to parliament, the press and the public to justify the war, only to start cavilling and nitpicking on the details. He answers questions about the cost of toppling Saddam with what-ifs. Things would have been much better, he says if only Iran and al-Qaeda had not meddled: their meddling was not foreseen.

Now, this newspaper supported the invasion of Iraq, as (for what it is worth), did this blogger personally. But what has happened since gives me at least pause for thought: it is startling to find Mr Blair seemingly unhesitating in his conviction that military intervention might be needed again, this time to tackle Iran's nuclear programme, at least in interviews to promote his memoirs.

Even the prose style is odd: the rootless, multicultural argot of the global VIP who spends his life at 35,000 feet. References to favourite parables from the New Testament pop up, alongside some very odd similes. At one point, describing how uniquely close he was to Gordon Brown in opposition, he compares them to a pair of lovers, impatiently receiving a visit from old friends while being "desperate to get to love-making". A feisty press aide is described as a man of "clanking great balls", while a favourite minister is "fully simpatico with the direction of change".

And yet his defence is not that history will absolve him, or some such appeal to exceptionalism. Instead, Mr Blair repeatedly defends his inconsistencies and complexities by appealing to the court of mass public opinion, and his success at winning over millions of "normal people".

The old Labour party was full of oddballs and obsessives, he says more than once. At its worst, it resembled a "cult". His allies lay not inside the party, but among the broad mass of the general public. He boasts of having avoided student politics at Oxford, and of his many non-political friends. He talks about his drive at all times to see Labour as ordinary people saw it. In seeking lines of attack against each of the Tory leaders he faced in the House of Commons, he says he tried to shun shrill partisanship, in favour of some "telling" observation that would trigger head-nodding in an ordinary voter. Again and again, he points to his success with voters as proof that he was on to something. Look, he says again and again, I won three elections in a row.

Ordinary people, he says, are not as dogmatic as politicians. They are not interested in left-right labels, or even as fussed about consistency as party loyalists. There is an interesting passage where he talks about Harriet Harman, then a senior member of his shadow cabinet, sending her son to grammar school. Yes, he concedes, her decision was a "real shocker", after all: "The whole of the Labour Party programme since the 1960s had been to abolish academic selection and bring in comprehensive, non-selective schooling." Yet Mr Blair, then Labour leader of the opposition, refused to denounce her, though he says he was in a minority of one. Why? Well, he muses:

"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 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?"

In other words, yes, Ms Harman was being hypocritical, but when it comes to family, ordinary people understand a bit of hypocrisy.

A common jibe against Mr Blair is that he is really a Tory in disguise, who pretended to be a Labour politician. His defence is different: that real people are just not fussed about partisan claims of ownership, when it comes to policies. Yes, he says, Britain needed the economic and industrial reforms of the Thatcher era. It was, frankly, a good thing that Labour lost the 1983 election (though he campaigned for Labour at the time). It took time, but he came to believe that the Conservatives were also right when it came to introducing choice and market forces into the public sector. Blairite plans for foundation schools, freed from local authority control, were inspired by Tory ideas. And now, he notes, David Cameron's coalition has borrowed the idea in its turn, and is pushing ahead with free and academy schools.

The winning centre ground of politics is shared space, in short. That may alarm more partisan types, but, he writes:

"that's the way it is! And it's not a bad thing—in fact it's rather good, and the public, by the way, understood this ages ago."

Among other things, this makes the character and likeability of party leaders of "paramount importance" in modern politics, he concludes, because voters make choices on instinct rather than by studying party manifestos or policy platforms.

This is, of course, a pretty self-serving analysis if you happen to be a former party leader who bet big that likeability and emotional intelligence trumped traditional party boundaries. But it is possible to find Mr Blair a bit exasperating and also concede that he is accurately describing how lots and lots of voters think and act. At election time, they seek out a government that somehow matches their instincts, aspirations and anxieties, and in doing so may switch from party to party and back again, while always feeling that they are being perfectly consistent.

There is, I conclude in my print column, a pointed lesson here for Labour Party members as they choose a new leader this month. Choosing a boss poses a dilemma for all parties: namely, to whom does a party leader belong? Does he or she belong to the party, or should members be seeking someone who could plausibly belong to the country as a whole, as a national leader?

Mr Blair makes no secret of what he thinks. Politics is about numbers, and majorities. It is about "getting" what people think, and welcoming the chance to craft policies that meet their evolving desires, while reflecting certain enduring values. It is no accident, I think, that his book at times sounds like a memoir or a management tract by some transatlantic business tycoon. A businessman can point to certain objective markers of success: a soaring share price, booming profits, heroic rises in sales. I think Mr Blair is drawn to the same impulse, in part out of frustration at his lack of acclaim within his own party: look, dummies, I won three elections in a row. No other Labour leader has achieved anything of the sort, after all.

But then? Mr Blair quotes several parables in his book: his favourite is the parable of the sower, he tells us. He does not mention the parable of the talents, but it comes to mind. He really was a remarkable figure, but to what end?

In the opening lines of the book, he notes, jaw-droppingly, that on the day in 1997 that he walked into 10 Downing Street, he had never been the most junior of ministers before. Being prime minister was his first and only job in government. And he was, at times, brilliant. He presided over a transformational decade, that saw Britain become more liberal, open and, yes, at ease with itself in all sorts of important ways. But was that enough? Was he just lucky to ride an economic boom that his government neither understood nor used responsibly?

Are his achievements enough to outweigh his mistakes? I am not sure. In the end, though, I think the question makes me sadder than it makes me angry.