The strange tale of Tony Blair

From its very conception, in other words, New Labour had two faces - and had to have. It presented one of them to the new supporters it needed to reach: voters who had elected four consecutive Conservative administrations, who were ready (to put it mildly) for a change, but who did not want to see the policies of those administrations simply reversed. The other face was shown to the party's members and traditional supporters: they might no longer be very clear about their socialist principles, but they knew that if they were anything, they were still anti-Tory. Happily for Mr Blair, many of these, even now, regard adopting soft Tory policies as a small price to pay for kicking the despised Conservatives out of power. At any rate, this was the unsteady coalition on which New Labour based its rule.

In a survey of “Britain's new politics” which appeared in The Economist in 1996, we argued that holding this peculiar coalition together, in such a way that neither side became so bitterly disappointed with Mr Blair's Labour Party that they chose to abandon it, would require the leadership of a political genius. The article also acknowledged the possibility that Mr Blair, who by that time had already stamped himself indelibly on British political history, might in fact be a political genius. Sure enough, though his coalition has come under strain from time to time, it has not yet - or so it appears - fallen apart.

Even recognising Mr Blair's talents, it must be noted that the Tories themselves deserve much of the credit. The memory of Britain's humiliating ejection from Europe's exchange-rate mechanism in 1992 is still vivid, neither forgotten nor forgiven: “Black Wednesday” destroyed the Tories' reputation for economic competence in the space of an hour, and more than ten years later the damage has not been repaired. Polls have consistently shown that Labour is regarded as a better steward of the economy. One particularly remarkable sign of this is a recent poll finding (YouGov in the Daily Telegraph of April 18th) that Britain believes the Tories would be about as likely to raise taxes after the election, were they to win it, as Labour. The Tories' greater desire to keep taxes low can hardly be in doubt: apparently, their competence on the point is what is questioned.

Labour, with luck on its side (and by 1997 with strongly improving public finances too, courtesy of the Tories), has run the economy pretty well. To that end, its instant granting of control over interest rates to the Bank of England was a masterstroke. The Tories make a sad contrast. Even under the relatively competent leadership of Michael Howard, they have often seemed to be reeling still from the setbacks of more than a decade ago.

Be that as it may, New Labour came to power with an intellectually ambivalent programme, and relying on the support of an unruly and uncomfortable alliance of constituencies. As a result, its preoccupations with spin, with tyrannical centralised party discipline and with the need for a marked flexibility of political principle were not optional extras. New Labour could not have ground the Tories down so effectively without them. The problem for Mr Blair was that as these necessary methods of political control became more obtrusive - not least over Iraq - Britain grew disenchanted with them. The leader could no longer get away with his always disingenuous pose of “what you see is what you get.”

Groucho Marx once famously observed, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.” Mr Blair faked it too much, and got found out. But in a way, justice is served: now, even when he really is sincere, he is assumed to be faking it.

There is no evidence that Mr Blair ever “lied” about Iraq. That is true of the controversy over what was known about weapons of mass destruction, and it is also true of the most recent disclosures about the advice given to him about whether an attack on Iraq would conform to international law. In all likelihood Mr Blair believed, along with all the experts advising him, that Iraq did indeed have weapons of mass destruction. And most likely he also believed that Britain's interests and the greater good required him to support George Bush's plan to oust Saddam Hussein - and that a strong case for such action could be made in international law.

Phoney Tony

Yet Mr Blair was not, as he would put it, straight with the people, or with Parliament, or even with much of his own government, in stating these convictions. The real calculations, defensible as they may have been, were done by the prime minister's small circle of trusties and spin-doctors. The flow of information to the cabinet, to the wider civil service and to the public at large was controlled and manipulated not (or not only) according to the demands of national security, but mainly to smooth Mr Blair's political path. (This, remember, was a government that had promised a brave new openness and “transparency”.) Thus, for instance, the government evaded and denied the awkward truth that compliance with international law might forbid the course of action that was nonetheless, all things considered, in the country's best interests. Mr Blair, as always, hoped to have it both ways. And who can blame him? More often than not in the course of his career, he managed to do just that.

At home, the main awkward truth that needed to be brushed over was that New Labour was largely consolidating, albeit softening, the reforms of previous Tory administrations. Again, that policy was not wrong. It was most likely in Britain's best interests, and for New Labour it was anyway politically necessary. But for a man of Mr Blair's ambition and vanity, it was also embarrassing. He wanted to be regarded as a radical in his own right - a transformer of the country, in the mould of Margaret Thatcher, not merely of his own party. This inclined Mr Blair and his circle to a perpetual state of making a great fuss over nothing. What New Labour lacked in substance, it could make up for in public relations. And, to be sure, the team for that was in place.

Remember the “Third Way”? Probably not. That was New Labour's grand unified theory of the new politics - a distinct ideology, neither socialism nor neoliberalism, to explain how kindly 1970s-vintage Tory policies were really a fresh-minted response to the 21st-century challenges of globalisation, post-modern international relations, the end of history and so forth. The policies weren't bad, on the whole. The encompassing new ideology did not even survive the first term.

At the smaller scale, New Labour's hyper-energetic public-relations machine ensured that every fluctuation in policy was elaborately packaged and repackaged, launched and repeatedly relaunched, each time as an entirely new policy more radical than any previously conceived. Initiatives and their supporting documentation poured forth in a torrent. The method soon descended into self-parody. At some point, diminishing returns, so far as the public's perception was concerned, set in. Worse than generating mere boredom, the strategy of permanent policy revolution bred weariness and cynicism. Politically, it became counter-productive: often the government now finds itself getting less credit than it deserves for its innovations, such as they are.

In only one broad area of policy can the government claim to have been genuinely radical, in fact: constitutional reform. The government granted substantial devolution to Scotland, and recast the House of Lords. Unfortunately, the reform of the Lords was a debacle. Overturning the hereditary principle was both popular and right, but the government's consequently increased powers of patronage are a travesty of democratic propriety. In other areas of policy, there is often plenty to like, but rarely much that is really new - most good things (as in health and education) being variations of earlier Tory ideas, either retained, or belatedly rediscovered, or extended; and always, of course, the tiresome threadbare pretence that the policies are wholly New.

The strangest Tory over-sold

To a large extent, therefore, Britain is disappointed with Mr Blair and New Labour simply because it is tired of the party's remorseless, pathological, high-pressure salesmanship. Circumstances surrounding the party's rebirth decreed it had to be that way. And it need not subtract much, if anything, from history's verdict on Mr Blair. If he has succeeded, after all, in consolidating centrist politics within the Labour Party, and hence in the country, that will be something to be proud of. Has he? In all likelihood, yes - though it will take a full term of Labour in power under a different leader to be sure.

Tony Blair said he would transform British politics, and has done just that. So why is Britain disappointed with him?