2 October, John Rentoul, 'Tony in 2025: Blair as History'.

The author of two acclaimed biographies of Tony Blair, John Rentoul of The Independent on Sunday gave a lecture to the Mile End Group on the subject 'Tony in 2025: Blair as History'. The respondents were Professor Dennis Kavanagh, and Professor David Marquand. The lecture marked the beginning of 'The Blair Government' History course at Queen Mary. Images and a transcript can be found below:

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Podcast

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Transcript

Since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister the country has gone to the dogs. The weather has been dull and grey; the economy has gone horribly wrong; and you just cannot get anyone to uphold traditional academic standards. Jon Davis and I, for example, have been hoping that someone would criticise the Blair Government course that we are teaching at Queen Mary this year. Confident of its merits, we wanted to sharpen our arguments in debate. We think it is a unique academic endeavour, bringing contemporary History right up to date, we said. So contemporary that you were living through it only 15 months ago. Great idea, everyone said. Brilliant. I’d love to come and talk to your students. Which is good, of course. But you’re not all supposed to say that. Some of you are supposed to say: Hold on a minute. Or hold on a year, a decade, 30 years. You can’t do this. Some of you, at least, are supposed to come over all Chou en Lai and say, Blair? French Revolution? Too early to tell. But no. Not a peep. Medievalists said it wasn’t their period, but object to the principle? No chance.


So, for the purposes of this lecture, I have had to resort to that refuge of the cavalier debater, the straw man. In order to have someone to argue against, I have brought my friend with me. Allow me to introduce Professor Straw. He says that History with a capital H can’t be the stuff that was in the newspapers 15 months ago and which is still being argued over in the newspapers today.
He says that History with a capital H needs Perspective with a capital P. For authentic historical judgement, he says, you need the Passage of Time. For two reasons. One, he says, you cannot judge the effect of many decisions for years or decades afterwards. He gives two examples: in foreign policy, the invasion of Iraq; in domestic policy, the creation of academy schools. In both cases it could be argued that it would be premature to reach any kind of historical verdict until at least another decade has passed.

The second reason is that you need access to confidential papers. We know that the 30-year rule is currently being reviewed – one of Gordon Brown’s better jokes – by Paul Dacre, the editor of The Daily Mail. The rule has already been eroded by the practice of publishing near-contemporary memoirs. Philip Gould, Ivor Richard, Lance Price, Geoffrey Robinson, Christopher Meyer and Derek Scott published theirs while Blair was still in office, although Lord Richard – whose account of the Blair Cabinet was the first, in 1999 – cheated slightly: it his wife, Janet Jones, who wrote the book. Alastair Campbell waited 12 days after Blair had stood down to publish the expurgated edition of his Diaries. Since then we have had Jonathan Powell, Michael Levy, John Prescott and Cherie. But, Professor Straw will say, we need the Cabinet papers. We need all the things that are meat and drink to the Mile End Group and to Peter Hennessy: the MISC this and the GEN that; the retired civil servants; the politicians in whom ambition no longer shines its bright and biased light. And I would say that Professor Straw is right about one big thing, which is that, until Gordon Brown ceases to be Prime Minister, we are all hampered in our attempts to assess the truth of the Blair-Brown relationship, so central to understanding and judging the Blair Government.

But the whole point about the Mile End Group is that it is constantly trying to push the boundary of serious history up as close as possible to the present day. With some success. According to Andrew Marr, Queen Mary has become a “seething hotbed of popular and contemporary history”. He said: “I’ve been struck by the quality and quantity of ‘Hennessy school’ historians emerging, as compared, say, with what is currently happening in Oxford and Cambridge."

Of course, some subjects are difficult to assess without the full papers, and without the longer view, but that does not mean that there is no point in trying. In any case, the very idea of primary sources is changing before our eyes. Another thing that Professor Straw looks upon disapprovingly is the internet. If I could digress briefly here, I will replace him with Professor Tara Brabazon, who I think is a real person, a professor of Media Studies at Brighton University, who recently argued that Google was "white bread for the mind". She does not allow her students to use Google or Wikipedia. For their work for her they are allowed to use only her handouts. This prompts two thoughts. How does she stop them using Google? And, Come in number 42, this is your home planet calling. I mean, Wikipedia we all know about. It is not 100 per cent reliable. But surely we should think of it as 97 per cent full rather than as 3 per cent empty? As for Google. Being against Google is like being against libraries. Or librarians. Or like being opposed to the practice of storing books in alphabetical order so that you can find the ones you are looking for. For our Blair Government course, Jon and I are taking the diametrically opposite approach. We expect our students to use the vast mind-expanding opportunities of computers to transform expectations of how much they can learn and understand.

And Tony Blair was the first British prime minister to govern entirely in the internet age. In order to read contemporary reporting of it, you do not need to travel to Colindale or even to know what a microfiche is. In future, students will think it strange that archivists in the 20th century stored information in plankton. All of the official public documents of the Blair Government are on the web. All the minutes of all the Lobby briefings, for example, since they became “on the record” in 2000, are retained on the Downing Street website – although it was revamped in July by Gordon Brown’s people and so the Blair Archive comes up Error 404 File Not Found. But it is still there: you just have to show a little of the life skills that Professor Brabazon thinks are junk food for the brain.

But back to Professor Straw. He thinks that long years must elapse before wisdom is attained. We are all tempted by that view whenever we have another birthday. But there are advantages, too, to immediacy. When Jon and I were discussing the Blair Government course with Professor Hennessy, he said something that stuck in my mind. Imagine if there had been something like the Mile End Group in 1951, he said, so that we could have obtained first-hand accounts of the Attlee Government from its leading members while their memories were fresh and their minds still racing with the furies and controversies that had animated them. My point is that the recollections in the tranquillity of retirement are just as likely to be biased as those fresh from the battlefield. A different kind of bias, maybe. The further away from the fighting, the greater the tendency to impose self-justifying simplifications on the story, as anyone who has read Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs and compared them with John Campbell’s brilliant history will know. The job of a good historian is always to balance different kinds of bias and adjust for them.

