Tom Bower is, as the veteran political commentator Michael White recently remarked, ‘The Carlos the Jackal of contemporary biography’. To paraphrase White, even Nelson Mandela or the Virgin Mary would have reason to fear an examination of their lives by Bower. This being so it was never very likely that so controversial a figure as Tony Blair would emerge alive from the Bower treatment and the author does not disappoint.
The result is a 600-page unrelenting, forensic monstering. Few, if any, successes are acknowledged. Those that are incontrovertible are either overlooked, attributed to the previous Tory administration or referred to in passing. The worst possible construction is put on just about every decision and every statistic. Issue by issue Blair’s premiership is taken apart and trashed. All motives are assumed to be of the worst. The possibility of an honest mistake is rarely considered. Bower does not do nuance.
Inevitably the book has been serialised in the Daily Mail. A flavour of the Bower approach may be gleaned from the following Mail headline which appeared over one of the early extracts, ‘Conman Blair’s cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2 million migrants…’ Of course one should never judge a book by a Mail headline, but in this case it does pretty much reflect the content.
Not that there isn’t case to be answered. To be sure, there is. The dysfunctional relationship between Blair and his chancellor, Gordon Brown, undoubtedly hobbled his ability to govern effectively. Blair’s decision to ally the UK umbilically to the worst American president in living memory was a catastrophe and sadly has cast a shadow over his entire legacy. Likewise, his post-retirement money-making and hob-nobbing with dictators has without doubt diminished his standing.
The author claims to have interviewed over 180 people, including many key players in the events recounted. Those who declined to co-operate (perhaps because they can see where the author is coming from) he dismisses as ‘irrelevant’. So far as the politicians are concerned there is a rich treasure trove of memoirs to draw upon and very little to say that is new. Where he does break new ground, however, is in his interviews with top civil servants - including three former Cabinet secretaries - and senior military officers.
As regards Iraq, one of the main complaints from the officials is that they were systematically side-lined and excluded from key discussions. One result was that anyone who might have asked awkward questions or who questioned the wisdom or legality of the enterprise was kept out of the loop. Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s chief of staff, is largely blamed for this. The military complain (as they do perennially) of a shortage of resources, an absence of clear instructions far enough in advance to enable them adequately to plan and (in both Iraq and Afghanistan) a lack of definable goals.
As others have alleged, Bower’s thesis is that Blair was committed all along to invading Iraq, but didn’t want to admit it until the last possible moment in order to give the appearance of considering all options. I don’t quite buy this. During the period in question I took part in almost weekly meetings with the prime minister at which Iraq was frequently discussed. My impression was that until the last moment Blair was hoping against hope that, faced with prospect of annihilation, the Iraqi regime would either collapse or come clean about its chemical and biological weapons which, no one (not even Bower) doubted that they possessed. The one charge that Bower does not make against Blair is to suggest that he lied over the existence of WMD (weapons of mass destruction). Responsibility for that is rightly pinned squarely on the intelligence chiefs, Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett who simply told their masters what they wanted to hear. In the circumstances, they are lucky to have got off so lightly.
On immigration Bower’s charge is that the Labour government was responsible for the rapid increase in inward migration that occurred in the late 1990s by relaxing restraints on the admission of overseas spouses, family re-unification and by allowing early entry for migrants from eastern Europe. As with much of what he asserts, there is a large grain of truth in this, but he takes little or no account of other factors such as the fall of the Berlin wall, the rise of the failed state, the possibility that much of the inward migration from the EU has proved beneficial or the fact that Labour’s inheritance from the Tories included a dysfunctional system for processing asylum applications which took years to rectify.
On education and the health, Bower argues that much of Labour’s increased investment was absorbed by higher wagers for teachers, nurses and doctors without any corresponding increase in productivity. Also that the initial reluctance of both the government and officials (especially in the National Health Service) to embrace market mechanisms fatally hobbled government efforts to improve results. Again, there is some truth in this but it overlooks the possibility that, after years in which the public sector had been starved of investment, an increase in the wages of key workers was perhaps desirable. It also overlooks the fact that, slowly and after many false starts, standards in many parts of the public sector did improve, in some cases dramatically. All this against a background of the longest continuous period of economic growth on record which Bower, inevitably, attributes to the previous Tory administration.
As this long litany of alleged failure wore on, without a glimmer of light, I began to wonder how the author was going to deal with peace in Ireland, which surely ought to form part of any balanced assessment of Blair’s career. Eventually, about two-thirds of the way through, curiosity got the better of me and I looked up Ireland in the index. It’s not there. I tried ‘IRA’. Not there either. Under ‘Ulster’ there are just five page references, none relating the peace process. The omission is symptomatic of Bower’s approach. Failure is highlighted. Success ignored. Shades of grey absent.
Although I acknowledge the failures and disappointments of the Blair years, I do not buy the thesis that it was all a waste of time. For 23 years I represented one of the poorest areas of the UK and I can say, hand on heart, that the lives of my least prosperous constituents improved significantly for the better. In some parts of Sunderland, when the Tories left office, civilised life had collapsed to such an extent that entire estates had been abandoned and demolished. By the time Labour left office most of the mess had been cleared up. The minimum wage, tax credits (especially those directed at the poorest pensioners), the extension of nursery education, programmes like Sure Start did make a difference.
The waiting list for a hip operation at Sunderland general Hospital was up to two years when Blair took office, by the time I retired in 2010 it was down to 18 weeks and falling. No less than 17 Sunderland schools were rebuilt, many with state of the art facilities, during the Labour era. To take but one example, in 1997 at Sandhill View School in my constituency less than ten percent of children were leaving with the minimal five A to Cs at GCSE. When I last inquired, the figure was over 70 percent. If that ain’t a change for the better, what is?
If the author had been willing to extend his area of research beyond the gentlemen’s clubs of Whitehall, he might have noticed some of this.
Chris Mullin is the author of three best-selling volumes of diaries documenting the rise and fall of New Labour. He was MP for Sunderland South from 1987 to 2010.
