Early in The Tony Blair Story (Channel 4, 9pm, Tues/Wed/Thurs), the former UK prime minister expresses surprise that anyone would want to make a documentary about him. But the cruel truth is 2026 is the perfect moment to look back at the era of Blair, as it becomes ever more apparent that everything he worked towards in his political life lies in ruins.
War in Europe, the British economy in a post-Brexit doom loop, the “special relationship” between the US and Britain reduced to an abusive bad romance. If the story of the UK’s post-Blair years could be summed up in musical form, it would have the title “Things Can Only Get Worse”.
Blair says he does not believe in psychoanalysis, and you can sense the frustration of film-maker Michael Waldman as he pushes the political manifestation of the Cool Britannia 1990s to look inward and reflect on the mistakes he made in office. The most grievous of those errors, many would say, was the Iraq War, yet Blair is not for turning.
“Would it be better if Saddam [Hussein] and his two sons were still in power?” he wonders. “I can be sorry about lots of things; there’s no point carrying on trying to get me to see a different point of view from the one I had at the time.”
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He says this with the fervency of a true believer, and journalist and author Robert Harris, who shadowed Blair during his 1997 election win, identifies in him a “Manichaean sense of good and evil” rooted in his Christian faith. He and others see in Blair a skilled and principled leader who became consumed by ego and a sense of manifest destiny – especially after a successful Nato intervention in Kosovo confirmed, to Blair at least, that military might can be a force for good.
What Blair had become blinded to was the fact that the world isn’t cleanly divided between black and white, and to Harris, “this seemed to be a dangerous way for anyone to live their life ... but for politicians, it is particularly dangerous”.
[ Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson will go down in history as crawlers and creepsOpens in new window ]
Friends and foes line up to reflect on Blair and his legacy across three absorbing episodes – though notable omissions include Bertie Ahern, whose insights into Blair’s contribution to the peace process are not sought.
The documentary does repeat the old trope of the Troubles being a “cycle of sectarian violence”, where to most Irish people they were plainly the death rattle of British colonialism on the island. But there is an amusing anecdote from Blair’s son, Euan – who recalls Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness taking a break from thrashing out the Belfast Agreement with Blair at 10 Downing Street and receiving an impromptu lesson from Euan on how to flip a skateboard.
Blair ultimately emerges from this impressively wide-ranging documentary as a hollowed-out individual, brimming still with charm yet blank behind the eyes. There are no regrets about Iraq, nor does he pause to reflect on how much of his legacy has turned to ashes, or whether he might not bear some responsibility. The portrait is of a politician who became a master of spin and sleight of hand but who, in the end, was largely lying to himself.
