Alongside the Oscar-winning performance by Helen Mirren, The Queen included cameo performances depicting the relationship between Tony Blair and his then-trusted lieutenant, Alastair Campbell. Unlike Mirren’s character, they were hopelessly implausible for one simple reason — the conspicuous absence of any profanity. British politicians have a great fondness for swearing — perhaps, because it adds a streetwise edge to their persona.
In exactly a month Blair will have left 10 Downing Street and Campbell’s long-awaited diaries will have hit the bookshops. The big story in London this week has not been Blair’s grand African farewell tour, but the revelation that Campbell has bowed to pressure from his former boss and excised from his manuscript all of the Anglo-Saxon words beginning with F and C, to which Blair is so partial.
To a large degree, this sums Blair up: his determination, to the bitter end, to put appearances before truth. And yet, while he will be remembered as the prime minister who relied heavily on his intuitive and agile powers of communication, rather than any deep intellect, there is more to the man than spin.
His concern about the colourful language in Campbell’s journal derives more than anything from his Christian faith. As the former editor of the New Statesman, Peter Wilby, noted in a recent review of the 11 Blair biographies, ”anyone who writes about Blair is forced to the reluctant conclusion that what is really at the core of him is Christianity”.
This, in turn, is the key to understanding Blair’s foreign policy and his approach to Africa. In Blair — probably the best and certainly the most comprehensive and least polemic of the biographies — Anthony Seldon puts it crisply: ”Blair conceptualises the world as a struggle between good and evil.”
The predominant aphorism used to be ”foreign policy begins at home”. It may now require revision: for leaders such as Blair and President Thabo Mbeki, the frustrations of contemporary domestic policy drive them to seek solace in painting on the larger canvas of international affairs, where the colours are more black and white and less shades of grey. As another biographer, Simon Jenkins, argues, to Blair foreign affairs provides a ”satisfying theatre of power where orders are obeyed and things happen”.
The other key to understanding Blair is to remember that politically he has no roots to speak of — either family or personal. Even at Oxford, he showed only passing interest in politics, and joined the Labour Party much later. He won the leadership in 1994 with a determination to reform the party, which he did, but with only domestic policy thoughts in his head.
Yet, within two years of coming into office, Blair’s interest in international affairs and the notion of liberal interventionism in particular, began to dominate his attention.
Kosovo was the watershed; he pressed for military action as a matter of principle. In Blair’s Wars, John Kampfer records how Blair’s sense of outrage over Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic led him to rapidly conjure a philosophy that Blair could ”call his own”, based on ”a new doctrine of international community”.
It may have been policymaking on the hoof, but it resulted in a set of criteria to justify intervention. With greater political skill it could have been the springboard for a profound shift in international law and practice — but it now lies buried under the bloody mess of Iraq and Britain’s unconditional support for the invasion.
This is both the paradox and the tragedy of the unfulfilled Blair legacy. Despite the febrile predilection for spin over substance at home, the nervous apprehension about upsetting Middle England, and his consequent slavishness to its interests that has resulted in Britain being an even more unequal society than when Labour came into office, there is a fundamental principledness about Blair’s approach to foreign policy.
Because of Blair’s lack of political roots he has nonetheless relied too heavily on his belief in his own powers of persuasion, buoyed by his outstanding success in mediating the Good Friday agreement in Ireland.
When he talks about Africa in private he takes on a boy scout’s sense of wide-eyed enthusiasm for the challenge. He genuinely does care about the problems of the continent and he is immensely proud of the Commission for Africa report. His administration doubled the development aid budget.
But Blair failed to control Britain’s arms sales and neglected to ensure that justice for the Palestinians, an historic commitment of Labour’s, and the one thing that could have justified his Middle East policy, remained a primary objective.
Like Jimmy Carter, it may be that his most valuable contribution may come out of office. The Blair Foundation is to focus on issues of inter-faith community. Sadly, however, the Iraq disaster is likely to undermine that too, driving him instead to the lucrative United States lecture circuit and the celebrity life that panders to his underlying vanity as much as it matches the superficial sheen that adheres to much of modern British culture.