This was a debate that flared briefly in the United States when Scott McClellan, who was George Bush’s press secretary, published his memoir in May this year. He was criticised, as many of Blair’s intimates have been, for betraying confidences by going into print while the body of the main subject was not only still warm but still governing. William Safire, the Grand Old Man of American political journalism, would have none of it. “The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony,” he said. Peggy Noonan, the great speechwriter and memoirist of the Reagan presidency, agreed: “History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. ‘I was there, this is what I saw.’ History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth. In that sense one should always say of memoirs of those who hold or have held power: More, please.”


There is no reason, I agree, why History – with a capital H – shouldn’t start that sifting process straight away. Yes, of course, that means that it shades into journalism, but it is impossible to police the demarcation line between the two, especially as good journalism and good history are trying to do similar things: trying through a constantly revisable narrative to get ever closer to what Peggy Noonan calls “something approximating truth”.

There is a Polish proverb: “Only the future is certain. The past is always changing.” (Like most so-called Polish proverbs I suspect it isn’t Polish at all but an Albanian proverb made up by Miles Kington, late of The Independent.) And perceptions of the Blair Government have already changed dramatically since 27 June 2007, when I sat in a makeshift tent on the patch of grass outside the Palace of Westminster that TV crews use for the backdrop of Big Ben. I was there with Kenneth Morgan, who had just – under protest – written a biography of Michael Foot, and we were taking it in turns to do interviews about Blair’s place in history with hundreds of different BBC outlets, ITV, Channel Four News, Americans, Australians, Japanese, Al-Jazeera English and Abu Dhabi TV. Professor Morgan and I took part in a debate on BBC Radio Wales, I think, in which he admitted that Blair had been an exceptional politician but regretted mournfully that he had not been more like John Smith, Clement Attlee and Keir Hardie. I even did an interview with Jon Gaunt, the Sun’s shock-jock, on TalkSport radio which went along the lines of: That Tony Blair, he was a plonker, wasn’t he? Well, not really, I think he was on balance a good prime minister and had some remarkable achievements to his name. Such as? Northern Ireland – Yeah, granted, but apart from that …

Since then, of course, it has become a little harder to gain support for the proposition that Tony Blair was a deadweight bloodsucking parasite that dragged down a Labour Party that would rise up and take its natural place in the nation’s affections as soon as he were disposed of – although I did hear Clare Short make almost precisely that argument on the radio a couple of weeks ago. Already, we have a clearer view of how exceptional Blair was as a prime minister. And the view of him will go on changing. Look at how attitudes to the Thatcher Government have changed. There are still some people – even some historians, judging by those best prime minister polls of academics that the BBC carries out every few years – that refuse to accept that she did anything good at all. But most people, looking back to the end of her time 18 years ago, accept that she did much that was necessary, brave and right in reforming the British economy, and in standing up to the Soviet threat.

On a personal note, I was with the Maggie Out lot. My first job in political journalism was on the New Statesman, where I wrote up Tam Dalyell’s campaign to expose her lies over the sinking of the Belgrano in the Falklands war. In fact, the only time I met Mrs Thatcher was when I literally bumped into her in the House of Commons as Tam was marching me to the Vote Office. (She was very small.) Tam wanted to get the clerk of the Vote Office to explain to me why he wasn’t allowed to ask any more parliamentary questions about the Belgrano. Great passions were spent on it, but I now realise that Tam and I were completely wrong. The commander of the ship was interviewed five years ago and said that his purpose at the time was to attack British ships, so I accept now that the sinking was quite justified and all that Clive Ponting business was irrelevant.

That may sound like an argument Professor Straw might make against ultra-contemporary history, but like Benjamin Zander, the conductor who taught his players not to swear when they made a mistake but to say, “how fascinating”, I intend to learn from my mistake.

The great thing about history is that it is dynamic. As an undergraduate, the most exciting bit for me was the revisionism coursing through the history of the English Civil War as we dumped all that Marxist class analysis and realised that when people said they were motivated by religion, they meant it. As history speeds up, we can get our revisionism in early. There is no need to wait – we can start revising now.

My defence of the Blair Government course is that there is no cut-off point for contemporary history. We can and should try to gain the perspective that the passage of time will bring from where we are now. We will not succeed completely, of course, but the effort, and the discipline in trying to apply historical method to even the most recent history, is, I believe, immensely worthwhile. It was possible, in the years after Thatcher’s fall, to make out the main features of her place in history. Yes, we had to wait 22 months for the ERM crisis, which was an important part of the legacy. Although in fact the arguments about the merits of the decision to join the ERM at that particular rate were already aired and could already have been judged without reference to the crisis of the devaluation. Much of the story that is told now could have been told at the time if the Mile End Group had convened to tell it.


That is why I have taken 2025 as my vantage point for this lecture. It is 18 years since Margaret Thatcher was pushed out, and, if we are now reaching a balanced, rounded, historical view of her premiership, the question is: How will Blair be seen 18 years after he was pushed out? Which takes us to 2025. I believe that we should aspire now, already, to the same quality of verdict on the Blair Government that we now possess on the Thatcher administration.

I think we can already see the outlines. There is one big event after Blair’s departure, comparable to the ERM crisis, that will colour his legacy, and that is the dismal humiliation of his successor. We do not know exactly how that will end. Gordon Brown may still be Prime Minister at the time of the next election, in which case he seems likely to lead Labour to a calamitous defeat. Or he may, like Thatcher and Blair, be forced out by a party unwilling to put that proposition to the test. Either way, it won’t reflect well on Blair. At a superficial level, the unforced errors of his successor might make him look good, but deeper down they pose awkward questions about his judgement and the condition in which he left his party. So, even without knowing how that part of the story ends, we should be able to make a provisional assessment – of a historical rather than a journalistic or polemical kind.

Let us imagine ourselves into the perspective of 2025, when I’ll be 66 and my undergraduate class will be in their late 30s and preparing to rule the world. Look back to the Blair decade that ended 18 years ago. It won’t take a moment, because you can access the entire internet by thought transfer to the inside of your eyelids. Just look up the Mile End Institute for Blair Studies, one of the biggest and most successful of the internet-based universities, which is one of the fashionable market stocks of recent years. Switch on the lecture being delivered by one of the students here today who is now professor of ancient contemporary history, and listen to it through the Bluetooth implant in your inner ear. I can tell you now, in 2008, what is not going to be in that lecture.

