The shredding of Tony Blair

Broken Vows: Tony Blair: The Tragedy of Power. By Tom Bower. Faber & Faber; 653 pages; £20.

IT IS a measure of how far Tony Blair’s stock has fallen that he has attracted the unwelcome attention of Tom Bower. Usually Mr Bower takes aim at controversial businessmen, such as Robert Maxwell, Mohamed al-Fayed, Conrad Black, Bernie Ecclestone, Simon Cowell and (twice) Richard Branson. A diligent cuttings job and interviews with anyone with dirt to dish or an axe to grind provide the material to shred a chap’s reputation.

The charge sheet against the former prime minister is predictably devastating. He was a fraud whose communications skills obscured a paucity of accomplishment during a decade in office. He deceived voters: over Britain’s involvement in two wars and by presiding over an undeclared open-door immigration policy. Distrustful of the competence of cabinet colleagues, unwilling to resolve the dysfunctional relationship with Gordon Brown and sceptical of the “modernising” commitment of senior civil servants, his approach to the exercise of power became destructive of the very fabric of government. His second career as a highly remunerated globe-trotting political consultant, often to some pretty dodgy regimes, has done nothing for his reputation.

The attack is relentless. Much of the evidence supporting Mr Bower’s narrative of a gifted but shallow politician who over-promised and under-delivered appears, at first sight, compelling. However, there is early on a warning about just how unbalanced this account is. Few would disagree that one of Mr Blair’s signal achievements was the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. Yet it merits only one rather barbed paragraph.

Mr Blair’s first term certainly lacked any guiding idea about how underperforming public services should be improved other than by spending more money. His losing gamble on the outcome of the Iraq war also drained the prime minister of political capital. Without it, pushing through a reform agenda that was at odds with the ideological prejudices of most of his own party and which Mr Brown, as chancellor in control of the purse strings, was determined to undermine (for personal as much as political reasons) was uphill work.

Where Mr Bower gets it wrong, however, is in casting Mr Blair as a feckless flibbertigibbet incapable of the serious analysis required to think through and implement complex policies. In the second half of his term of office, Mr Blair had a very clear idea of what needed to be done. There was no doubting his intellectual conversion to the role that market discipline could play in improving public services, nor his command of intricate policy detail. But there were only a handful of people who could help him realise his goals. All too often, when faced with Mr Brown’s intransigence, he failed to stand by them.

On Iraq, Mr Bower does his best to suggest that Mr Blair was guilty of an act of deliberate deception in sending Britain to war. He fails to come up with anything fresh. Too much weight was indeed given to patchy intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. But there is no doubt that Mr Blair believed in it and thought it right to act on it. When the long-awaited Chilcot report is finally published, it will interest historians, but it will not satisfy those who say Mr Blair is a war criminal.

Mr Bower is on firmer ground when it comes to Mr Blair’s life since leaving Number 10. Copying Bill Clinton, Mr Blair has combined lucrative political consulting and business networking with running philanthropic foundations: one aims to spread good governance in Africa, another advocates religious tolerance. In theory, the consulting is meant to provide funds for the philanthropy. But the latter often provides moneymaking openings for the former, Mr Bower alleges.

Mr Blair’s acquisition of considerable wealth since leaving office has contributed as much to his subsequent vilification as the residual bitterness over Iraq. But his governments were far from being the unmitigated disaster Mr Bower describes. Had they been, voters would not twice have re-elected him. The author never tries to see things from his subject’s point of view. Nor does he consider the often adverse political context in which Mr Blair was operating. The result is a shrill and misleading account. Readers deserve a fairer and more serious book about this important political figure.