The loneliness of Tony Blair

COMPARED with the rather cramped office of the British prime minister at Number 10, Downing Street, the headquarters of the last-prime-minister-but-one is an impressive place. Tony Blair Associates is based in a porticoed town house in Grosvenor Square, once inhabited by John Adams, who before becoming America’s second president was an emissary to London. Framed photographs show Mr Blair with a generous scattering of world leaders. A separate, less spectacular office block not far away in the West End houses the Tony Blair Foundation, a multitasking charitable outfit that sponsors international programmes to combat religious extremism in over 30 countries. For good measure, there is a sports foundation in the north-east of England and one promoting improved governance in Africa. Cherie Blair, the former prime minister’s wife, a barrister, also runs her own charitable outfit, supporting female entrepreneurship.

Since Mr Blair was edged out of the premiership in the middle of his third term by Gordon Brown, his restless chancellor of the exchequer and successor, he has built himself a life of foundational do-gooding. He reckons he spends two-thirds of his time on his work for his various charitable bodies, alongside lucrative consultancy and speechmaking. He thinks of himself as a “geopolitical and strategic consultant” and multi-project philanthropist. The good works are funded by a broad range of consultancy projects for governments ranging from Kazakhstan to Kuwait and connections with Qatar through high-profile international deals. On top of this comes an unpaid role as a peace envoy promoting Palestinian economic growth, plus work for banks and investment companies opening doors and smoothing the way around the world. Occasionally, he seems to have difficulty keeping up with himself. A climate-change initiative he founded in 2008 had its “latest news updates” on its website in 2011.

A frenetic political afterlife seems to suit him. At 61, despite heart surgery in 2007, he looks physically fit, with blazing blue eyes and a disarming grin. A chipped front tooth has been restored to pristine evenness. Yet there is an uncomfortable side to Mr Blair’s existence. While he is welcomed and celebrated abroad, in his home country he is reviled. The ostentatious combination of money-spinning, globe-trotting and commercial deals with some unappealing governments sit uneasily in austere, post-crisis Britain.

A YouGov poll in 2013 concluded that just under half of Britons thought he was a war criminal. Five people have tried to carry out citizen’s arrests on him. The Labour Party, which he led to victory more often than any other leader in modern times, might be expected to turn to him in its current troubles, but seems to regard him as an embarrassment. An award this year for his charitable endeavours from GQ, a men’s magazine, elicited scorn in the media and social networks. Another plaudit, from the American branch of Save the Children, spawned a petition signed by 500 staff members, calling for the award to be rescinded. Private Eye, a satirical magazine, jokes that he is in negotiations with the devil over the sale of his soul, “which I have not needed for some time”. At the extremes, the hostility takes alarming forms. He and his wife have received death threats, and a law student allegedly inspired by Islamic State to try to kill them is on trial in London.

Inevitably, there is dark comedy about an existence that features being feted on the American lecture circuit one day and ranted at in Britain the next. A waiter in a fashionable east London restaurant recently tried to arrest Mr Blair on the grounds that his customer launched “an unprovoked war against Iraq”. The “unprovoked” bit riles him, but the tale elicits a rueful grin. “You order a mixed salad and the waiter tries to arrest you. What can I say?” He tried to engage the outraged citizen in a discussion about Syria, but “he looked at me as if he had never heard of the place” (the waiter inferred that his target was just trying to change the subject).

That Mr Blair is disliked does not set him apart from all his predecessors. A recently published story entitled “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” was spawned in part by the “boiling detestation” that the Booker Prizewinning novelist Hilary Mantel felt for the former prime minister; but then Thatcher, who died in 2013, was loathed as well as adored while she was in office. Sir John Major aroused no strong public emotions either in or out of power. Mr Blair, by contrast, was widely approved of while he was prime minister. He transformed the Labour Party from a grumbling socialist backwater into a centrist electoral machine that won three stonking victories, including an historic landslide in 1997. For most Britons, Mr Blair’s time in power was a calm and prosperous one, with a bold centre-left leader who began long-overdue reform of public services.

His personal ratings were battered by the humiliating aftermath of the Iraq war, but it is since his departure from office that his star has fallen precipitously. The unravelling of Iraq after the fighting and its contribution to the chaos that has spread through the Middle East, have left a stain on his record far darker than when he was prime minister. Yet those events are not the only explanation. Although George Bush was the main architect of the war, Mr Blair attracts more hostility than the former President does, especially in his own country.

That may be partly because the British were less enthusiastic about the intervention than the Americans were, and Mr Blair used his formidable powers of persuasion to sell it to a dubious public. Much of the distrust springs from the quality of the evidence presented to the British public for the existence of the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was said to possess: it was questionable at best, shoddy at worst. The outcome of the Chilcot inquiry into his government’s handling of the war (the third and most thorough review since 2003) is pending, but few expect an uncritical verdict. And although Iraq signalled imperial hubris for America, it arguably had a more devastating effect on Britain’s appetite for projecting force in the world.