One: the Millennium Bug taskforce. Blair gave a speech in March 1998 announcing the recruitment of “an army of 20,000 bug busters” by April 1999. “I’m no information technology expert,” he said. “But I know that, unless we act, the consequences of the Millennium Bug could be severe.” How did he know? “Many business leaders are warning …” Two: the Roy Jenkins report on electoral reform, which Blair published in October 1998 and which Jenkins said he was determined would not sit on a shelf gathering dust. Well, I have a dead tree edition of it on my shelf. It is dusty. Three: the reasons why Stephen Byers resigned from the Cabinet in May 2002.

I spoke to one of Tony Blair’s staff recently, who had been doing some research for the memoir. Preparations are not far advanced, I can report. This person had been reading some of the Lobby briefings and had been struck by the ferocity of the media firestorms over issues now long forgotten. I remember another conversation, with a minister who was a strong Blair supporter, at the height of the cash for honours firestorm, one of the biggest and longest running of the media hoo-has. “If there are no charges it is a complete footnote in history,” he said. I am not so sure: I think the secrecy and the indirect payback cast a pall over the Blair premiership. So, more than a footnote; but probably not a chapter of its own.

Let us look instead at the issues that will shape the larger story of the Blair Government. First we should return to Professor Straw’s examples, Iraq and academies, and try to deal with his objections to the making of historical judgements. With the Hutton and Butler inquiries, and the leaks of the Attorney General’s legal advice and what has become known the internet over as The Downing Street Memo, we are not short of primary documents on the decision to join the invasion of Iraq. Despite the outstanding Freedom of Information requests of conspiracy theorists, I doubt that there is much material left that will alter the information base significantly. What is still required is a historian’s approach to weighing the evidence. Of course, what happens in Iraq and to the balance of power in the region may still change that assessment. Although if, say, Iraq becomes a stable and prosperous democracy or Iran suddenly gives up its nuclear programme, it would now be difficult to attribute that to the farsightedness of George Bush and Tony Blair in 2002.
Professor Straw’s other objection may be that Iraq is still an issue of heated public debate. I do not accept that this makes historical perspective impossible – or even that historical debate is always cool and rational.

In any case, if the problem of live controversy is a problem, it is more likely to be so with academies. As a journalist, I am still sensitive to the specific forms of words used by Cabinet ministers. Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, was asked a month ago if we could “end up with almost all schools being academies” and replied: “I don’t think so.” While James Purnell, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, spoke a week later of his hope that by 2020 – five years from my target date – academies would have “become the norm in the school system”. As a historian, however, I think we are already in a position to begin to judge the significance of the academies experiment. Ed Balls may be a reluctant patron, but he has allowed Andrew Adonis, the driving force behind the policy, to continue pushing the programme forward. So the experiment has not been stopped, which is the main thing we needed to know after Blair stood down. The issue within Government and between Government and Opposition is the degree of enthusiasm for the principle. I think that in 2025, we will look back at academies as a turning point in the history of the state education system.

This is not the place to go through the argument in full. For that, come to week 13 of the Blair Government course. But I come to this conclusion by applying, I hope, the best practice of historical investigation. By a process of hypothesis, antithesis and synthesis. The case for academies; the case against; the summing up.

That is the method we should use for sketching out the judgement on the broader record of the Blair Government. For our starting hypothesis, we could choose either the positive or the negative reading of Blair’s place in history. It hardly matters whether we start with the hostile reading – B. Liar the war criminal and crypto-Tory – or the adulatory – the Version According to Cherie in next month’s Vanity Fair: “He was fantastic. I’m sure history will judge him very well. I think he’ll be up there with Churchill.”

The hostile reading is well known. Whole newspapers, including sadly my own, were devoted to it, often in quite an extreme form. TV dramas, such as Alistair Beaton’s The Trial of Tony Blair. Even a feature film – not a commercially successful one – called Taking Liberties. As for the adulatory reading, that it is something that I have been accused of. I have been described as Blair’s hagiographer; sometimes less polite words have been used. And I plead guilty to deliberate provocation of the Blair-hating tendency. In fact, however, I don’t think he is a saint. On the contrary, his religiosity is one aspect of his character with which I feel uncomfortable. But I do think a case can be made that Blair was the finest peace-time prime minister since the introduction of the universal franchise. That may sound a little as if I am married to him. So let us start with that, and test it, and try to come up with a synthesis.

Note, though, that I have chosen my words carefully. “Peace-time” usually produces a snort about a prime minister who authorised military action in four separate theatres; but let us acknowledge that in historical perspective the engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan are small, while those in Sierra Leone and Kosovo were even smaller. Leave aside the two world wars: in Korea, for example, up to 63,000 British troops were deployed for three years and 1,100 died. The total combat death toll in the Blair decade was about 220. The point is that, unlike Cherie, I am not seeking to compare Blair to Churchill, or to Lloyd George, both of whom led the country in wars of national mobilisation.  

And I use the word “finest” rather than “greatest”, because I think both Attlee and Thatcher have a better claim to greatness, by leading the nation in testing times. But their claims to greatness are heavily dependent – I touched on this earlier – on the ideology of those historians sitting in judgement. And I think that they both spoiled their achievements by serious mistakes: Attlee extended public ownership too far and his government was blown out in just five years; Thatcher presided over social division. I know that this may be a dangerous thing to say in the presence of the Attlee Professor of Contemporary History, but I think that Blair was a finer prime minister than either of them: his achievements were more tempered to the comfortable times in which he governed, and from which his failures detracted less.

So here goes: my starting point is the list I made while sitting in the tent on Abingdon Green with Kenneth Morgan. I put Northern Ireland at the top, partly because I was working in chronological order, although the last bit of the deal was one of the last things Blair did in office, with the election of Ian Paisley as first minister seven weeks before the end. I think it is quixotic, and will remain so, to refuse to give Blair the main credit for securing a settlement in Ireland that eluded all his predecessors since Victorian times. Since Disraeli exclaimed in frustration: “I want to see a public man come forward and say what the Irish question is.”

