Tony Blair’s unfinished business "I can stop Bresxit"
The Statesman
Thursday November 24 2016
Tony Blair enters the room at his London offices wearing a navy blue crew-neck sweater, an open-neck pale blue shirt, informal dark trousers and dark shoes. This relaxed, casual style is strikingly reminiscent of how he was dressed when he appeared alongside George W Bush during their first meeting at Camp David in February 2001, the beginning of a relationship that set Britain on the road to war in Iraq, the reverberations of which continue to destabilise the world and distort the legacy of Labour’s most electorally successful leader.
Protected by his personal security team, Blair travels incessantly, a habitué of the first-class lounge and the luxury international hotel, and on this damp, early Monday morning, he looks puffy-eyed and tired. He sits to my left, in a stiff-backed chair, leans forward, his legs slightly splayed, and asks for some coffee. There is a monitor mounted on the wall and several small bottles of water in a bucket of ice on a sideboard. The blinds are partially closed, lending our meeting a curious conspiratorial atmosphere.
Neither of us can recall the last time he was interviewed by the New Statesman. In his memoir, A Journey (2010), he wrote of this publication in a sly aside: “It used to be a serious magazine.” (The New Statesman has been resolute in its opposition to the Iraq War and took the side of the Brownites in Labour’s internal conflict.) “Did I say that?” he says, smiling. “It’s much more serious now, really very interesting.”
Blair, who in conversation is personable and animated, is not quite a fugitive in his own land but, because of the Iraq War and his extensive business operations since leaving office, as well as some of the dubious company he has kept among the global plutocracy, he is widely reviled, a fate that frustrates him but to which he is resigned. “I gave up a long time ago, worrying as to whether life’s treated you unfairly,” he says, when I mention his public image in Britain.
But these are turbulent new times and Blair is planning a fresh start and a renewed engagement with British politics. In September, he announced that he would “close down Tony Blair Associates and wind up the Firerush and Windrush structures”, two companies in the group through which the revenues flow. While he will keep some personal consultancies, Blair said that he will concentrate on his charitable and not-for-profit work. “The substantial reserves” – estimated to be around £8m – “that TBA has accumulated will be gifted to the not-for-profit work,” the Office of Tony Blair said in a press statement, which noted that his group of organisations employed 200 people in 20 countries. It was as if Blair was clearing the ground for a comeback. At the age of 63, his journey was far from complete.
The day before our meeting, the Sunday Times reported that Blair was “positioning himself to play a pivotal role in shaping Britain’s Brexit deal”. He was also alleged by unnamed sources to have called Jeremy Corbyn a “nutter” and Theresa May a “lightweight”. The report irritated his aides and Blair alluded to it several times during our conversation, as if eager to correct any misunderstanding.
There has been speculation to the effect that he wants to set up a new political party. He says that he does not. Nor does he want a role in Brexit negotiations, or to lead the resistance to it. But he wants to participate in public life, engaging with new ideas and policy initiatives. He wants to be heard and to influence the wider debate – because, as he told me, the state of Western politics simultaneously dismays and motivates him. His dismay is motivating his re-engagement.
Blair hasn’t met Theresa May since she became Prime Minister but expects to before long. “I didn’t call her that [a lightweight],” he says. “This is completely not my view, by the way. I would not be rude and disrespectful in that way. I’ve not said that about her, I don’t think that about her. No, I think she’s a very solid, sensible person but she’s delivering Brexit. And she has to deliver it. Otherwise she will lose the support of that very strong right-wing media. And they’ll open up a rift in the Tory party again. It will be very difficult for her, and that’s why I don’t disrespect her at all. She’s got a very difficult political hand to play.”
As for Corbyn, he says: “I did not call Jeremy Corbyn ‘a nutter’. I don’t think he’s a nutter. I just think he is someone on the far left of politics and he’s been consistent for the last 35 years that I’ve known him, which is fine. I don’t think that’s an unprincipled position. I just don’t think it’s a position that is either correct or one from which he can win an election. But I may be wrong, so let’s wait and see.”
What is unambiguous is that Blair is determined once again to become an agent of influence in British politics, on issues from Brexit to reviving what he describes as the “progressive centre or centre left”.
