Book review: A Journey, by Tony Blair

Published on Friday 10 September 2010 19:38

(Hutchinson, 624pp, £25)

BRIGHT and breezy in tone, this must rank as the most informal memoir ever produced by an ex-Prime Minister. But its various demotic touches – "you know something?", "don't get me wrong", "anyway, you get the point" – should not be allowed to mislead. In terms of full disclosure this is just about as unrewarding as Harold Wilson's far more ponderous account (The Labour Government 1964-1970) of his first two administrations.

Wilson produced his memoir just over a year after leaving No 10 and he needed the funds it brought in to run his office as leader of the opposition. Blair, by contrast, has taken three years to produce a defence of his record and can scarcely plead poverty (we have, indeed, already been told that not just the 4.6 million advance but any royalties it earns both at home and abroad will be donated to the British Legion).

So its justification has to lie solely in its merits as a book. How good is it? It's already looking like a bestseller. Blair, who casually remarks in his final chapter: "I have always been more interested in religion than politics", certainly knows how to strike an anti-political note in an apolitical age. Indeed, in one sense, his whole purpose seems to be to underline the "I'm a pretty straight sort of guy" message that he originally delivered to the British public when he first found himself with his back to the wall over the Formula One/Bernie Ecclestone affair in 1997.

But is that true? At the margins, it has to be said, even this modern equivalent of John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua is bound to raise doubts. In contrast to the blow-by-blow accounts we are given of Blair's various encounters with the Royal Family we learn remarkably little about the darker episodes in his career.

Take, for example, his account of his relationship with Derry Irvine, his pupil-master at the Bar (described here more than once as "my idol and mentor"). Irvine was removed as Lord Chancellor in 2003 to make way for Blair's even closer chum and former flatmate, Charlie Falconer.

Irvine's departure, Blair writes, was "the hardest of all". In which case, are we not entitled to be told how it came about? But we are rewarded with no details, just a reference to how important it was "to get some modernity into the very old-fashioned ways the criminal justice system worked". Even Cardinal Wolsey, with whom Irvine once rashly compared himself, was hardly treated more cursorily by Henry VIII.

It is much the same story with Roy Jenkins, again lauded with tributes ("I grew to love him, actually"). But this only makes it all the stranger that Blair cannot bring himself to say a single word about the way in which Lord Jenkins's report on electoral reform, which he commissioned, was ruthlessly ditched during only his second year in office. A mumbled complaint or two from such dinosaurs as John Prescott and Jack Straw – and our hero, much given to moral messages, simply folded his tent and stole away from the field. Unlike Jenkins, Paddy Ashdown is still alive, and I should expect him to feel much aggrieved at the way in which his relationship with Blair is described. A protracted three-year affair over the practicalities of a Lib-Lab partnership is treated as virtually a one-night stand. Anyone wishing to assess Blair's candour should also read the intimate account of their various trysts provided by Lord Ashdown in his two volumes of contemporary diaries.

Of course, some will say that none of this amounts to much when put alongside the author's wholly uninhibited account of his relationship with his friend and then foe Gordon Brown. It is undeniably vivid but wholly self-serving. I have to confess that this book has done for me what I thought impossible – made me feel that Brown, while undeniably a curmudgeon, deserved better treatment than this at the hands of his immediate predecessor. It is, after all, Blair himself who, in the nearest thing to a note of self-criticism, boldly declares "I am very, even excessively, loyal to friends". So maybe the contradiction – to say nothing of the capacity for self-delusion – will not come as all that much of a surprise to a man who, in their shared Downing Street days, rounded on his boss and announced: "I will never believe another word you say."