Now the sun has set, my first memories are of the dawn. I was at London’s Royal Festival Hall that bright May morning in 1997 when the news came through of the Labour landslide.
When Tony Blair appeared on an outdoor platform, he was greeted like a dragon-slayer. “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” he asked.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” I said to the party official beside me. She, unsmiling, asking to see my credentials. I was not eligible to be in this zone, so was frogmarched out of the building.
It was a useful introduction to the Blair era. There was glamour, excitement and goodwill. People believed Britain was about to enter a new, better age. But it was also marred by the control-freakery so central to the Blair years.
More deeply, it was an intimation of Blair’s distance from his party’s tribal emotions.
For most of his first term, Blair remained the unchallenged master of British politics. The opposition, led first by the much-ridiculed William Hague and then by the more- ridiculed Iain Duncan Smith, could not lay a glove on him. By 2003 Labour had still not lost a by- election, a six-year spell unmatched in half a century.
Blair made history, establishing a parliament in Scotland, an assembly in Wales, a mayoralty for London and clearing the House of Lords of hereditary peers. He brought near-tranquillity to Northern Ireland. He led the Nato alliance into its first humanitarian war, in Kosovo.
There was the calamity of the Millennium Dome; the fuel crisis of September 2000; the double resignations of Mandelson; the foot-and-mouth outbreak. But trouble glided off him.
Somehow he had established himself as more than a mere politician. He was leader of the nation, a position from which it is far harder to be dislodged.
Voters had decided in 1997 that after 18 years, Labour would be given a proper turn at government. But it was also a function of a specific event — the death of Princess Diana.
Within hours, the young prime minister stepped forward to anoint her the “people’s princess”. It seems cheesy now but it caught the mood perfectly. In the film The Queen, Alastair Campbell calls Blair the “father of the nation” — and this is not far off.
He seemed to understand what the country was becoming. His predecessor, John Major, was a throwback to a buttoned-up, 1950s Britain; Blair was the open-necked embodiment of the new century. He drank tea from a mug; Major was a cup-and-saucer man.
Just as Harold Wilson sought to ride the spirit of the 1960s by posing with the Beatles, so Blair wanted to be a man of the Nineties and noughties, with Noel Gallagher of Oasis and Chris Evans in for John and Ringo.
Wilson’s government introduced great liberalising measures on divorce, abortion and homosexuality; the first Blair term saw progress on both gay rights and race. For liberals, it was as if the scales, so long tipped one way, were being righted.
The important bad habits were there from the start: the rigid controlling from the centre; the government-by-sofa in which a tight inner circle ruled from the Downing Street den; the obsession with headlines; the profligacy; the intimacy with big business. This was the era of MPs herded like sheep by their pagers; the dominance of Campbell; the target culture that unleashed a thousand consultants setting goals from Whitehall.
It caused sniping in the papers and Labour, but the voters were barely troubled. Blair’s ratings remained stratospheric.
The turning point was September 11 2001. The gut decision Blair took after the attacks, to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the Bush administration, no matter what, would shape his remaining years in office, leading to record-breaking unpopularity and a stubborn public distrust.
Initially, Blair seemed to have repeated his Diana trick, instantly grasping the scale of the event and the likely public reaction. While George W Bush’s initial state was one of stunned panic, he projected calm, finding all the right words. His skill in articulating the United States’s feelings, and putting the US’s case to the world, would be a theme of the years that followed.
When British troops joined the US in invading Afghanistan and destroying the Taliban regime, public opinion was solidly with him. The Tories were once again crushed underfoot.
But, away from view, the march to war in Iraq had begun. The loudest voices in the Bush administration were pushing for military action against Saddam Hussein and, step by step, Blair walked with them. As early as April 2002, visiting Bush on his Texan ranch, he pledged support for war.
For the next three years, his premiership was consumed in frenetic war advocacy, culminating in the notorious “dossier” on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and the fevered quest for United Nations backing.
After the invasion, Blair probably hoped for at least respite. Instead, there were massive civilian deaths, the breakdown of order, human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib — and, most damagingly, no WMD.
A question mark grew over the truthfulness of Blair’s case for war, given human form by the death of former arms inspector David Kelly. The Hutton and Butler inquiries ensured that the second half of Labour’s second term was dominated by a single question: did Blair lead Britain into war on a lie?
It was not just that so many had died, or that he was seen as a poodle of a reviled US president, or that he dismissed the two million protesters who marched on London, or that he ignored the dissent in his own Cabinet, military and intelligence agencies — though these did him enormous harm. The heart of the matter was honesty.
It is a tribute to his political skill that he survived this period, which climaxed in the 2005 “masochism election”. He deliberately faced hostile audiences, who now routinely labelled him “Bliar”. He wanted voters to get it out of their systems, to punish him and move on.
Even before 1997, Labour aides fretted that voters suspected a “phoney Tony” behind the wide smile. After Iraq, the problem of trust became insurmountable. Had Blair argued that Saddam was an evil dictator who had to be deposed, voters might have forgiven the war. But he had not made that case.
When there were no WMD; when it emerged that the intelligence presented to him was not “beyond doubt”, as he had said; and when people understood that the Bush-Blair war decision was taken much earlier than admitted — then the trust was gone.
How had Blair made such a fatal mistake? Part of it was conviction: he had urged action against Saddam in 1999, when Bush was still Texas governor. Part of it might have been a self-belief verging on the messianic, forged in the Kosovo conflict, when Blair came to see foreign policy as an arena for moral purpose and himself as blessed with higher powers of judgement.
He might also have been felled by insufficient understanding of the US. Visiting the US only once before becoming a frontline politician, he may not have grasped just how aberrant and ideologically extreme Bush’s administration was. He underestimated the neoconservative project and his own power to resist it.
One of the paradoxes of the Blair era was that, for all its stress on communication, people often struggled to know what he believed in. His lodestar seems to have been a determination to reverse what he saw as Labour’s follies of the 1980s. The party had been wary of business; he would be close to it. It had been chummy with the unions; he would keep his distance. It was divided; he would rule with iron discipline.
Remembering when Neil Kinnock was lucky to get a brief, frosty audience with Ronald Reagan, he would allow no such estrangement from Washington. He stayed close to Bush, even when the embrace began to suffocate him.
How will the future remember Blair?
The admirers will focus on the first term — the democratic institutions in Cardiff, Edinburgh and London; the Human Rights Act; the economic prosperity (though some may give credit for that to Gordon Brown). Public space — schools, hospitals, libraries — no longer looked on the edge of collapse, as it had under Margaret Thatcher.
Peace in Northern Ireland will be Blair’s greatest monument. The Good Friday agreement showed him at his best — patient, thorough, immersed in the detail; slippery or inspirational when required.
But he will not escape the debit side of the ledger. The centralising instincts left governance impoverished. His endless stream of criminal justice Bills badly eroded civil liberties it took hundreds of years to secure, and which may never be recovered.
Some will lament his failure to reform the parliamentary electoral system, which might have brought a centre-left realignment, ensuring that Labour will not be shut out of power for most of the 21st century, as in the 20th. Others will regret that a man who promised to make his government “whiter than white” allowed sleaze to creep in, or that a leader who vowed to put Britain at the heart of Europe left it ambivalent about its relationship with the continent.
Blair was the best communicator to dominate British politics since Churchill. He broke Labour’s curse, ending its association with failure and defeat. No Labour leader had ever won three terms.
Yet the first line of his obituary will record him as fighting a tragically needless war.
Mary Tudor believed that “when I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart”. In Blair’s, there will also lie a single word — Iraq. — Â