Opinion
Iraq War catastrophe still looms large over Tony Blair’s achievements as former prime minister turns 70
His election win in 1997, aged just 43, felt like an exciting new era to many – but the decision to back America and go into Iraq still overshadows his achievements.
Adam Boulton
Sky News commentator @adamboultonTABB
Wednesday 10 May 2023 13:37, UK
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Tony Blair turns 70 on Saturday. Plans to celebrate the former prime minister’s biblical milestone of three score years and ten are muted – and not only because Blair’s big birthday on 6 May falls on the same day as the coronation of King Charles III.
The 26th anniversary of Blair’s, genuinely historic, first, “New Dawn has broken”, general election victory on May Day 1997 also passed without comment. To many Sir Tony Blair is a pariah.
In spite of Blair’s achievements, his name is often greeted with embarrassed shuffling. It took the current Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer well over a year before he found the courage to utter the word “Blair” in public.
The Downing Street chronicler Sir Anthony Seldon declined to include him in his list of 10 best prime ministers, only Attlee and Thatcher get his nod in modern times.
The gentle comedian Harry Hill co-authored Tony! – The Rock Opera, now touring theatres.
In a short notice in the usually Labour-leaning Guardian, the reviewer wrote off the play’s subject without hesitation as a “monster”, “gormless”, giving “Gordon Brown a raw deal”. He regrets that in a death-bed scene the depiction of Blair’s “dotage, sadly never transpires”.
It is 16 years since Tony Blair left office and active politics. True, memories fade. The section of the electorate under 35 will have no memories to go.
It is important to take this opportunity to look at his record, especially because, for the first time since Blair’s last victory in 2005, there is a live prospect of Labour forming a government after the next election. The idea of Tony Blair still casts a long shadow over his party and British politics more widely.
U.S. President George W. Bush (R) shakes hands with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Oval Office of the White House June 7, 2005. The two leaders, both faced with skepticism at home over their handling of the Iraq war, met for their first talks since Blair emerged from elections a month ago with a third term but weakened politically. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
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Blair’s alliance with George W Bush over Iraq has become notorious
What explains the indifference or malice directed at a significant national leader, who is now often caricatured as “Tony B. Liar” and “a war criminal”?
If they are remembered at all, prime ministers are remembered for a single thing. In Blair’s case it is Iraq.
Blair propelled the nation into the military invasion in 2003, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of US and UK troops and more than a 100,000 Iraqi civilians.
He made the case for war on what turned out to be an inaccurate premise – that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. Once the Iraqi despot was overthrown, the region plunged into chaos and civil war from which it has still not recovered.
Britain’s stance led to a significant rupture with some allies in the European Union, led by President Chirac of France, and arguably set the country on the road to Brexit.
At home the Blair government’s aggressive campaign to make the case for military action precipitated the suicide of a British expert, Dr David Kelly, and the dismissal of the director general and the chairman of the BBC.
With hindsight most of Blair’s closest supporters, but not the man himself, concede that his decision to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with US President George W. Bush turned out to be a catastrophic error.
Blair’s insistence that he “acted in good faith” doing what he thought was right, survived numerous public inquiries, including by Robin Butler, Lord Hutton and Sir John Chilcot. The US would have invaded without British forces in any case.
No evidence emerged that Blair ever deliberately lied about the Iraq threat. He secured a democratic vote at Westminster for the invasion. Public opinion at the time was roughly split down the middle even as over million took to the streets for Stop the War demonstrations.
Iraq has blotted out Blair’s other achievements.
In electoral terms, Tony Blair remains the most successful Labour leader ever. He is the only Labour, or indeed non-Conservative leader to have led his party to victory for full terms in three successive general elections.
File photo dated 10/04/98 of then prime minister Tony Blair (right) and his then Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern, shaking hands outside Stormont, following the all party talks' agreement to a historic peace deal. Former taoiseach Bertie Ahern regards lingering instability of Northern Ireland's political institutions as one of his biggest regrets from the Good Friday Agreement talks. Issue date: Monday April 3, 2023.
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Blair with Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998
He was prime minister for a decade. A period of continuous economic growth in this country during which increased public investment resulted in qualitative improvements in state education and the National Health Service.
As even his severe critic, the former Tory MP Matthew Parris, acknowledges, social reforms, including the introduction of civil partnerships, left a nation much more at ease with itself.
With his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern and the American Senator George Mitchell, Blair secured the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998, which brought an end to Northern Ireland’s murderous Troubles.
