2008-2014 Anthony Blair (Labour)
The Jack of Hearts
The Incumbent
Anthony Charles Lynton ‘Tony’ Blair has wanted to be Prime Minister since he was six years old. Or at least, so he told Jonathan Ross last year. The slightly weird ‘grinning geek’ of British politics was once a charming and lauded foreign secretary under Gordon Brown. When Major won his shock victory in 1998, Blair began salivating at the prospect of taking the Labour leadership from his longtime friend, but, incredibly, was pipped to the post by Harriet Harman. When voters found her attitudes about ‘a woman’s place’ out of touch with modern Britain, knives began to be sharpened. They did not need to be used, in the end, for Harman would resign in suspicious circumstances in 2001. Details were never released, but blackmail is widely accepted to have been the cause. To this day lobby journalists swap stories and rumours of Harman and her husband’s ‘authoritarian’ bedroom activities.
Deputy Leader Margaret Beckett declined to run in the ensuing leadership election, having got rather bored with politics. She retired from Parliament in 2003, and went on to present a BBC1 television series about caravanning around the UK.
This time, the leadership was Blair’s for the taking. John Prescott underperformed in the union vote, sealing his own fate, and Blair relished the opportunity to demolish Major- then Cameron - at the dispatch box on a biweekly basis, but was bitterly disappointed when the PM’s innate charisma outshone him in 2003’s televised election debates. Secure in his post, however, he stayed on after Labour’s defeat, darkly warning the nation ‘things are about to get worse’.
He was right, of course, and as the chaos of McAlpine gave way to the mediocrity of Cameron, Labour soared in the polls. A landslide looked certain, and the election drew nearer and nearer.
But then something happened. Few knew quite what it was, but the polls began to narrow as soon as the election was called. Cameron wasn’t outperforming Blair, far from it, and Labour policy launches were successful and appeared popular. A week before the election, Labour’s strategists realised they could no longer hide from the awkward truth.
The public didn’t like Anthony Blair.
It wasn’t enough to stop Labour getting into power, but dreams of a landslide were dashed on the rocks of a thirty seat majority. Blair was less popular than his party, and did little to change this. His attempts to place himself centre-stage at the London Olympics in 2008 were misjudged, and while people did not exactly long for John Major to return, Blair did look like a man who was claiming credit for work he had not done. A string of unpopular policy decisions, such as ID cards, lengthier detention periods and ‘academy’ schools did not endear him to the anti-Blairite public. His competent Chancellor, Edward Balls, a young acolyte of the still-popular former Prime Minister, proved a more loveable figure, and became the face of ‘the Labour recovery’.
The Prime Minister had one ace up his sleeve - the poor quality of opponents facing him across the despatch box. Cameron’s resignation left the veteran Cabinet Minister Michael Howard to take command for the interim period and soon gave way to the brash former Defence Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. The new Leader of the Opposition proved to be a typical example of the party choosing the leader it desired, rather than the one it needed. Although the swaggering former soldier was effective enough at Prime Minister’s Questions, his refusal to apologise for the worst excesses of the Major years failed to win him many votes in Middle England. A tendency to raise his voice during exchanges in the Commons also played poorly to the Press Gallery and a well-publicised “Listening Tour” around marginal constituencies led to his gaining the nickname ‘the Shouting Man’.
Blair was also still a formidable diplomat. The man who had worked with the Americans during the Gulf War knew they were not to be trusted to do anything that was not solely in their interests. Blair maintained a cool distance from President Rodham as she saw our her final months in office, eventually handing the nomination to her vice president, a man who would make history in November 2008. His ethnicity would infuriate a sad minority of Americans. The fact he was a Republican would drive millions of Democrats up the wall for years to come.
Determined to leave a mark on the country he loved, Blair didn’t let his critics get to him and immersed himself in the work of government. Taking a back seat in government business began to get him some grudging respect from the public, with the Sun (which had been particularly unkind to him during the campaign) calling him ‘a class act’.
However, Blair’s standing with the public would take more than a few tabloid endorsements to really improve. In 2011, events in the Middle East provided an opportunity to transform his reputation - but one that was in no way obvious at the time.
Post-Operation Desert Thunderbolt Iran had, since the ceasefire in 1991, been an unhappy place for ethnic and religious minorities. The Rajavi regime maintained that it was a secular but ‘culturally Muslim’ state, and while this was preferable to the madness coming from the Caliph of Baghdad, it had begun to translate into an unpleasant life for Iran’s Christian, Sunni and Zoroastrian communities. Iranian Kurds had it even worse, but as Kofi Annan tried to force the UN into action, none was forthcoming.
Initially nervous, Blair took to consulting the papers of Clement Attlee more than fifty years ago. Then, a failure to act had allowed a dictatorship to brutally carry out slaughters and mass incarcerations. With the public unsure whether they supported military action against Iran, Blair launched a passionate and transparent plea to the House to support a resolution to unilaterally send peacekeeping British forces to the region.