There was devolution in other parts of the United Kingdom: Scotland, Wales and London. For most of Blair’s time in office those looked like positive achievements, although the Scottish National Party’s success – again, just weeks before Blair’s departure – has forced a hurried rethink, at least among English Labour politicians who didn’t see it coming. All the same, I think that in 2025 Blair’s policy will still be seen as broadly right. Even if the Scottish people do vote for independence by then, which I doubt, I do not believe that historians of the future will argue that they should have been denied a Scottish parliament in 1999 in order to avoid giving the SNP a platform.

On the rest of domestic policy, my list included a surprising number of accidental achievements, of banning things – fox hunting, tobacco advertising, and smoking in enclosed public spaces. In each case, Blair’s own instinct went the other way, but he bowed to the nannying tendency of his party – and in the end all the bans were quite popular.

On the bigger issues, it may be a touch polemical to claim that Blair “saved” the great public services of health and education. At the moment, the big question is to what extent the huge increases in public spending were paid for on the never-never, and the great whine of the times is that we haven’t seen much for our money. But the people who ask “Where has all the money gone?” – a Tory slogan at the last election – have defective memories of the effects of cumulative under-investment by 1997. Primary school classes have as many as four teaching assistants now, in addition to a teacher who is far better paid and therefore more likely to be competent. We do not hear about the lack of text books, or crumbling buildings, or NHS waiting lists, or even – for the past year and a half – NHS trusts in deficit. The complaints have moved on to what a waste of money interactive whiteboards are, or MRSA, or having to go private for very expensive new cancer drugs that may or may not postpone the inevitable for a few months. The changing list of complaints is more a measure of success than an index of the pointlessness of higher spending. And, in dealing with the new complaints in conditions of tighter public spending, the reforms that Blair began will be the template and the model of a Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit that focuses the central effort on a small number of specific indicators will be the method.

Higher spending on public services has been made possible by a really rather remarkable record of steady economic growth. Yes, there may be a recession this year. But just as it was hubris to think that Blair and Brown had abolished the downward stroke of the economic cycle, so it is too gloomy to assume that the upward stroke will not resume in due course. I suspect that in 2025 people will look back and wonder that a Labour government managed not to mess up the economy for more than 10 years, rather than that the business cycle finally asserted itself after Blair had gone. I remember Andrew Graham, economic adviser to Harold Wilson, at a Fabian conference before the 1997 election saying that if Blair and Brown managed to not mess up the economy, this would be a historic achievement for a Labour government. Despite the present hysteria about private sector debt, which is not Gordon Brown’s fault, and public sector debt, which is, the overall record is not bad. The decision to go for an independent Bank of England was historic and right – the only unresolved question for us historians is which of Blair or Brown should take more of the credit.

In 2025, I imagine that we will look back on Blair’s record on equality more dispassionately than is common now. At the moment, people such as Polly Toynbee and Michael Meacher work themselves up into a righteous fury about it. Meacher said last year: “We are now a more unequal society than at any time since the 1930s ... I feel very sick and angry about it. I didn’t expect this to happen under a Labour Government.” He was quite right not to expect it to happen, because it hasn’t. What is surprising is that a Labour MP, and one who claims to feel strongly about the issue, does not know the facts. All the evidence is that, while Britain became considerably richer over the period, the degree of inequality, of either income or wealth, has not changed at all. This may be regarded as a failure for a left-of-centre government. We can have a separate argument about that: I regard it as an achievement to have avoided greater inequality in an open economy such as Britain’s at a time of rising global returns to skills. And the Blair Government did a lot to tackle the roots of inequality that may take a generation to come through.

But domestically his most striking achievements were political. You have got to smile when a left-wing trade union leader such as Derek Simpson of Unite says that the Blair years were “the years in which Labour support had haemorrhaged”. Blair won three consecutive elections by larger majorities than Thatcher. That means something.

Many of the undergraduates on the Blair Government course – who were 10 when Blair came to power – say that they admire him not so much for his policies as for his consummate skill as a politician. This was partly a matter of political and communications technique. For many years he will be the template against which his successors are measured and found wanting. But it is also often said that he changed the Conservative Party. It is a glib line, but it is a measure of a leader’s historical significance – just as the Tory party accommodated itself to Attlee’s postwar settlement, and Blair himself marked Labour’s accommodation to Thatcherism.

What is important about David Cameron’s liberal Conservatism is that it pays tribute to a Britain that is finally comfortable with equality for women and gay people. The legal breakthroughs for social liberalism came in the 1960s and ‘70s, but the Conservative government, for 18 years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, was never reconciled to them. Under Blair, we got used to the idea of gay Cabinet ministers and a parliament where people wear something other than dark suits. Now, Cameron is desperate to have more women in his shadow cabinet and, as Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, said last week, the Tories have changed from “a party of proud Etonians and closet gays to a party of proud homosexuals and closet Etonians”.

Blair’s achievement goes farther than that, however. He has forced the Conservative Party to put public services before tax cuts. It has abandoned the idea that people should be encouraged to opt out of the NHS. And who would have thought that the Tories would now be opposed in principle to the idea of selective state education?

Despite all this, Blair’s reputation has been terribly undermined by Iraq. I think it will still count against him in 2025, although I read it as tragedy not betrayal. Tragedy in the classical sense of a good man brought down by a flaw – hubris, in this case. I do not accept that the decision to join the American invasion was a mistake, but I do accept that it will probably count against him in the court of history. Not that there will be a single or fixed verdict, as I have tried to suggest throughout this lecture. But the balance of opinion among historians is likely to be tilted against Blair on this one. Two short points in his favour about the view from 2025: one is that I expect the heat to have gone out of the allegation that Blair lied, and I hope that the conspiracy-based readings of history will have been laid to rest; the other is that there is a good chance that the issue will not dominate his record to the extent that it did in those instant judgements on the Green outside Parliament on the day he stepped down.


That matters because Iraq casts a shadow over a foreign policy record that would otherwise have been outstanding. From doing the right thing in messy conditions in Sierra Leone to the shining moment of standing up to Slobodan Milosevic’s so-called “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, to his later work on Africa and climate change, Blair showed an extraordinary gift for global moral persuasion.
So there you have it. Finest peace-time prime minister of the age of mass democracy; outshone for partisans of left and right by Attlee and Thatcher respectively; but unequalled in placing himself at the centre of gravity of the British electorate, and at delivering the modest but lasting social-democratic reforms demanded of him.