But the difference in attitudes to Mr Bush and Mr Blair may also spring from their different lives after office. Mr Bush has published a couple of books, founded a library in Texas, practised bipartisan matiness with Bill Clinton and keeps largely stumm about his record. Mr Blair volubly defends his. He denies responsibility for the chaos that now bedevils the region and will not—“until my dying day”—concede that it was wrong to remove Saddam who, he insists “retained the intention and the capability to revert to the weapons of mass destruction”. He knows that he is infuriating people by distinguishing good intentions on Iraq from the messy outcome, yet remains defiant. “What annoys people is my refusal to change my mind. I don’t shut up about it and I know that strikes some people as provocative. But it is much more progressive to get rid of Saddam than leave Bashar Assad to murder 200,000 of his own people in Syria.” At the least, he adds, the Arab Spring would have challenged Saddam and the consequences “would have been truly terrible”.

If he was guilty of a misjudgment, he says, it was that he “failed to properly understand the causes of 9/11” and was too hopeful about the aftermath of the war. “We reckoned if you removed the brutal dictatorship, let people decide their future democratically—which they embraced wholeheartedly, by the way—and put an unlimited amount of funding behind it, things would settle down.” The reason they did not, in his view, is that violence and terror from extremist groups destabilised the country before new institutions could grow, and thus created a vacuum into which increasingly vicious fundamentalist groups expanded.

An award for his charitable endeavours from GQ elicited scorn in the media and social networks

This belief now drives his charitable work. He has embarked on a campaign of speeches and debates on the need to understand the nature, range and depth of religious extremism and to develop better strategies to counter it. His faith foundation’s projects aim to combat extremist ideas in countries ranging from Nigeria to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia, focusing on creating school curricula and training teachers to promote open debate and religious tolerance. But why does he think people should listen to him? “Precisely because I have been through all this,” he says with irritation. That is unlikely to convince the many Britons who feel that if the Iraq war did not single-handedly create the Middle East’s current problems, it contributed to an almighty mess.

Although he resists the conclusion that ousting Saddam was wrong, his analysis of what has happened in the region has changed his attitude to dictators. The man who rallied for “liberal interventions” against figures such as Slobodan Milosevic now cites the “strategic necessity” of dealing with autocrats from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who has common cause with the West against fundamentalism, to Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, president of Egypt, who came to power in a military coup against the Muslim Brotherhood and whom he thinks the West should back more strongly. From the failures of the Arab Spring, he deduces that it would have been better to leave Hosni Mubarak in power in Egypt and try to affect a more gradual transition. Criticised for giving (pro bono) economic advice to Mr Sisi, he warns that freezing the former military leader out will “take away a major bulwark for our security”.

This argument is intellectually coherent, but leads to moral tangles—as highlighted by Mr Blair’s involvement in Kazakhstan, where he has set up a team of advisers to counsel Nursultan Nazarbayev, president for a quarter of a century. In 2011, two months after Mr Nazarbayev hired Mr Blair’s outfit to advise him on reform and the transition to democracy, police opened fire on demonstrators in Zhanaozen, killing at least 15 people. Repression remains fierce and Mr Nazarbayev, untroubled by anything as vulgar as a real election, looks like a dictator who has hired a convenient figleaf of respectability.

Mr Blair denies this, saying that he is “not a PR adviser to the President of Kazakhstan”, but there to “assist the country in the way it is changing”. Its geostrategic position between Russia, China and various Central Asian states, as well as a mixture of faiths alongside a majority Sunni Muslim population, makes it “vital to engage with”. Of the Zhanaozen massacre (Mr Blair carefully uses the word “issue” to describe it) he adds, “There was a very violent confrontation and people died. It was a terrible thing, but nearly all the people associated with that have moved on or changed.”

His argument that the West needs to deal with dictators because they can protect people against the fundamentalists who are the new, more dangerous, enemy is respectable, but hardly complete. For one thing, it leaves open questions of when to walk away from oppressors like Mr Nazarbayev, who are prepared to oversee massacres of their countrymen to stay in power, and whether the incarceration of opponents by autocrats such as Mr Sisi fuels rather than combats extremism. Nor is Mr Blair’s championing of this argument likely to win sceptical compatriots round.

Iraq is the main, but not the only, reason for that. Another is money. Mr Blair has quite a lot of it these days. The business arm of his operations, Tony Blair Associates, made some £13m ($18.2m) in 2013, his most profitable year since quitting Downing Street. It advises government and companies, but also gets involved directly in deals, oiling the wheels of the Glencore commodity-trading megalith’s takeover of Xstrata in 2013, for example. Mr Blair’s personal wealth has been estimated at tens of millions. Exactly what it comprises is hard to figure out. He says that he “gives away as much as he has earned”, and that he has given away around £10m. The Blairs and their offspring co-own ten flats and houses.

