Tony Blair: A Journey

This is released today and I'm excited, a little to my surprise.

Most political books by politicians leave me a bit cold, either because they pull their punches, or because the events that excite their authors are rarely the things that I'm interested in. Or possibly because they're setting out their stall for people like them, rather than people like me.

Typically, from the extracts I've seen, Blair seems to have pitched his just right. I guess those are the choice bits and it might yet veer off into screeds on internal Labour arcana, but I doubt it.

Here he is on Brown, for example:

I could see Gordon's enormous ability, extraordinary grasp and unyielding energy, and realised they were all big qualities in a leader. Unfortunately, what I had also come to realise was that those qualities needed to be combined with a sure political instinct in order to be fully effective. And that instinct comes from knowing what you truly believe, not vaguely or at a high level of generality or "values", but practical, on the ground, everyday-life conviction. And at this utterly crucial epicentre of political destiny, I discovered there was a lacuna – not the wrong instinct, but no instinct at the human, gut level. Political calculation, yes. Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero. Gordon is a strange guy. But by the end I had come to see that this was not the fundamental problem. (He had and has a sort of endearing charm in the strangeness.) The fundamental problem was the he simply did not understand the appeal of New Labour, in anything other than a polling, "strategy", election-winning sort of way.

will read his obituary, other than that i'm not interested in the selfserving cunt

Might get this actually. In paperback haha.

eh sorry not to derail thread. that's quite readable fwiw, etc

I was so excited I bought The Guardian.

I wouldn't worry about it xp - I figured there's probably not much I could do to keep it from heading that way anyway, so best not to try.

I like him at least, and am pretty fascinated by what I've read so far. I'm most pleased that he's taking on the big issues and being forthright, and particularly that it looks like he's not going to try to be too clever about it. I'm sure he'll get scoffed at for the style, but I appreciate it.

will read his obituary, other than that i'm not interested in the selfserving cunt

― k¸ (darraghmac), Wednesday, September 1, 2010 12:12 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark

seems kinda harsh tbh, from a non-uk resident?

not like he didn't have any effect outside his own borders is it though?

but we have threads for that

• Blair says the Tories will be "at their best" when they don't have to compromise with the Lib Dems in certain policy areas.

"The real challenge for the coalition will be simple: the Tories and the Lib Dems don't really agree. In many areas of domestic policy, the Tories will be at their best when they are allowed to get on with it – as with reforms in education. They will be at their worst when policy represents an uneasy compromise between the Old Labour instincts of the Lib Dems and the hard decisions the Tories will instinctively want to take."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/sep/01/tonyblair-past

(tonyblair-past!)

That passage seems to me exemplary of some of what is bad about Tony Blair.

otm pinefox

btw Guardian's interview ends: "Blair may or may not have been away. But he's definitely back".

Blair may or not be back. But he's definitely been away.

Blair may have been away, and may not be back yet

Blair may or may not have been Prime Minister. But he's definitely a former Prime Minister.

Blair might be away from the desk, can we get him to call you if he comes back, which he may not have done yet?

this cunt was the living end

fuck the guardian and any fellow travellers who give him the time of day

That Blair quote on the 'Tories at their best' in making 'hard decisions' vs. 'Old Labour instincts'. Presumably Old Labour == dodgy irresponsibility, while New Tories == steely eyed courage. What a cunt.

Yes, it suggests that he likes what he thinks of as typical Conservative policy and dislikes what he thinks of as typical Labour policy.

Perhaps he should join the Conservative Party?

or just make a new one?

Or just fade against the wallpaper?

i guess blair is a dick, but in the end the true labour gordon brown had his turn at the wheel, so it seems kinda churlish to harsh on him now

Well I've read about as much of this as I can. I think I agree with Julian Glover at the Guardian (who, I learn from his twitter, is "Chief Leader Writer" despite looking like he's just been rejected from a casting call for The Inbetweeners) - "He can still make us believe then pages later make us feel sick". I saw Blair a couple of times and this was just what he was like. Chatty, informal, made you think the New Labour thing could really work, and then he'd say something like "You know, say what you like about Margaret Thatcher...".