Dennis Kavanagh: I have just inconveniently put a peppermint in my mouth so I’m trying to swallow it…
Very enjoyable presentation! Can I say that I agreed with the defence of contemporary history: I thought that was very well argued; I agree about some of the achievements – not all of them – of TB. I think the social liberalism that was emphasised is very important: I think the way the Conservatives have been forced to change their ground, gradually and particularly since 2005 (and the same incremental ground happened with the Labour party, of course, responding to each stage of Mrs Thatcher – the centre ground was moving away from them all the time). With Cameron himself – he’s a bit of an old fashioned conservative, a lot of this social liberalism, it’s rather odd: this comes from the people who are part of his Notting Hill set, Steve Hilton, George Osborne, Ed Vasey – they were all very much social liberals and he was a bit of an outsider but he certainly forced the Conservatives to move on and I accept all of that.

Some of the domestic achievements that John mentioned: Well, there is Northern Ireland. I think it would be a great injustice not to pay tribute to the heavy lifting done by John Major before 1997. That is not to detract from the persistant and great efforts by Tony Blair on Northern Ireland but he was  building on work that was already set and I think the pattern was pretty set by 1997. You talk about the academies – I’m not saying they are the same as but they are building on the CTCs that Labour got rid of in its first term. The health reforms under Alan Milburn were building on the internal market that the Conservatives had before 1997: in other words there was a lot of kind of wasted time in the first term and a lot of re-learning going on.

And about devolution. Well, I really would question this! I mean much of the constitutional reform package was inherited by TB. It’s something that is almost a textbook platitude, it’s something that he was never interested in, showed no commitment to. And there is that famous exchange in Paddy Ashdown’s diaries where he is complaining about Scotland refusing to introduce tuition fees and he’s saying this shouldn’t be allowed – ‘why is Scotland doing this?’. And Paddy Ashdown said, ‘well, that’s about devolution’, to which Blair replies ‘ah, well, devolution was a mistake then’ and he was going along with it but he didn’t understand it: he was not a pluralist at heart about devolution.
So I have my queries. Now can I just: I had prepared a couple of remarks because I write obituaries – and I’ll let me leave to one side whether I’ve done Tony Blair’s – but the thing about Blair… but he’s a very young man to retire from top flight politics, very young (early fifties) and he’s probably got more than half his adult life ahead of him and will want to be doing big things and just on this point about perspective: I remember in 1997 Anthony Howard who was then the Times Obituary editor, he said to me, well, I think you can do your final draft on Ken Clarke and Michael Howard, we can say that they have gone back to the pavilion for good and if you only just think about… they both had quite a bit of history to add to them!

I think your points, your warning about perspective, about the way we can… I mean some things can change. What strikes me about Prime Ministers is really – and I expect to be challenged on this – is how on the whole perspective changes don’t change our judgement about Prime Ministers very much. About the only Prime Minister I could think of over the last 60 years whose reputation has changed dramatically would be Clement Attlee. Even by… already by the time he died, even more since the time he died…

And when you described – I think you were right about this, I think this is very, very true – about Blair being the skilled politician, he’s skilled in modern Britain, with it even though he’s very impatient with it, but in terms of its values and its style and that kind of thing he’s got a country at ease with itself. And I was thinking: Christ, he’s talking about Stanley Baldwin! And there is something very Baldwin-esque. And Baldwin is the classic case of someone who retires and was seen as a great man in 1937 and within a year or two because of events his reputation goes right down: it recovered a little bit but it had quite a bit of recovering to do. I think in contrast to John that I would place TB as a middle ranking Prime Minister. A great election winner, a man who has fought a lot of wars, a man who did some of the achievements that I’ve agreed with but beyond that I’m rather hard pressed to find achievement and I’d just like to in a moment talk about what I think would be bigger picture failures looking back on his thing.

The reason why I think Blair could be comfortable is that I think he was comfortable in himself. A cabinet secretary once said to me – I didn’t ask but he brought it up and he’d worked with Mrs Thatcher – and he said that the interesting thing about Tony is that he could walk away from it, like that. Mrs Thatcher could never let go, ok, but Blair could let go. I think that’s the interesting thing about him.

What’s my verdict? I think he’s a gifted politician like you said: I think bearing in mind the large advantages that he had I think one of the phrases that is always going to be associated with Blair is ‘missed opportunities’. He had so many opportunities that no other Labour Prime Minister has ever had and such a long tenure of office that no Prime Minister… such a weak opposition! I mean Attlee faced considerable opposition, lot of heavyweights that Blair did not, so it’s very much a missed opportunity. And I think the tragedy about Blair is that he begins to find a programme by about 2004, particularly on public service reforms and he's got that after Iraq and after the mood for change in the party is such that his political capital is depleted and in a sense I suppose that many of the big choices that he should have made – and this is something that is engraved upon Cameron. If you talk to his circle, they want to hit the ground running, they want a first hundred days… they don’t want to do a ‘Tony Blair’ who they see as wasting most of his first term – which is a verdict which Blair probably doesn’t disagree with in many ways.

You raised another question actually about Blair and Brown. I mean, the two key figures about Blair and history seems to me are Gordon Brown (a huge constraint on domestic policy, a huge constraint) and people tell me they only worked well when they worked together – Gordon could do it and Tony could do it. One without the other couldn’t have done it and that may be part of the problem that Gordon Brown has now, nobody else there is a balancer with him or there is nobody else that can supply the political gifts that he doesn’t have, ok? And Brown may have supplied some of the solidity and gifts that Blair lacked. But if you think about the failings, may I suggest the following.

First, I think he kicked liberal interventionism to death, and his great Chicago (very eloquent) speech in 1999 was his credo of foreign policy. Iraq killed it, ok, and has ruined the other opportunities for Britain and America and other countries who may want to get involved on humanitarian grounds so that’s a real setback on the foreign policy front.