Blair’s political success was built on his Big Tent political philosophy of reaching out beyond his natural supporters.
“You can either A: Hold on to your core vote, basically, you know, say, ‘look let’s not break out because if we break out we might lose what we’ve got, and at least we’ve got what we’ve got, so let’s keep it’,” he explained, “or B: You say ‘let’s accept the world is changing, and let us work out how we can lead the change and actually reach out’.”
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, at Nexus, University of Leeds, in Yorkshire, to launch a report on constitutional change and political reform that would spread power, wealth and opportunity across the UK
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Until Keir Starmer, Blair was shunned by his successors – including Gordon Brown.
This ambidextrous key to success ultimately antagonised both Labour loyalists and Tory opponents, who felt he was annexing their natural territory.
In retirement, as an elder statesman, Blair has been available to offer private counsel to his Conservative successors as prime minister.
He made common cause with John Major to warn publicly and perceptively of the dangers posed by Brexit to the Good Friday Agreement. At the same time he remained a Labour Party partisan, although, until Starmer, he was cold shouldered by successive Labour leaders, including the resentful Gordon Brown.
Starmer is now moving Labour back towards the centre, having shaken off his past allegiance to Jeremy Corbyn. His parliamentary career began in 2010, years after Tony Blair left politics and after the defeat of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Now some of the old TB/GB, Blair/Brown tensions are becoming evident in the Leader of the Opposition’s office. Starmer would like to win like a Blairite but so far he has looked more Brownite in his calculated caution.
His leadership team features prominent Brownites such as Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband and Deborah Mattison as well as those more closely associated with Blair’s New Labour, including Peter Hyman, Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, left, sporting a print bandanna on his head and a white, loose-fitting shirt with matching white shoes and trousers, goes for a walk British Prime Minister Tony Blair, right, and his wife Cherie Blair, after their arrival at Berlusconi's luxury villa, in Porto Rotondo on the Island-region of Sardinia, Italy, Monday Aug. 16, 2004.
Pic:AP
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Blair and wife Cherie with former Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi in 2004
As Rishi Sunak steadies the Conservative government, Labour faces a bigger challenge than previously. While few want a return of Blair’s tarnished charismatic leadership style, worried Labour campaigners would welcome dashes of his classlessness, daring and vision.
Blair’s departure from office in 2007 was bitter, including an attack on the “feral beasts” in the media.
He did not enhance his reputation as he set about money-making to secure the financial security of his family, largely from foreign sources. He talked about moving to America. Estimates of his net worth start at around £50m. His four children are all property rich.
In common with Major and Brown, Blair did not take a peerage in the House of Lords.
After a surprisingly long gap for an ex-prime minister, he was installed as a Knight Companion of the Garter last year at what would be the Queen’s last investiture service at St George’s Chapel in Windsor.
Blair’s eldest son Euan, 39, has surpassed his father in wealth. He founded White Hat, which encourages white collar students to take apprenticeships with businesses rather than go to university.
Now rebranded Metaverse with backing from the US Walmart dynasty, Euan’s stock holding is valued in hundreds of millions of dollars.
Blair's children at his Order of the Garter service in June 2022
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Blair’s children at his Order of the Garter service in June 2022
Nicky Blair, 37, is a footballer’s agent after a brief career as a teacher. Kathryn, 35, is a barrister. Tony and Cherie’s annual Christmas card now regularly features their growing brood of grandchildren.
Cherie Blair KC co-founded Omnia Strategy, a firm of “global dispute and arbitration” lawyers.
Leo, the youngest son born while the family were in Number 10, seems the child most likely to go into politics. Now 22, he joined Labour aged 16 and accompanied his mother to celebrations for the party’s 120th anniversary.
Tony’s 70th birthday celebrations will be a private family affair.
He cut back on his personal commercial activities in 2016 and now largely uses his earnings to support the family’s foundations for sport, religion and government, which employ several hundred people around the world.
Work by his umbrella Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has ranged from ideas to deal with COVID to the Africa Governance Initiative and calls to counter Russian influence in the region.
The UK now has an unprecedented roster of seven living ex-prime ministers – Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss – all still active. Tony Blair is the enigma.
His reputation is not yet settled with the public. As he looks on at the coronation from his pew in Westminster Abbey, the restless Sir Tony Blair is unlikely to miss the irony that the career of his life was over at the age of 53, while King Charles III, who is four years older, is only just embarking on his starring role.
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