Glover is made to feel sick by the, ahem, "gushing sexual passages" though, which is bizarre because the only bits I've stumbled on are very tame.

it's quite sylvie krin in places:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6242543/blair-the-sex-scenes.thtml

can't believe Glover is Chief Leader Writer (as against a columnist)
as he's supposed to be a Con
and I usually quite admire the balance of the Guardian's main leader articles!

otm

think the guardian is mental employing this scrote and then also seumas milne

see u mas

Viz Top Tips
BRIGHTEN up your day by moving at least one of Tony Blair's books to the crime section in your local book shop. /via @pokeHQ

I bought a copy last night. Having defended the easy style above, it actually makes it harder to read than it might be - the cliches get in the way too much and the digressions, while he keeps them brief, do take some of the punch out of it. It reads like a well-planned first draft and would've benefitted from a little editing.

He's got a cracking good story to tell, though, and he doesn't hang around doing it, so it's a hit.

i guess blair is a dick, but in the end the true labour gordon brown had his turn at the wheel, so it seems kinda churlish to harsh on him now

Can't believe you think this, HM. Thought Deborah Orr was OTM here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/02/new-labour-tony-blair-gordon-brown

xps
I'm pretty sure those "sex" bits are supposed to be at least slightly amusing. To feel sick about them is a bit Old Fogey-ish. Which Glover surely is. Seems to have quite a lot of say at The Guardian too. V. depressing.

I liked the style, would have preferred more digressions rather than "you know I cried a lot over iraq" which just doesn't ring true. Oh, I don't know maybe he did, just seems unlikely.

lol no i don't entirely mean that

blair comes across now more than ever as a free-marketeer, but really he's a lightweight on questions of policy. he was talking complete blather on the marr interview -- something about the role of the state as a 'strategic enabler', how old left-right divisions were redundant (except brown was too left-wing), and the crazy idea that the reason labour lost was that his exciting reforms programme for welfare and schools didn't get pushed through.

but there wasn't a constituency in the labour party that represented a viable alternative -- the new labour lot weren't wrong, in some ways, about what had happened to the party since the 1970s. throughout the blair era there was a continual idea on the left that brown would be much different. there wasn't a great deal of complaint about the focus on home-ownership, the toleration/encouragement of wealth disparity through borrowed money, etc.

so think orr is right, that they lied to the country about the degree of prosperity it could expect [via 'aspiration'], but in my blacker moments i think the country, or enough of it, wants to be lied to. but part of what's she's saying is that the expansion of the public sector under new labour was an epiphenomenon of the bubble, done by cheap borrowing. which is disquieting, yes?

xpost

actually agree with john harris:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/01/blair-zealot-pathology-biography

Apparently Blair did not get on that well with Gordon Brown.

Brown now needs to release an autobiography that consists solely of the sentence 'Tony Blair is a lying piece of shit'

^^^^ would purchase

He could write a 'blog' for that.

Or do it in a 'tweet'!

As I've said elsewhere, I wish that someone in one of the lengthy interviews with TB would ask him real questions about policy, other than eg the legality of the Iraq invasion.

Admittedly he is such an extraordinarily slippery customer that he can turn any question into his own show (and has bored us all on Iraq that way for years). But there is such incoherence in the way he discusses policy, which goes unchallenged cos media people are apparently not interested in it and think we only want to hear about 'personalities', plots etc.

Example of incoherence: TB insists again and again that he and GB argued ferociously not over personal differences but over policy, eg on public service reforms, law & order, ID cards.

GB became PM. So what did GB as PM do on these issues that was different from TB? Maybe some things. But not much that people have ever talked about much (esp as they prefer to talk about his appearance, voice etc). He stuck with and promoted ID cards (it was a vote-loser for him this year). So what sense does it make for TB to say that they battled over the ID cards policy? What can that supposed battle actually have been about?

apparently some bad people have been moving this book into the crime and fiction sections of bookshops.

This seems to be for sale just about everywhere for half price. Does that impact what the British Legion will get? I've never really understood how royalties are paid out tbh.