The other thing that Blair was very interested in – David will know this – was forging a progressive alliance: this would be the Progressive century like the 20th century had been a Conservative century. He failed to deliver on PR and the Liberals may be as likely to line up with the Conservatives now as with the Labour party. So I mean a big missed opportunity there when Labour held the cards and had the opportunity and didn’t take them.

The third big failure which he talked about a lot with his people at Number 10 was putting Britain at the heart of Europe, being, leading Europe. And of course at the end of the day in foreign policy he chose Washington over Europe. When there was an actual choice he didn’t take Britain into the Euro. Now it seems to me that those are three really big picture failures that would have shifted the agenda of British politics. He had the opportunity – not saying the opportunity would have been easy or that kind of thing – but he didn’t really move on any of them and the other thing was the public service reform: I mean it became his passion from about 2004 when he set up, when he had the Cabinet doing all its work in 2006, 2007 about the next five, the next ten years, the John Burt kind of programme for the departments that’s still there, it’s still there. You know he wanted to start this and start it in such a way that it would be entrenched: it may be that it’s David Cameron who delivers on the public service reform that Blair started and started too late. And really on health and education I think the reforms were very, very modest. Have I got time to take two other things, just as if you’re doing an obituary, two or three things strike me about Tony Blair…

What would you say about him in 2025 or 2040 when he dies. I think people looking back would say there’s something about him that’s a new style politician; that he is the first – I think – Prime Minister born after 1945. I think I’m right about that and he is very different. I mean you can recognise the old Callaghan, Wilson, Mrs Thatcher, they’re all recognisably older style politicians, you know, grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s and it was a different kind of politics. Blair comes along and Major is a transitional figure. Major is very respectful of the traditional institutions and traditional procedures, he's not self confident enough to kind of do something different. Blair is. And I think the House of Commons, the new style Prime Minister (I think Richard Rose is expanding on this), the new style Prime Minister really isn’t particularly bothered about the House of Commons, not particularly bothered about the Civil Service, not particularly bothered about Cabinet, much more informal, much more interested in the media. And he's got a set of gifts and I think the new style politician – you think about Obama, you think about Clinton, you think about David Cameron, these people have this ability to connect, which seems to be… they’ve got this ability to emphasise, for a time anyway, with the public: and Blair was the master of this. He is a new politician able to do this, very skilled with the media, you talked about his gifts of communication and what you get; it’s a form of celebrity politics that Blair seems to be comfortable with in a way that nobody else really would. They’re  a bit more… too dignified! There is something demotic about him, kind of a managed populism, happy with celebrity politics. Now, he is a new style leader and so is Cameron – with that you can, you can even see William Hague as being an old style politician in that way. And I think the second thing about Blair is – and you’ve touched upon this – I think his reputation is going to be shaped by what Brown does, what first of it Brown makes, by how Labour does in the next General Election.

Now, can I throw out one generalisation? If you think about three long periods of government: you can talk about the Liberals (I know there is a coalition there as well) up to 1918. They are in office for a long time; they’re holding similar seals of office between ’06 and ’18. Bang! The next time you think about the Conservative party from ’79 to 97’. Bang! And the next long period of office and you know that you can talk to Labour, they’re not talking today but they were certainly talking last week, last month, the three months before that about how Labour is going to just implode after what people were expecting to be a cataclysmic defeat. So long periods of office, you know, aren’t good for the health of parties! And I think there are some understandable reasons for this actually, the lifeblood of the party is sucked out of it, and what Blair did – (he’s the politician) this kind of populist connecting politics … but the thing that amazes me is this, which is interesting in terms of British politics… is a Politician beyond Party. It’s as if he realises that we now live in a period where class politics has died – you can argue about that (I think it has) – and you can also argue that the political parties have effectively died. They’re no longer the bearers of sets of values and interests that they were even in the 1960s and to some extent in the 1970s. So a politician has got to reach out beyond: the core vote for any party is too small, so the key ability is to transcend your political party. It’s almost an American style presidential politics and there are two phrases that are often associated by analysts to the Blair style of politics. One is Spatial Leadership: that is for the leader to be successful he can’t secrete himself or be buried or the embodiment of the political party, he's got to create a space between himself and the political party so he can stand apart and appeal to other people outside the political party. And the other one of course is the idea of triangulation from the United States and Blair was brilliant at this and these… they are two devices (I mean I’m not saying that he thought these through or read books or borrowed them), they were just instinctive way of politically operating and the Labour party I think became poorer for it but it was a feeble instrument anyway before he became leader in 1994.

I suppose the one last thing – I see I’ve got a note down here and I haven’t elaborated on the point – the Blair premiership, do you know what it rested on? ‘We have no enemies to the right of us’. That was their thing, whether it came with taxation, whether it came with immigration, law and order, standing up to the Unions, you know, ‘we colonised the ground that Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail want, no enemies to the right’.

Ok, thank you very much!

David Marquand: You’ll be glad to hear that I’ve been given firm instructions to keep it down to five minutes!

Well, it’s very difficult to comment because we’ve had John’s splendid lecture and then this fascinating sort of mini-lecture by Dennis Kavanagh. I think what I would like to speculate about is Blair the human being. It seems to me that whether he’s the ‘finest peacetime Prime Minister’ or the ‘greatest’ or – I agree, entirely with John when he said he didn’t think he was the greatest: I’m not quite sure what finest is if you don’t mean greatest! Whether these adjectives may or may not be applicable I think he’s certainly the most puzzling, contradictory and hard to read, probably of any Prime Minister since Lloyd George, with whom incidentally I think Blair has certain things in common. The populism is Lloyd Georgian. Lloyd George had to be, because his party had fallen apart, largely through his own actions during the First World War. He didn’t have, really, a party; he was a Prime Minister dependant on Conservatives who were not his party, in which the Liberals were extremely weak and weakly based, so he had to be a populist.
Now, Blair certainly was a magician of populist leadership, no question about it, but what was it all for? What did he think it was for? What was he trying to do? If you’re going to say whether Blair was successful or not successful you - I don’t agree at all with the approach to history that says, well, you can give him 10 points on Iraq and 20 points on Public Service reforms  and five points on something else, I don’t  think that’s the job of historians at all. But what I think the job of a historian is to try to understand these people, try to understand the forces at work but also try to understand the individuals at work. And I find, my very brief dealings with Blair, mostly before he became Prime Minister… Peter Hennessy and I (I don’t know if you remember this Peter) were both summoned to a meeting shortly after Blair became leader of the Labour party of left-of-centre intellectuals (well, you were! And I was there too!). It was extremely embarrassing. Tony Giddens, the then director of the LSE and now the inventor of the Third Way and now of course a Labour Peer was also there: interesting to recall that Peter and I were never invited again but Tony Giddens clearly was invited again… But I find his personality extraordinarily difficult to understand.

