POLITICS: MICHAEL McDOWELLreviews A Journey,By Tony Blair, Hutchinson, pp 718, £25
PERPLEXING. That’s the only word I can find to sum up Tony Blair’s immensely readable political memoir. Let me say at the outset that Ireland owes Tony Blair a huge debt of gratitude for the commitment he made – and delivered on – to bring about the settlement of the Troubles. That sounds almost cliched, but it understates his extraordinary personal, political and emotional devotion to Ireland, the Irish and their relationships with each other and with Britain. It was not simply a matter of effort; it was also a matter of determination to resolve the underlying issues.
No other British prime minister has come within shouting distance of Blair’s commitment to Ireland. Lengthy summits at Stormont, Hillsborough, Weston Park, Leeds Castle and St Andrews, plus multiple meetings in Dublin, Belfast and London, were but the visible tip of a huge volume of political and diplomatic activity aimed at a resolution of the problems that beset Northern Ireland.
As a participant in much of that activity from 1999 to 2007, I know how much we collectively owe Tony Blair for the successful outcome. I like and admire him. And Ireland certainly features, along with his electoral successes, among the high points in his account of his tenure at No 10.
Why, then, perplexing?
A Journeygenuinely seems to be written by Blair and not by a ghostwriter. This is especially noteworthy to anyone who has seen Roman Polanski's film The Ghost Writer, based on Robert Harris's political thriller, who might have expected a Blair memoir published in comparatively short order and running to nearly 700 pages to have been written by somebody else. The language throughout is totallyBlair. I can hear him speak its words as though we were back sitting in his study at Downing Street.
The perplexing part as far as I am concerned is that Blair in the book seems to be exactlythe Blair I knew. I had expected that, once freed from the role of PM and free to speak his inner convictions, a much more complex, more multidimensional, more judgmental Blair would emerge in the pages of his memoirs and that there would at least be some momentary glimpses of deeper, darker and visceral recesses of his personality. That doesn't happen. But I'm not at all disappointed – just, perhaps, surprised that appearances did not conceal any different side to the decent man I met and dealt with.
Blair, in my view, is instinctively decent, mild-mannered, polite and very much conscious of and concerned with how he is perceived. He is non-confrontational, sometimes to a fault. These features of his personality have been wrongly and unfairly described by his detractors as phoney, superficial, effeminate or obsessed with the media – Private Eye'svicar of St Albion's.
I believe that he remains surprised by, and grateful for, the remarkable political opportunity that came his way, which he grasped with both hands. From MP with no ministerial experience to PM in one leap! There is a sense of humility and bafflement in his description of his political success, much like an underestimated rugby player who gathers a loose ball, jinks through the opposition, runs the length of the field and scores: “Did that really happen to me?”
While instinctively averse to confrontation, Blair was no coward. Faced with a smouldering, resentful and politically dangerous Gordon Brown, he holds face-to-face meetings with him but does not allow them to develop into showdowns. He faces up to adversaries but doesn’t face them down. Unlike Brown, Blair understands that, in our media-driven politics, perception is almost everything.
If Ireland and his electoral successes buoy him up, his responsibility for Iraq weighs him down. If “stretching the truth beyond breaking point” helped in Northern Ireland, I think it gravely damaged Blair in relation to Iraq. His reliance on a report by Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector, to defend the invasion fails to deal with the ultimate truth: Blix opposed the invasion, and there were no weapons of mass destruction.
A Journeymakes clear that, before the invasion, Blair became emotionally wedded to the notion that, in the aftermath of 9/11, "America's fight against terrorism had become everybody's fight". He said so in New York as he stood beside Mayor Rudy Giuliani. And it now appears that the raw emotion of 9/11 deeply affected Blair, swaying him into what would become a largely uncritical, deferential and even submissive attitude towards the administration of George W Bush.
The problem is that the very phrase “war on terror” is flawed and phoney – and replete with dangers that led straight to water-boarding and Guantánamo. Blair fails to address the distorting effect of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, on US perceptions of the Middle East and on relations with the Islamic world. He also expressly discounts the neocons, either as a label or as a political reality.
Joining with the Bush invasion of Iraq by stretching the meaning of UN resolutions was wrong legally and politically, especially when the facts were being stretched beyond breaking point to create a pretext based on the imminent threat of Saddam’s WMDs. In the end he is reluctantly pushed back on to regime change as his real, ex-post justification.
I don’t think Bush would or could have invaded Iraq without British participation. And Blair’s description of his own belated, weak and wholly inadequate efforts to persuade the Bush administration of the need to bring about a just settlement in the Arab-Israeli question as part of a balanced western approach to the Islamic world amounts to a frank admission that he allowed the UK to be sucked into the Rumsfeld-Bush mindset and to become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. That said, Tony Blair isn’t a war criminal; Saddam certainly was.
A Journeyis almost totally uncritical of others – not a bad trait. Praise is lavished while condemnation is spared. So one is left wondering whether Blair has written this book with a closer eye to the rest of his career than to vindication of his past. Certainly, in some cases he praises people about whom I know he held some reservations.
He half defends his publicly held position that Gerry Adams was not in effective control of the IRA. I was quite satisfied, on the basis of consistent reliable information, that the opposite was true.
I remember vividly being asked by Adams, in the margins of a Downing Street meeting, to sit down with him on the stairs of No 10. I did so, wondering what was coming next. Adams began to berate me about the suggestion that the IRA was involved in ongoing criminality. I, of course, stuck to my guns without giving chapter and verse, based on intelligence, about their crime network and money laundering. This was before the Northern Bank robbery, needless to say.
As things were hotting up, Cherie Blair came home, pushing baby Leo in a buggy festooned with shopping. Quick as a flash, Adams broke off, jumped up and embraced Cherie with a birdie on each cheek. I was left shaking my head in disbelief.
Blair insisted on TV recently that Adams and Brown are still his friends. Another case of stretching the truth beyond breaking point?
Perplexing, indeed.
Michael McDowell is a senior counsel, and former tánaiste and attorney general