I don't know, and I don't get why they use this and the Harry Potters (i.e. their few guaranteed blockbusters) basically as loss-leaders instead of milking them for all they're worth.

it's race-to-the-bottom stuff. tesco is probably to blame; for them it really is a loss-leader. bookstores cut prices to compete, but their whole set-up is different. people won't be spending £100 on groceries from them.

Kate O’Sullivan (24) from Cork attempted to make a citizens arrest on Mr Blair after buying the book. She said she approached Mr Blair saying “I’m here to make a citizen's arrest for war crimes that you’ve committed.

“Immediately five security people grabbed me, dragging me off. They brought me down the stairwell around the corner held me there for about 20 minutes . . . and told me I’m allowed to go with a caution.”

Ms O’Sullivan said Mr Blair did not respond to her but just “looked annoyed”.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0904/breaking3.html

That makes some sort of sense xp, but it isn't good. I really fear for bookshops' futures - we have a nice new Waterstone's near us, but it seems to be barely used. Would've been nice to see them get a bumper payday for once. Can't say I'm helping much, with my amazon habit and all.

asked tougher, more direct questions on iraq in every tv/radio interview i heard him give over here than any of the inquiries over there.

i mean our quivalent of adrian chiles/jonathan ross grilled him ffs

good old neutral ireland

ha, i dunno where that's going, but blair was about as popular over here as british premiers got. might very well still be.

(though he's riding on major's coat tails there)

im just saying, there's not really much left to ask. we know the questions and the answers already.

maybe as he's so proud of his Irish achievements, he should really have started the tour not in Dublin but with big signings in Newry, Strabane and the Shankill Road? Wouldn't need security there as he brought peace to Northern Ireland.

hmm in a practical sense that's enough i guess? i dunno. i'm just a crazy idealistic mfer or something

(xp)

maybe as he's so proud of his Irish achievements, he should really have started the tour not in Dublin but with big signings in Newry, Strabane and the Shankill Road? Wouldn't need security there as he brought peace to Northern Ireland.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, September 7, 2010 10:09 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is pretty cheap

yeah confused at that. i rag blair for taking over a process where other had already taken a lot of the very big steps, but it's not like he did a bad job of what he was handed either. and he doesn't hog credit for it either imo.

exackly. Strabane/Lifford's not that bad either iirc.

Also I know the bloke is an arms-length butchering twat but let's have a list of Prime Ministers that don't rock that description. Presumably his Liberal/Tory critics haven't heard of Lloyd George or Churchill.

I think the Belfast Agreement, etc, is one of TB's best legacies. I was very keen on it all at the time, though it seemed to grind into years of further negotiation about its implementation.

vs my English whiggish view, I have known people (Republicans) who reject it, the Savile Inquiry, etc, as divisive, whitewash, etc, and also tend to say, year after year, that violence vs Catholics is as bad as ever, or anyway very bad. Never known enough to judge this myself.

I would think that parts of NI are still very dangerous, for one reason or another, though maybe in different ways from before.

Genuinely think TB could go there on book tour - the particular tensions of NI might displace or drown the Iraq tensions he faces everywhere else. So think going to Dublin was a strange displacement of actually going to NI. Maybe a lot of people in the south are glad that TB helped NI (assuming he did), but as R Foster et al have shown, most middle class people in the south are very detached from NI now anyway, and just as likely to think of TB as Iraq warmonger.

i don't see how the saville enquiry is a whitewash, really.

anyone saying 'the violence against catholics is as bad as ever' is telling an ever so slightly one-sided story. there are 'wrongs on both sides', as the saying goes -- but, well, there are.

the good friday agreement -- any agreement, any saville enquiry -- was not going to lead to a new dawn of peaceful community relations in northern ireland. it was always going to be a grinding process involving extremely difficult people.