He is obviously a man of – you can see this even in my small dealings with him – extremely attractive as a human being. He’s funny, he’s self deprecating, he has a wonderful sway of making you feel, (or at least I guess he still has, as he did indeed in those meetings) feeling, you feel that you matter to him enormously, and but you also know that when you go out of the room he won’t have that feeling at all and the next person that he sees will be the person that matters to him most in the world. I think you have to see him as a man on a journey to try to discover who he is. It’s almost like an artist trying to discover who he or she is through their art and I’d like to suggest that that’s how we should see Blair. He has this very confused and troubled adolescence, obviously. He then gets religion as a student at Oxford, he meets this charismatic and spellbinding Australian priest and is converted to Christianity in which he showed no interest at all apparently, before. He flirts with the idea of Community, developed by a now totally forgotten but in his day influential and important Scottish philosopher called Macmurray. It sounds as if Blair didn’t actually understand what Macmurray was saying. Possibly he didn’t understand what Peter Hennessy and I were saying! This is why we didn’t get invited again… perhaps he didn’t understand what Giddens was saying either? But then, neither did I! That’s why we weren’t invited again… I mustn’t get into this personal anecdote business too much.

I think he was on a kind of journey. He was highly competitive, obviously, highly ambitious, he wanted to win at whatever thing he was doing. He had the temperament and the style of a courtroom barrister (which is what he would have been if he hadn’t gone into politics) which is that if you are – as I understand it – you have got to win your case, you’ve got to your client off or if you’re appearing for the prosecution you’ve got to get the guy convicted. And while you’re doing it, you throw yourself into it 100%, totally, so that he had this ability to persuade himself, partly because he was such a good actor that (his… all the things about his childhood, his school days suggest that he was an extremely good actor on the stage) he had this ability to feel himself into the part that he was playing and so to speak believe in it while he was playing it 150%. All of his energies, all his emotions, all his intellect and so on was thrown into that part to win that case in that courtroom at that time.

Well, he becomes Prime Minister. Actually, he didn’t expect, I don’t think, to win such a large majority. I think that a lot of the oddities that Dennis was talking  about… how this relations with the Liberals, PR and all that stuff… I think he didn’t expect to win a large majority and thought he was going to have to knit together a Progressive Alliance… then, ‘blow me!’ He has this enormous majority without PR, without a progressive alliance, he doesn’t know what to do about it, he's a bit embarrassed really, so he carries on flirting with Paddy Ashdown but obviously his heart isn’t really in that except when he happens to be in the same room as Paddy Ashdown. All this stuff about domestic policy… well, public service reform… all this stuff is very boring. And if you’re a person with that temperament, how dull and tedious it is…

The world stage is a much bigger, better, nobler stage to be on and I think it was this, Blair sort of discovers himself to be a unique sort of Liberal Imperialist. He’s going to be Gladstone in modern dress, Denouncing Evil, Trouncing Evil, Defending Truth and Goodness on a world stage and that starts with Kosovo and then comes the famous Chicago lecture which is actually an extraordinary document, an extraordinary document! It sets out a case for unlimited right of intervention in the affairs of other countries by a mysterious entity called ‘we’. You read this speech: ‘we’ are entitled to do these things, we are entitled to punish the evil-doers like Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. Who the ‘we’ is is never stated… and ‘we’ of course means ‘me,’ Blair! He can’t do it all by himself. He has to join with George Bush. I think the answer to the Iraq business is actually in a way… there are all sorts of rationalistic instrumental argument that can be put forward as to why he behaved as he did over Iraq and there’s something in them: he believed in the Anglo-American special relationship as all British Prime Ministers since the war except Ted Heath have done, he believed that because of that if the Americans intervened and did it all by themselves the world would be more unsafe than it would be if they had allies; I think that calculation comes in  but I don’t think that that’s the real issue at all. I think that the real issue is that there is Blair, riding into battle on a white charger trouncing the evil-doers. He went into Iraq because he agreed with George Bush, actually. He saw the world in the same kind of way and there’s a sort of terrible paradox here: here is this good man, wanting to be noble, searching for himself and his true destiny and discovering it as a latter-day Gladstone and it all goes wrong. It all turns out to be a dreadful, catastrophic failure, so the poor guy, what’s he supposed to do? Well, he’s supposed to go off and solve the problems of the Middle East. Plenty of scope for nobility there!

Jon Davis (moderator): Because we’ve gone on we’ve got time for about 10 minutes of questions. Keep them brief and the answers too.

Trevor Dadson: Because the world we live in moves so fast we’ve all got very short memories. I remember the mid 1990s vividly. They were horrible. This was a horrible country to live in. I used to hate coming back to England in the mid 1990s and kept looking for jobs anywhere but here. It was depressingly sad country and horribly divided. It was country that was not at peace with itself in any sense of the word and I think it didn’t take long into that that first term (which was terribly wasted, I agree) but we’re a much happier country than we were in the mid 1990s and I don’t think we will forger that. Universities, we are in a University, some of us haven’t forgotten how we were not funded throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. We were cut every year and this is the legacy in the building problems we had: we did not have any resources, our salaries were appalling, people were leaving… we’re much better funded now and we have a much better higher education system. My sister is the headmistress of a primary school: primary schools are unrecognisable from what they were in the early 1990s. Now, I don’t think we will forget that. The trouble is that we’ve got used to it so we take it for granted. I always remind myself of what it was like coming up to the 1997 election and thinking ‘Please God after 18 bloody years!’ The sadness was the total waste of that first term. Why he did not expect a landslide I do not know because everybody out there on the streets knew there was going to be a landslide, and they didn’t prepare for it and there were five wasted years, or four years. And I think the second term was largely wasted as well and that is certainly a negative.

