Introduction, Part 2

Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader
by Philip Stephens

(Page 2 of 5)

There are echoes of an earlier age in Tony Blair's premiership. His approach to foreign policy has its roots in the interventionism of the nineteenth-century Liberal British prime minister William Gladstone. Like his distinguished predecessor, he is impatient of the strategic doctrines that say governments should turn their backs on tyranny and injustice in the world unless their narrow national interests are in imminent danger. His politics - and a deep Christian faith - tell him that civilized nations have the right and duty to confront suffering beyond their boundaries; in the medium to long term, such intervention is a matter of enlightened self-interest. Even before the events of September 11, Blair had emerged as the most outspoken advocate of military action to end Slobodan Milosevic's tyranny in Kosovo, and had sent British troops to end the civil war raging in the West African state of Sierra Leone. In the spring of 1999, during the Kosovo war, he enunciated a new "doctrine of international community." Tyrants, he declared, could no longer be permitted to shield behind the United Nations charter in pursuit of the oppression of their own peoples. The NATO military campaign against Serbia was "a just war based not in territorial ambitions but on values." But it was also a matter of self-interest: "If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later."

For all his idealism, Tony Blair bears the blemishes of his profession. No one would ever accuse him of lacking personal ambition. And, though he prefers to make friends rather than enemies in politics, he has never lacked the ruthlessness required of politicians to reach the top. A friend and admirer in Blair's own cabinet states quite simply, "He is the most ruthless leader I know. He is very unsentimental about doing tough things." The high moral tone of a political message infused with Christian belief has often jostled with the low politics he has employed to win and retain power. The unshakable conviction that has marked his foreign policy has often stood in contrast with a curious timidity and hesitancy in his domestic agenda. As an opposition leader, Blair remade the Labour Party in his own image, destroying the assumptions of British postwar politics. He placed himself between the Conservatives' Margaret Thatcher and the far-left leaders of his own party. The old left, he often said, had stressed social rights to the exclusion of individual responsibilities, while Thatcherism emphasized individual economic rights to the exclusion of social responsibility. New Labour joined rights and responsibilities. Yet sometimes it seemed that the guiding purpose of Blair's domestic politics was simply to win a second term. Early on he was held in thrall by the focus-group and opinion-polling obsessions imported from Bill Clinton's White House. His political skills - he is the most fluent and persuasive communicator in British politics - are not matched by a natural mastery of the cumbersome machinery of government. Yet his gifts as one of politics' great persuaders rest upon a foundation of staunch self-belief. In Northern Ireland, where six years of patient peacemaking ended a bloody terrorist war against the British state, he deployed a genius for convincing unreasonable people to do reasonable things to brilliant effect. At other times, he seemed to think that stirring rhetoric was sufficient to make the world a better place. More than once he has learned that vision is a poor substitute for the hard choices demanded of those in power.

For all such flaws, the aftermath of September 11 and of the conflict in Iraq marked out Tony Blair as a different sort of leader. The gifted thespian had met the conviction politician. In the months after the attacks on America he traveled many tens of thousands of miles and met dozens of world leaders as the most eloquent spokesman for a new coalition behind America's fight against terrorism. Right or wrong on the best way to deal with Saddam Hussein, his approach was rooted in principle and carried through with courage. This was a personal as much as a political watershed. The war told Britain and the wider world where the prime minister came from as a politician and where he intended to go. There were many reasons - the realpolitik of the Anglo-American relationship high on the list - why he might have decided to go to war against Iraq. And, doubtless, matters of strategic interest played a central part. But the moral certainty that prompted Blair to risk everything on the war came from the conviction that the world would be a better place once it was rid of Saddam Hussein. If this Manichaean outlook unsettles even some of his close supporters, a willingness to gamble all distinguishes him as a man who is in politics to change things. He was sanguine about the idea that the venture might cost him his career, because if he could not do the things he believed to be right in his position, he saw little purpose in staying. The heavy irony of the furor after the Iraq war over whether Saddam's regime really did have weapons of mass destruction is that Blair would have liked from the start to frame the war in a different context. For him, removing a dangerous and murderous tyrant was as compelling a moral cause as a hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Blair's Christian faith is open-minded, tolerant of human frailties, and respectful of Jewish and Muslim teaching. But Christianity - and the concept that he draws from it of the world as a place of interdependent individuals and communities - informs and infuses all his political thinking.