The resolution was passed, and Blair’s bluff began. He may not have liked the Americans very much, but he knew that Britain’s modern but small army would never be able to topple Rajavi on its own. But in the coming weeks, pressure rose in Washington for Obama to join Blair’s ‘Coalition of the Free’, bolstered after the men arrested on flights to LA in April with concealed blades and bombs were found to have been trained by the Iranian army. By December 2011, units from the UK, USA, and a dozen other countries were embarking and making their way to the Iranian coast.
The Iran War needs little detailing here, being so recent and such a triumphant moment for British foreign policy. The collapse of the Republican Guard was almost instantaneous, and the carefully-drafted Blair-Brown Plan for a Post-Rajavi Iran was brought into action. The former Prime Minister had been delighted to consult on the document, acting as an expert on infrastructure (it was he who oversaw the de-Rajavisation of the civil service and army, and their subsequent takeover of the state) and the history of the region (having studied it as part of his doctorate). The Gordon Brown Highway opened outside Shiraz last month, overlooked by one of the commonplace huge statues to Blair himself that mark out the new Iran.
In the space of 18 months, Blair had completely turned public opinion around. His personal ratings soared, and his grumpy, wild-eyed public behaviour turned into a more relaxed, endearing persona. Here was a hard-working champion of liberty, who had brought peace to the Middle East - some of it, anyway - and led the world in liberal intervention. There are a lot of babies in Kurdistan today named Tony.
Last year, audiences flocked to see the BBC-PBS production Out of the Frying Pan - a spin-off of the popular satire series In at the Deep End. Starring Tom Hollander as the hard-nosed, but kind-hearted International Development Secretary, Out of the Frying Pan served as a cynical endorsement of the humanitarian intervention in the Middle East, with the former Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi playing an exaggerated version of the serving Prime Minister.
The 2012 election, called as operations in Iran were declared over and support for the war reached new heights, was a foregone conclusion. Blair got the landslide he had always wanted, and re-entered Downing Street a relaxed man. The economy continued to improve, and Labour were more united than they had been at any point since the Brown years. The stage was set for four years of solid, good government.
The death of the Queen Emeritus shocked and saddened an unprepared nation. But it would be the making of Anthony Blair. In a defining piece of post-war oratory, Blair led tributes to the late Queen, who had defined ‘Crown Princess’, ‘Queen’, and finally ‘Queen Emeritus’ for generation after generation since the war. Blair’s speech, delivered slowly and with genuine compassion - his voice cracked as he neared its end - referred to the late Elizabeth as ‘the Queen of Hearts’. As the nation buried the woman who had created the Abdication Precedent, it rallied around its popular, savvy King and - for the first time - the appealing, genuine and kind Prime Minister. People even started calling him Tony, as he had always wanted.
2013 was therefore something of a delayed honeymoon for Blair and his government. As the last British troops returned him from Iran, Labour passed the ‘troops into schools’ bill, which proved exceptionally popular with the public (though it remains too early to say whether it has been a success). A rise in the minimum wage - to §8.09 an hour - shored up the government’s credibility in the eyes of the unions and working people. The closure of the north of England’s last ‘old mine’ in August 2013 saw the completion of the ‘Pit to Prosperity’ programme, with Britain’s final batch of pre-modern-trained miners taking jobs in the new, LED-lit and electric-railway-operated supermines (the only significant legacy of a short-lived thinktank set up by Margaret Thatcher when she was not quite ready to say goodbye to politics). Helping them get to work from across Yorkshire was the landmark mass transit system for the north, NR1, while NR2 will bring the same regenerational effects to Tyneside this year.
For a time, it looked like Tony Blair would try to go on and on. But an unexpectedly concerning bill of health late last year set Whitehall aflutter with speculation about his future. Two months ago, he confirmed the rumours - he did indeed plan to resign this autumn. But there was work to do until then, and he planned to do it.
For a time, it looked as though Balls was the obvious successor to Blair. Practical, experienced and safe, his star has however been on the wane as voters desire someone a little more punchy. All eyes are now on the charming, handsome Secretary of State for Energy, who in his previous brief at Transport oversaw the NR programmes to their completion. He has a family name that carries him far in the more left wing circles of the Labour Party, and a cross-public appeal that could win him the centre. But he should watch out - rumour has it his dorky older brother has ambitions of his own.
It is far too early to say how Tony Blair will be remembered. But among the pantheon of post-1940 Prime Ministers, he will surely be able to sit among those who are more fondly remembered. Far above Attlee (to say nothing of Macmillan), but perhaps a few notches below Callaghan and Heath, both now forever duking it out in the great debating chamber in the sky. Blair did not transform the country in the same way as Heath, but he led it more firmly than Wilson, and with more confidence (eventually) than Thatcher. His war leadership did not make him a Churchill, but if Britain’s darkest hour were to return today there are few who say he would not make a fine Eden. His friend and confidant Gordon Brown is perhaps his equal in the eyes of history and in terms of steady achievement, but if we were to seek a direct comparison in terms of success and relative transformation, we might well find one in Alec Douglas-Home.
For Tony Blair, government was a rollercoaster. He entered office an unpopular man, but thanks to determination and a bold decision to bring peace while others looked away, he looks set to retire as a titan. Few have experienced such an arc in politics. A good summary can perhaps be found in a version of his doom-bringing statement after the 2003 election. For Blair, things just kept getting better.
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