Audience Member: Not a response to that, another question. Is it also worth bringing in the kind of international context which he existed and in which policy is made, so if you look at for instance civil partnerships, if you look at the Laissez Faire attitude to global capitalism, even to an extent at market based reforms in the public services… these things that are actually going across many countries of the world and we’re not acting along in Britain – I just wonder how much this reduces the impact of any particular Prime Minister here.

Dennis Kavanagh: Well, I very much agree with the thrust of the question.

David Marquand: Me too. It has to be part of the story.

Audience Member: How can you place Tony Blair above Attlee? This word ‘finest’…

John Rentoul: Not in front of the Professor!

Audience Member: …I’m still not quite clear about the meaning of this word ‘finest’, but I mean when Attlee was so far superior to him in process, the way he ran government and outcomes, but on the other hand how can you describe Blair as a middle ranking Prime Minister when I would argue that of the twelve since the war, there are just three, Attlee, Thatcher and Blair who did change the political landscape of the country?

John Rentoul: Well, I didn’t get into process, that is perfectly true, because I didn’t want to start a fight because I regard all this business about Blair being presidential and overriding cabinet and government and disrespecting the traditions of parliament as utter hogwash! And I think the argument that Blair rode roughshod over parliamentary processes is usually made in relation to Iraq where we get the phrase ‘sofa government’ which I regard as one of the least helpful and least accurate descriptions of the way Blair operated. He operated precisely as a Prime Minister with a very large majority was entitled to operate and I think he operated within all the conventions of British government, only possibly more efficiently than his predecessors. The idea that Attlee is a model for procedure I fully accept but I don’t see where Blair departed from it.

George Jones: Somebody said that he enfeebled his party. Well, that was one of his great successes – that he eradicated the influence of the mad lefties and therefore made Labour winnable. So a great party leader… but No! Because having done that he just left it alone and failed to see that it was important to be a good party manager, to keep the party going as a bastion of support. While Blair scores for restructuring the Labour Party, he failed later because he did not keep his eye on the party and manage it. It was another missed opportunity. He let the Labour Party fall into desuetude. He should have been actively managing it to keep the new members and attract even more. Or he should have appointed an apparatchik like Mandy to do it and project the PM as party leader. He failed as a Party Leader to energise the members and bring in new members.

And you end up with this enfeebled organisation now, and it’s also related to his other great failure that hasn’t been mentioned and that is that he has been a centraliser. He had no understanding of how government worked, thinking that as PM he could issue orders and the machines would obey. Lacking interest in history and the Constitution, he had no understanding of, and sympathy with, the vital role of local government as part of the system of government with its own accountability arrangements, and not as a department of central government. He was a centraliser who removed powers and discretion from local authorities, subjecting them to an array of controls and interventions, which had the effect of making local government no longer attractive for the able and ambitious to serve on as councillors. Becoming a councillor had been the raison d'etre for local parties. With local government no longer a magnet attracting councillors, local parties withered. He enfeebled all that because of the presidential style, his celebrity politics, he thought he could sit there and say ‘do this, do that, Tony wants this, Tony wants that’ and everything would immediately jump into action. It shows how really limited this man was. Not interested in history, not interested in the way government worked, thought it was all a barrier and a nuisance and didn’t understand any of that; some people say he was a person without any real culture as well. And you then start to think what was it he was interested in? Just strumming his guitar?

Dennis Kavanagh: I said he’d enfeebled the party. Now the point in that Neil Kinnock had done a great deal and so had John Smith. I think the left were pretty well defunct by the time TB took over and that’s why, partly why he was able to take over.

Peter Hennessy: I’ve been really fascinated by all three of you and now George concentrating on the remaining mysteries. And I find it mysterious too. I think David is right, he’s about the most mysterious of all the post war ones, because as our friend Ralf Dahrendorf was key to a lot of them when he said that most politicians want to create a better yesterday and I think that’s profoundly true. Certainly was with Mrs T; I think Mrs T wanted a ‘50s Finchley with no European entanglements and none of that liberation she so disliked about the ‘60s and ‘70s and as David’s wonderful new book shows, she was horrified by the cultural liberation that seemed to go with economic liberation and so on. It’s like Selwyn Lloyd saying in his old age - he was the main motivator behind independent television – ‘well I never meant it to be like that!’ So Margaret is better ‘50s. Tony had a very, very precarious grasp of history as George was indicating so that doesn’t work as the un-locker of Tony… he said to Roy Jenkins that he wished he’d read history at Oxford rather than law and I think that’s profoundly true.
           
And if I can just finish; David’s recollection of that extraordinary meeting in February 1995 in Tony’s office in the commons is the same as mine. But Tony began by saying ‘thank you for coming, you guys, well what I want from you is an idea that links everything we’re trying to do in the way that Margaret had the market to link everything she wanted to do. And there was a terrible silence and I said, not being able to bear silence, ‘is well, I think you might want to update Tawney on equality and he said ‘no, no, it’s alright, we’ve got all that community stuff, we’ve done all that’. I said, ‘no, no, you should actually take notice of Tawney because the Major always swore by Tawney as David Marquand here knows better than I do’. And David said to me afterwards, that ‘I didn’t thank me for linking you with my views and talking about the Major because Blair had no idea you were talking about Attlee. He thought you were talking about the current Prime Minister, John Major!’ So his lack of history was what caused our problems that bizarre evening. And Tony Giddens began to talk about the internet and how it transformed everything from the most intimate particles of life to the economy and we were lost, weren’t we, we were stuck like Fabian herbivores… and the evening ended disastrously! And I never forgot it because I didn’t realise that he didn’t understand that Attlee was the Major, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

But the real mystery is what the roots are. As Margaret would have said, what stars did he steer by? Great self belief, sense of person and destiny, plus that lawyer capacity which David put his finger on. But isn’t it interesting how what has intrigued us all this evening is the remaining mysteries and they are very considerable. And I think, John -  as biographer who will return to be biographer at some point I hope – that might be the most difficult bit of all.