Maybe a lot of people in the south are glad that TB helped NI (assuming he did), but as R Foster et al have shown, most middle class people in the south are very detached from NI now anyway

indeed. sinn fein's desire for a united ireland under sinn fein-type leadership doesn't seem to have caught on; whether it set back the cause of catholics in northern ireland, i don't know. but it's expecting too much of any politician to ask for an instant panacea there.

sinn fein's desire for a united ireland under sinn fein-type leadership doesn't seem to have caught on

it never did. they hijacked a civil rights cause, rode it through terrorism and all that came with it, and once all that came to (if it has done- substantially, it has imo) resolution they're left where they were to begin with- no-mates hardline political lunatics.

sry yeah -- bit of english understatement there

oh you english!

I still believe that Blair, albeit perhaps because he was a Labour PM rather than purely through personal qualities, got the deal signed when Major or any other leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party wd have found it near impossible to get a deal thru their own MPs. IMO still the only thing he deserves any credit for.

Not only through their own MP's, there's prob something in a belief that a Tory leader wouldn't have got through to the nationalist side enough to the level blair did (which is where I credit major with doing seriously undervalued work)

I think Major was in many respects a decent dude who deserves credit for his part in the process but in the end however much he might have wanted to reach across to Nationalists how or why could they possibly trust the shower of arseholes Major was representing?

Yeah, basically- but that's on top of being a Tory PM.

It's strange/perfect in many ways- A Tory made the first major steps/concessions, a New Labour (in many ways distanced from all former UK govts in terms of 'legacy'?) PM got in deep and close for the nitty gritty, then a Tory PM delivers the verdict fo the Saville Report, and the ensuing apology (genuine watershed moment imo)

No idea how Saville was received in NI, a lot of the comedy Stalinists in the English press have spun it as a cop-out.

Saville, I'm not sure of- Cameron's accompanying speech- final step of the peace process.

Can't help but feel that if Cameron had genuine good will he shd push through a name change on his party, but that's probly just kneejerk hate on my part.

New Labour (in many ways distanced from all former UK govts in terms of 'legacy'?)

in a way, yes... but the GFA was less than a year into their first term. (i mean, they weren't that distanced -- kept to major's spending plans, etc. but in other ways yes.)

xposts

i think there were people who didn't like saville from the 'other side' -- mcguinness got off a little easy, etc -- but as i say, there will always be someone with a grudge in northern ireland.

yeah, absolutely. a higher % of wingnuts, maybe, but other than that no different to anywhere else

but hey i come to bury caesar not to praise him so let's talk about iraq again

Think the Anti War Coalition might be a bit late tbh

heh by that token, you'd best stop moaning about thatcher

they hijacked a civil rights cause

They being what our Unionist friends call IRA/Sinn Fein. Curiously, historians are swinging back to the idea that the NI Civil Rights movement was actually a front for the IRA after all. I refer readers to the most excellent recent book on the Official IRA and the Workers Party by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar.

But back to the real issues. Blair may have helped with the peace process, but he did so with the telling phrase "Now is not the time for cheap cliches. I feel the hand of history on my shoulder".

heh by that token, you'd best stop moaning about thatcher

I don't often, tbf. And if I'm speaking in the real world rather than on the lolternet I have a reasonably nuanced view of her and her place in UK politics. Still gonna get in the queue to tapdance on the grave, like.

I'm a bit conflicted about Army families getting all anti-Iraq on account of them being sent to do the kind of thing that you have to do if you join the Army.

xp Well it's all such an internecine mess on the nationalist side it's hard to tell which side was a front for the other, admittedly

I'm a bit conflicted about Army families getting all anti-Iraq on account of them being sent to do the kind of thing that you have to do if you join the Army.

but, maybe, not the kind of thing you join the army to do.

(though i haven't got an idealised view of recruits to the armed forces so i'm not glued to that sentiment or anything)

I am not automatically anti-squaddie but it seems at best naive to think when you sign up that there mightn't be an element of people trying to kill you involved.

Yeah, without being callous- in a war that wasn't such an obviously unnecessary fuckup, each uk casualty wouldn't be something that I'd necessarily pay much more than the standard attention to

it's the afghanistan mission that's been costly for the brits (and even then, don't want to be callous, but by british standards this is a pretty peaceful epoch). and that wasn't anything like as controversial as iraq when it started -- it's the last, uh, four years, that things have got bloody (for the brits).