Two sides to every story: Tony Blair's memoirs reveal a man unable to resolve the many conflicting aspects of a complex personality

Published on Friday 3 September 2010 18:15

It was a bargain at the discounted price of £12.50 at which it was surprisingly available on the day of publication, but, unlike Winston Churchill, I doubt if Tony Blair will get the Nobel Prize for Literature for his memoirs.

The style is varied, sometimes chatty, sometimes colourful and occasionally portentous. It is as if Blair felt he would only get one shot at publication and had to get everything into one volume.

And so we have a mixture of analysis of Labour's failures in the Eighties and Nineties, an account of the creation of New Labour, accompanied by some uncomfortable moralising, a view of the world as it should be, all larded with personalities but with a searing account of his central and nearly centrifugal relationship with Gordon Brown. The approach is thematic and not chronological. You need a pretty good knowledge of the politics of the period to make sense of it sometimes and the author has a capacity for self-diversion.

This writer is not an unbiased observer for two conflicting reasons. First, if the numbers had been different in the General Election of 1997 I might have been in a Blair coalition Cabinet, although not if John Prescott had had anything to do with it as the former prime minister reveals in a description of a bizarre exchange with his deputy. Second, because my general sympathy for the direction of travel of his government was destroyed by his unshakable determination to join George W Bush in military action against Iraq which I still consider to have been illegal.

But as this book immodestly reveals, Tony Blair was and remains a remarkable influence on politics both domestically and internationally. His Chicago speech described here in detail was a courageous recognition that if human rights were being systematically ignored by an oppressive government's deliberate abuse of its citizens, intervention without UN authority might be justified to protect those who were being persecuted or worse.

The intervention in Kosovo and the action against Serbia effectively illustrated that principle, and, as Tony Blair makes clear, his determination to hold Clinton's feet to the fire on the issue of putting forces on the ground was essential to success, even if it had an adverse effect on the relationship between president and prime minister. Equally successful was the intervention in Sierra Leone at Blair's instigation which saved many of that country's citizens from the barbaric mutilations practised by rebels whose drug-fuelled ambitions to bring down the legitimate government were thwarted.As the text makes clear, this was Blair with an ethical dimension.

But when we come to Iraq, realism gave way to evangelism and evangelism has no place in the conflict of relative values that is foreign affairs. The reader will search the text for any admission of regret or apology for the decision to ally the UK to a US president determined on the removal of Saddam Hussein. Although I do not doubt that Blair's expressions of regret for the consequences of that are anything but genuine. Where Blair cannot be challenged is the assertion that the distinction between foreign and domestic policy is being eroded. Globalisation of communications means, as he says, that every foreign crisis is beamed into every living room.

Reading Blair's continued justification for Iraq and his apparent willingness to contemplate military confrontation with Iran, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he finds the constraints of international law irksome. There is a sense that so long as the motive is pure the action is justified. But such an approach begs the question of what is "pure" and who will decide.

This seems to argue against a rules-based system of international relations which sits uneasily one would have thought with a barrister's training and experience. A curious impression is that the prime minister who determined to commit Britain unnecessarily early to a like-for-like replacement of Trident seem less unequivocal in his support now for that decision as he was then.

If Iraq will be both Tony Blair's legacy and epitaph it is in his account of his relations with Gordon Brown that most morbid interest lies. From the moment of the decision when John Smith died that he and not Brown should stand for the leadership to the time in 2007 when Blair stood down, the relationship, as he describes it, was verging on the dysfunctional. The mystery not revealed in this book is how it survived for so long, and why a prime minister with three historic successive Labour victories under his belt was unable to exert the authority his office allowed.

Blair challenges head-on the often repeated conventional wisdom that he ceded responsibility for domestic policy to Brown and contends that as prime minister he was as engaged domestically as he was internationally. But tell that to the ministers in spending departments of government who had to face Treasury control over not just the amounts available to spend but the policies on which that money was spent.

So much has been written about the relationship between Brown and Blair that it obscures individual achievements of both of them - such as Blair in Northern Ireland and Brown in the world financial crisis of 2007.In each of these they respectively displayed their particular talents - Blair his natural guile and persuasiveness and Brown his intellectual firepower.

If their relationship had been one of marriage or professional partnership then no court in the land could have denied them divorce or dissolution. But if it had not been as Blair described how much more could have been achieved?

That Tony Blair found being prime minister lonely and stressful is perhaps not surprising - who wouldn't? But his admission that he liked a gin and tonic and a couple of glasses of wine in the evening is hardly revelatory. It is a minor mea culpa.

One particular passage strikes a chord with all who have had to submit themselves to the trial by ordeal that is Prime Minister's Questions. Margaret Thatcher revelled in it, but Tony Blair in a particularly expressive passage relates the terror which surrounds it for the PM on the rack for half an hour and, to a lesser extent, the party leaders who are obliged to ask the principal questions. As he rightly says, it has little to do with scrutiny of the executive and more to do with theatre which explains why he as an accomplished schoolboy actor became particularly adept.

But this is not an autobiography. In truth is tells us little about Blair the boy and the man. Nor does it answer the question why he joined the Labour Party. Scathing though he may be about the Tories and even more so the Liberal Democrats, he could credibly have been the leader of any one of the three main political parties. The same certainly cannot be said either of his predecessor or his successor.

I doubt if Tony Blair will change many minds by this book. The battlelines between his supporters and his detractors are firmly drawn. But he was and remains a phenomenon.

•Sir Menzies Campbell is Liberal Democrat MP for North East Fife