His allies call for a new “muscular centre”. They are discussing how best to counter the populist surge on both the radical left and radical right. There are plans for a new think tank or organisation to generate policy initiatives, and for Blair to make more direct interventions. Jim Murphy, a former leader of Scottish Labour, is working as an associate on various projects.
“You’ve got to unpack, first of all, what bits of the so-called liberal agenda have failed and what bits haven’t,” Blair told me. “And you’ve got to learn the right lessons of Brexit, Trump and these popular movements across the Western world. Otherwise you’re going to end up in a situation where you seriously think that the populism of the left is going to defeat the populism of the right. It absolutely won’t.”
Our new emerging political order, he believes, is defined less by a conflict between left and right than by one between “open and closed”, and this is a theme he has been exploring since 2007.
“Open v closed is a really important debate today, because in a curious way the populism of the left and the populism of the right – at a certain point they meet each other. They tend to be isolationist. OK, the left is more anti-business, the right is more anti-immigrant, but they tend to be protectionist and they have an attitude to the process of globalisation that says this is a policy that is given by government and we can stop it and should stop it. Whereas my view about globalisation is that it’s a force essentially driven by people, by technological change, by the way the world has opened up. You’re not going to reverse that. The question is: how do we make that just and fair? That is the big question of our times. The centre left does not provide an answer to that, and we can and should.”
He does not want Labour to split, though he feels that the party is in a much weaker position than it was even in the 1980s. “It’s a tough business . . . The leadership has been captured by the far left for the first time in the party’s history, so we have to see. I hope that the Labour Party realises that it has a historic duty to try to represent people in this country who need our representation desperately. I hope it rediscovers the fact that the government that I led and that Gordon Brown led actually did a huge amount for the people who were left behind by the policies of the previous Conservative government.”
Blair knows that he is unpopular, especially with the left, and why. But does he feel misunderstood?
“Well, I think there was huge misunderstanding of what we were about and why we were about it. That’s partly one of the reasons I’m changing everything.”
Changing everything: the phrase is resonant and refers not only to Blair’s decision to close down most of his commercial and business interests, but also to his renewed sense of political engagement. “What I’m doing is to spend more time not in the front line of politics, because I have no intention of going back to the front line of politics, to correct another misunderstanding . . . but in trying to create the space for a political debate about where modern Western democracies go and where the progressive forces particularly find their place . . . I’m dismayed by the state of Western politics, but also incredibly motivated by it. I think in Britain today, you’ve got millions of effectively politically homeless people.”
He tilts forward. His voice quickens even as his body language betrays frustration. “I can’t come into front-line politics. There’s just too much hostility, and also there are elements of the media who would literally move to destroy mode if I tried to do that . . .”
So what can he do? Is there someone in whom he can invest his hopes? He says that his first priority is to “build a platform” that will allow people to debate ideas and formulate solutions, without the abuse or vilification that has become so prevalent in modern politics. “The best thing I can do is use [my] long experience, not just as prime minister – I’ve learned a huge amount being out in the world these past nine or ten years . . .”
The platform will be driven by technology. “One advantage of today’s social media is that you can build networks. Movements can begin at scale and build speed quickly. You’re not going to relate the answers to the challenges that we face by a Twitter exchange, so what I’m interested in doing is asking: what are the types of ideas that we should be taking forward? How do we provide a service to people who are in the front line of politics, so that we can provide some thinking and some ideas? The thing that’s really tragic about politics today is that the best ideas about politics aren’t in politics. I find the ideas are much more interesting in the technology sector, much more interesting ideas about how you change the world.”
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Tony Blair believes that Brexit can be halted. “It can be stopped if the British people decide that, having seen what it means, the pain-gain cost-benefit analysis doesn’t stack up. And that can happen in one of two ways. I’m not saying it will [be stopped], by the way, but it could. I’m just saying: until you see what it means, how do you know?”
Attempting to secure access to the single market will be the defining negotiation. “Either you get maximum access to the single market – in which case you’ll end up accepting a significant number of the rules on immigration, on payment into the budget, on the European Court’s jurisdiction. People may then say, ‘Well, hang on, why are we leaving then?’ Or alternatively, you’ll be out of the single market and the economic pain may be very great, because beyond doubt if you do that you’ll have years, maybe a decade, of economic restructuring.”
But, I suggest, the Remain side made numberless dire economic forecasts during the long, dispiriting referendum campaign and they were ignored. The public understands well enough the risks of Brexit.
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