I never met Tony Blair but, a few years ago, had occasion to write to him seeking help on behalf of a certain subject of Her Majesty who was experiencing difficulty with one of the institutions of the British state. I didn't expect much, but not only did I receive a signed acknowledgment from the prime minister, but the institution in question immediately began to alter its behaviour, John Waterssays.
Blair didn't have to do this, but he did it. Some will say this kind of thing has nothing to do with politics - is in fact damaging to politics. I could not agree less. Helping people is the essence of politics. If a politician is not there for the little things, he is unlikely to be there for the big ones.
This is but one tiny witness from a glittering decade as prime minister of the UK. This past week of his departure, we have heard much about Iraq being the defining moment of his career. Why not Ireland? Why not Kosovo, the most exemplary episode of leadership in our time? When he was elected leader of the Labour Party 13 years ago, I greeted that event as among the most significant of the age. I have been wrong about many things, but not this. Blair was head and torso above all of his contemporaries. He was a true leader of a representative democracy in that, having obtained his mandate (and woh! what mandates!) he invested in the responsibility thus devolved to him not his sense of what might be popular but what his conscience told him was right.
So it was with Iraq. The situation there since the invasion of 2003 has gone from bad to appalling, but that should not be the measure of the morality of the cause. Blair was motivated by a desire to rid the world of one of its ugliest dictatorships at a time when increasing regional volatility might have delivered Iraq into the hands of even more sinister forces than Saddam. At the time, virtually everybody believed that Iraq had some form of major weapons programme, including the late Dr David Kelly, whose suicide was the focus of the Hutton inquiry, and who had come to know at least as much about Iraq's arms programmes as anyone else. Kelly, while criticising how the evidence was being presented by the government, also maintained the weapons were so well hidden that they would be almost impossible to find. The worst that can be said about Blair is that he exaggerated the danger to win public support, presenting a worst case scenario that was subsequently shown to be mistaken.
The story of Blair and Iraq is the story of what sometimes happens when utopianism hits reality. Blair was the first British politician to embody the values of the 1960s and, like Bill Clinton, was engaged in a tightrope walk between idealism and responsibility.
In another context, Blair's first term was dominated by talk of a "third way" between socialism and the market, a kind of communitarian fudge that never acquired real substance. But, in a more general sense, both Blair and his admirers sought, from the beginning of his first term, a much more generalised third option - a way of evading the hard decisions that come with responsibility, as Clinton managed to do for two full terms. On September 11th 2001, Blair understood that fudge was no longer enough. He was the prime minister of the United Kingdom, charged with the welfare and safety of its citizens.
He was one of the key leaders of Western society and he had no choice but to take the lonely road of leadership. There was no third way. With Clinton, idealism became cynicism; with Blair courage.
I find it useful, when contemplating the actions of a politician, to put myself in his or her shoes. What would I do, faced with the same situation? When I apply this to Blair and Iraq, it emerges from the murk of his dilemma that the only choice was between doing what he did and engaging in a protracted evasion of reality. The latter, of course, is what the entirety of the liberal West wished him to do: to avoid clear-cut action, to make grand speeches and empty gestures, to prolong their sense of cossetted invulnerability and vindicate their illusory belief in vapid slogans of the 1960s. But Blair was too principled for that.
Britain became great in the time of Tony Blair. I spent a lot of time in London around the beginning of his premiership and will never forget the charge he brought to public life and to the public square there. After 800 years of hatred, he changed the relationship between Ireland and Britain in a way that seems too good to be true, but actually is the kind of thing that would have happened long ago if we'd had leaders of his calibre before.
He was truly great and it is a measure of the seriousness of our continuing self-delusion that we are unable to see this clearly.