Actually, reading a book with such a careful index is like reading the abstract of a scientific paper. You can easily miss out the best bits, and get such a soupçon that you totally miss out on the real flavour. This could be the detriment of understanding Tony Blair, or possibly be an advantage. Despite my protestations which principally come from the Andrew Marr interview on the BBC, I went into the journey with an open mind, I hope..
The thing I instantly liked about “The Journey” is that it is easy to underestimate the nadir from which Labour actually came at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s popularity. I remember in my 20s what a disaster the Conservatives had become internally, and how they had virtually imploded on the issue of Europe (a topic which still threatens their infrastructure today). So, it was for me as Blair described indeed, having lived through the experience that Tony Blair talks about. I feel that I can actually empathise with his account, even though I have zero emotional intelligence, arguably, myself.
I had got used to defeat myself, I didn’t expect Blair to win, when I was at the age of 23, having experienced so many defeats in the past for me during the Thatcher generation. Quite early on in the book, Tony Blair seems to have an acknowledgement of not making his writing too self-congratulatory. Whether he’s actually succeeded on this I feel is a very tough call. His prosaic style varies from being candid emotionally, to being rather unemotional, as if he is talking in ‘legal speak’. However, the sense of excitement is there, as well as some sense of expectation management.
Some things in the book are pretty predictable. For example, the glowing reference of Alastair Campbell shines through. However, I find Blair very unclear on obvious certain failures of domestic policy. For example, I don’t feel that Tony Blair really tackles head-on the equality (inequality) divide. An epiphenomenon of this is that neither ‘poverty’ or ‘inequality’ are words are in the index, which I am sure that Tony Blair didn’t compile. There is an appearance of lip service to the Fabian Society, on a somewhat academic footing, with a surprising acknowledgement of Tony Benn and Tony Crossland at the University of Oxford. Blair seems to identify the problem:
“Once so altered, [Benn and Crossland] became staunch advocates of social action and of the party of the trade unions and the working class whose lives had to be liberated from the conditions of poor housing, poor education and poor health care.”
Critically, there is no explanation – or even an attempt at an explanation – of whether improvements in social indequality were achieved. However, it does seem that the culture of Blair, with the emphasis on September 11th, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell Iraq and Islam, seems to have somewhat overshadowed all this, and this really shows in the book. These topics have been described extensively elsewhere, so I won’t mention them. However what I did find incredibly interesting that a much publicised move was that of Gordon Brown to reduce the capital gains tax to a rate of 15%. Even Blair calls this move by Brown as heralded by politics than any real conviction, so the overwhelming impression for the reader like me is that Gordon Brown deliberately wished to court the city against any notion of anti-business rather than having thought carefully about the social and economic sequelae. Robert Peston has indeed cited this as a reason where the Blair/Brown axis failed, and I agree. Was the Labour government successful on this single issue, irrespective of Iraq or Afghanistan, more school and nurses, etc.? No.
This is a big deal, because parties tend to lose when they systematically alienate groups of people. I noticed this with Margaret Thatcher first of all, but I have latterly felt that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair did this with the working, middle and upper classes. “Somethings got to give” as Marilyn Monroe said, and it must before the next election, in addition to Labour formulating a coherent response to the effect of cuts on the economy and real people.
Is he a great leader? Well, he certainly achieved a lot, but it’s a moot point whether he made his domestic policies so toxic so as to make them rather uninspirational. Thankfully, there are other features of a good leader, such as intelligence, passion, focus, risk-taking and enthusiasm, and you can conceivably argue that Blair had all of these in abundance.