Tony Blair's response to the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, turned a politician who was strong at home and well known in Europe into a leading figure on the world stage. The support he offered to George W. Bush - first to fight terrorism and then to remove Iraq's Saddam Hussein - gave him a public profile in the United States unmatched by most postwar British prime ministers. Only Margaret Thatcher could claim the same sort of recognition among Americans and, arguably, Blair did more even than the "Iron Lady" to establish Britain as Washington's staunchest ally. He did so, however, at substantial cost to his popularity and reputation at home.

The prime minister won the vote for war on March 18. While some 139, or about a third, of his own MPs in the House of Commons rebelled, it was enough that Blair had carried the support of more than half of his party. Ten days later, when the British and American leaders met in Washington, George W. Bush offered his now-famous tribute: "America has learned a lot about Tony Blair over the last weeks," the president said. "We've learned that he's a man of his word. We've learned that he's a man of courage, that he's a man of vision. And we're proud to have him as a friend." But for both men, the peace would bring many more problems than the war.

A few months later, in early August, Blair passed another political milestone when his government became the longest continuously serving administration in Labour's history. Yet while Britain now had a prime minister who had changed the political weather in Britain and emerged as a powerful leader on the international stage, the nation was hardly in a grateful mood. The war had ended in Iraq but left a bloody and chaotic peace. Failure to find Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in the months after the war badly damaged trust in Blair's leadership. So, too, did a loud public controversy over whether the British government had deliberately exaggerated the extent of the threat posed by the Iraqi leader. In his determination to fight at America's side Blair had put too much emphasis on the immediate danger. During the summer of 2003, a public inquiry into the suicide of a distinguished British weapons scientist revealed the flaws in the intelligence reports that had been presented as cause for war - and shone a harsh light on the way that Blair's office had sought to play up the potential threat. Many questioned whether Blair had put his determination to preserve a "special relationship" with Washington above all other judgments. Perhaps, as Winston Churchill discovered when he was voted out of office at the end of World War II, it is the fate of British leaders to be admired abroad and mistrusted at home. In any event, when he reflected on all this in an interview at the end of July 2003, the voice of the nineteenth-century moral missionary in Tony Blair was as clear as it had ever been that toppling Saddam had been "the right thing to do."

I first met Tony Blair during the 1980s, when he was a junior Treasury spokesman for the Labour Party and I was an economics reporter for the Financial Times. Subsequently, I followed his career as the newspaper's political editor, as a columnist, and as UK editor. I have spoken to and interviewed him on dozens of occasions, watching and charting the rise of the young, determined politician as he first became leader of his party, then Britain's prime minister, and ultimately a politician determined to make an impact on the world well beyond Britain's shores. Many of these encounters became interviews published in the Financial Times; others provided the basis for columns in the newspaper. I have drawn on all of them, as well as many more conversations with his friends, his political allies and aides, and his opponents, in writing this biography. In late July 2003, Blair also agreed to give a lengthy on-the-record interview specifically for this book, in which he spoke candidly about the early influences on his political life, as well as of his thoughts on presidents Clinton and Bush and on the war against Iraq.

Tony Blair is a remarkable politician. His achievements, at home in Britain and abroad, have belied his youth and inexperience. He is a leader willing to take risks in pursuit of conviction. But this is a biography, not a hagiography. Blair's admirers have long been confounded by the ruthless political gamesmanship that sits alongside the conviction; his critics are disarmed by the principles that lie behind the constant quest for popular acclaim. My intention is to provide a portrait that allows readers to make their own judgments.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Philip Stephens is a senior editor of the UK edition of the Financial Times and writes a column on political and economic affairs in Britain and Europe. He is the 2002 winner of the David Watt Prize for outstanding political journalism.