The persecution of Tony Blair

ONE of the most hated men in Britain gave a speech on April 23rd that was fated to remind Britons why they so hate him. Listening to Tony Blair talk on “Engaging the Middle East”, at a plush City venue, your columnist could almost sense the gathering invective. The former prime minister’s familiar yet still odd mannerisms— the glottalised accent, designed to erase any trace of his privileged roots, the paddle-wheeling hand movements—seemed almost to invite it, so thoroughly is he reviled. But the main problem was the speech itself, in which Mr Blair showed amazingly little appreciation of this.

The big problem in Syria, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere is militant Islam, he suggested, as if this was previously unremarked upon; and the world needs to do something about that, he said, as if it had not tried. Yet Mr Blair, in this self-promoted “keynote speech”, delivered to a small audience of investors and journalists, suggested no new cure for the blight other than “an international programme to eradicate religious intolerance”. That at least sounded better than reinvading those troubled countries; but surely the United Nations is doing something of the sort already?

If Mr Blair appears obsessed with the great scab on his record, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is no wonder. But he will do himself no good by scratching it. He has little credibility, and will probably never have more, on intervention, the Middle East or Islam. He is busted on such issues—and not only with the pacifists who periodically “arrest” him in return for a crowd-funded bounty from ArrestBlair.org, which now stands at £7,414 ($12,438).

The armed forces, stricken by the overstretch and consequent cuts wrought by Mr Blair’s adventurism, also resent him; the Foreign Office distrusts him. Even his own Labour Party, filled with self-loathing over the wars it was persuaded to agree to, considers its former leader an embarrassment. “What he needs to understand,” says a senior Labour figure, “is that people do not want to hear from him.”

Having covered Mr Blair’s wars, Bagehot understands the sentiment. And Iraq is not the only reason for the former leader’s fall. The great paradox of Mr Blair was always that, while possessing a fine ear for the anxieties of middle England, he never seemed altogether British. He was too hard to place socially, too religious, too damn cocksure. And in retirement this oddity has turned toxic. Having set his sights on emulating Bill Clinton’s success as a global statesman and cash cow, he has accrued a fortune of over £60m and over 200 employees across multiple consultancies and foundations. Yet Britons take a more puritanical view of their public servants than Americans—even when their corporate governance is less cavalier than Mr Blair’s might seem. His clients include corrupt regimes, such as in Kazakhstan, and beneficiaries of his premiership, such as Sierra Leone, where Mr Blair gave liberal intervention a gentle workout, and Rwanda, to which his government gave millions in aid. Even avowed Blairites, a dwindling band, consider this distasteful. To others it smacks of the shamelessness with which he is synonymous—all the more so, perhaps, after tabloid revelations concerning his alleged role in the recent break-up of Rupert Murdoch’s marriage.

Yet if this explains the extent of Blair-hating, it does not justify it. Because Mr Blair was about much more than Iraq. He remade the Labour Party, then won three elections with such ease that it fancied it was invincible, not he. Gordon Brown, his successor, showed the folly of that. By devolving power to Scotland and Wales, Mr Blair made Britain happier—transient as that has proved, with Scottish nationalists in power and an independence referendum looming. He also reformed public services, as even Margaret Thatcher had never dared do, pushing choice and competition. He did it, moreover, with a conviction that these changes were necessary not only to save money but because they were the principles upon which modern society was founded, in Britain and elsewhere. He was a political giant, a leader with a world view and global heft, who changed Britain in many ways, mostly for the better. And his successors—both David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, and Labour’s leader Ed Miliband—are underrating that to their cost.

Mr Miliband’s error is most glaring, the Labour leader having abandoned the centre ground that Mr Blair took such pains to capture. Wedded to Labour’s statist tradition, he has abandoned the Blairite public-service reforms so utterly that they are now popularly attributed to the ruling Tories. By bashing banks and energy companies, he has lost the love of business upon which New Labour’s seminal claim to economic competence was founded. Thereby he has achieved a measure of party unity; but Mr Blair would view that as a rotten measure of political success. To win, he would always put Labour noses out of joint. He seemed to enjoy it.

Atonement for Tony

It is Mr Cameron, however, who fares worse by comparison with Mr Bliar (as the Tories once slurred their nemesis). That is, first, because his erstwhile effort to modernise his party was directly analogous to Mr Blair’s. And his failure to effect anything like the New Labour makeover, as signalled by the Tories’ enduring feuding over the European Union and other right-wing shibboleths, is all the more conspicuous for it. His other big comparative failure, in foreign policy, is related: Mr Cameron’s need to placate his party has led him to promise a referendum on Britain’s EU membership that he does not want and perhaps could not win.

It is also hard to grasp Mr Cameron’s view of Britain’s place in the world. His focus on trade—shown by the caravan of footballers and tea growers he recently took to Beijing—is meant to be pragmatic. Yet it can seem demeaning and unambitious. That, for all the blunders and damage they have done, could never be said of Mr Blair’s peculiarly audacious, globe-trotting leadership.