A further factor is that Mr Blair’s links with dodgy regimes—inevitable, given his belief that the West needs to deal with autocrats—has raised questions about the opaque sources of his revenues. The complexity of his interrelated roles also invites suspicion that he fails to distinguish between pro bono and purely pro-Tony work. He insists that he does not “make money personally out of Kazakhstan” and his main income derives from advising financial institutions, such as JP Morgan and Zurich Insurance, as well as a slew of lucrative speaking engagements.

But this explanation does not satisfy his countrymen. The left dislikes him for cosying up to bankers they deem greedy and irresponsible, the right for his preachiness, and both wince at his taste for glitz. He hosted a lavish party for his wife’s birthday which featured two of the stars of “Strictly Come Dancing”, a TV talent contest, and an impersonator doing impressions of himself. Tim Bale, a politics lecturer at Queen Mary’s college in London, believes that “a slightly preachy, evangelical side to his (Blair’s) character leaves him open to the charge of hypocrisy when he serves Mammon as well as God.”

Jonathan Powell, the former chief of staff who oversaw the Northern Ireland peace process, one of Mr Blair’s less-disputed achievements, thinks his old boss “massively unfairly treated because if you look at other ex-leaders, such as Sir John Major or the late Thatcher, they all made a lot of money after office.” (Sir John has worked for Carlyle Group, a private-equity company.) Mr Powell reckons that left-of-centre leaders receive undue criticism for getting rich after they leave politics.

Another reason for Mr Blair’s alienation from his compatriots is that he seems increasingly like a foreigner—an impression underlined by his high-profile combination of wealth and charitable work. Although standard practice in America, this is unusual in Britain, where political leaders usually fade into a discreet Valhalla of positions on company boards. Mr Blair’s political afterlife resembles those of former British leaders less than it does that of Mr Clinton, which it echoes in a number of ways—the power couple, the grandiosity (notepaper headed “Office of Tony Blair”), the preternatural energy combined with an air of self-conscious dash.

The company that Mr Blair keeps does not endear him to many of his compatriots, either. Earlier this year, in an episode that brought joy to the British press, Rupert Murdoch ended his long-standing relationship with the former prime minister over suspicions that he had had an affair with Wendi Deng, then Mr Murdoch’s wife. According to sources at NewsCorp, Mr Murdoch pressed the “mute” button during a confrontational phone call, informed colleagues that he was getting “politicians’ answers” to his questions, and has never spoken to Mr Blair (who is godfather to one of the couple’s children) since.

Mr Blair roundly denies any impropriety. Asked whether he was (at least) careless about his reputation, he says calmly that it is “not something I will ever talk about—I haven’t and I won’t”, and then bangs his coffee cup so loudly into its saucer that it spills and everyone in the room jumps. But did he find himself in a tangle over his friendship with Ms Deng? A large, dark pool of sweat has suddenly appeared under his armpit, spreading across an expensive blue shirt. Even Mr Blair’s close friends acknowledge that the saga damaged him—not least financially, since Mr Murdoch stopped contributing to Mr Blair’s faith foundation and cut him off from other friendly donors in America.

But the main reason why the British have distanced themselves from Mr Blair is his refusal to admit to having done anything wrong. Premier cru politicians need more self-belief than the common man, and he is unusually well-endowed with it. Despite the unravelling of Iraq and an almost-universal belief that the invasion was a mistake, Mr Blair’s certainties remain ironclad. Martin Bright, a journalist who worked briefly at the Blair Foundation, wrote afterwards that he had felt “as if I was in the presence of an Old Testament prophet. The answers had been revealed to him and he was revealing them to the world.” Another former staffer jokes that, “Tony called his memoirs “The Journey”, without going on one. He was even more convinced at the end that he was right at the beginning.”

Here, perhaps, is the core of the problem. Because it is so important to Mr Blair to be right, he cannot admit to failings over the war in Iraq. Yet until he does so, people will continue to mistrust him.

That is a shame, for his mission to fight against fundamentalism needs all the resources and energy it can get. He has considerable talents, which he is prepared to devote to his cause, just as he energised a moribund Labour Party and made it a more powerful political force than the largely retrograde instincts of Ed Miliband, its present leader, could have done. Yet the main asset that any former politician has is moral sway, and because Mr Blair has forfeited so much trust, he has far less credibility than he should have. Some contrition or regret among those ironclad certainties would serve him and his cause better. The late Mo Mowlam, an outspoken minister in the Blair government, was on to something when she observed early in his reign that “the trouble with Tony is that he thinks he’s fucking Jesus.” Mr Blair has plenty of the Messiah’s self-belief and sense of mission. He could do with a dash of his humility as well.

Correction: An earlier version of this article included the government of Qatar and Rwanda among Tony Blair's international consulting projects. This was not the case and has been changed. Sorry.