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Tony Blair is fond of authorising those whom he wishes to sit in judgment on him. History is the front-runner. Then God. The Prime Minister has not revealed who, in this imaginary tribunal, should play counsel for the prosecution, but it is fair to assume that Geoffrey Wheatcroft would not be his first pick. This short polemic on the Blair era and, in particular, on the Iraq war and its aftermath deftly meshes the events of the last years with a commentary heavy on rage, bafflement and scorn.
Recent foreign policy has produced some foot-shuffling justifications from the pro-war lobby and some recantations. Wheatcroft, from whom no apologies are required, writes from the angry standpoint of one who never bought the Blair dream.
The title refers to the famous glimpse at a St Petersburg summit of what President Bush really thinks of Prime Minister Blair. Their informal conversation, relayed through a microphone left switched on, was both "hilarious" and "excruciating" (a favourite adjective for Blair's behaviour). Bush greeted him with "good-natured disdain - 'Yo, Blair!' - and treated him like a put-upon valet, a part Blair played very convincingly".
That "grotesque" episode sets the tone for a tenure portrayed as toe-curling and macabre. Blair, in this account, was a failure from the outset. He made his first tactical error in persuading Gordon Brown to stand aside in the leadership election, instead of challenging him to a contest that Brown could not have won. Having engineered a damaging schism with his future Chancellor, Blair went on to rupture relations with his colleagues and the Labour movement. From his first election victory onwards, he was what Beaverbrook called Lloyd George - "a Prime Minister without a party".
There are many comparisons with predecessors, but the Welsh Wizard, tarnished by the whiff of corruption and cash for honours, is the most frequently invoked. Lloyd George, however, rose to prominence through his opposition to the Second Boer War, while Blair has never knowingly let slip an opportunity to indulge his bellicose instincts. Lloyd George stood up to Woodrow Wilson, while Blair has not gainsaid George W. Bush at any juncture.
But this is not simply an indictment of policy and, in particular, foreign policy. It is an attack on an incumbent unfit for his high office.
Blair is a mendacious, money-grubbing zealot who belongs neither to the left nor right, but to the limbo reserved for those with no ideology. His beta brain has been remarked upon by no less an intellect than "the eccentric pop singer George Michael" who remarked that Blair "didn't seem the brightest guy in the room". As Roy Jenkins said, Blair had "a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament".
Others think even this conclusion unduly kind and Wheatcroft is among them. His dossier of damnation is a clever and carefully substantiated version of a thousand blogs. While annihilation of Blair's ill-judged and dishonest rush to a bloody and predictable war may be too savage for some tastes, plenty will think the Prime Minister deserves no better.
Many warned him exactly how the Iraq war would play out, but Blair was, then as now, impermeable to doubt. As Albert Camus said: "If there were a party for those who weren't sure they were right, I'd belong to it." Blair, Wheatcroft notes, is "the general secretary of the Party of Those Who Think They Are Right".
Think? Know, surely, with that religious certitude unpicked in this book, with the vanities and platitudes of a Prime Minister who "has no reverse gear". There is much here in a story of wrong decisions, dodgy dossiers and suspicious chumminess with Rupert Murdoch to satisfy everyone from the disillusioned and the disappointed to those who, like Wheatcroft, would believe almost any ill of Blair.
That venom occasionally has the effect of portraying others in a more favourable light than they deserve. From Margaret Thatcher to the American neocons, almost everyone comes out well compared with Blair.
But while his constitutional reforms are far from glorious, his dismantling, scornfully dismissed, of "the traditional office of the Lord Chancellor" could be seen as an attempt, bungled admittedly, to recast an office that blurred the separation of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary. Despite a passing nod of acknowledgment for economic success, Blair rarely gets the benefit of any doubt.
Maybe his hopes of lucrative US lecture tours and publishing deals have "consciously or unconsciously conditioned his attitude towards the United States", but even the most cynical might balk at the claim that the Northern Ireland peace process "was inherently mendacious". It is true that there is some contradiction between the West's treatment of Hamas and Sinn Fein, but, given how far Irish republicanism has shifted, Wheatcroft's suggested explanation - "Perhaps the real difference is that Gerry Adams is white" - is hardly satisfactory.
Peace may be a relativist's game, but it is still peace. Those who abominate the bloodshed in Iraq and the betrayal of Palestine might still be grateful that the citizens of Enniskillen can live without fear of murder. As for Afghanistan, the war may be a hopeless folly, but it seems far from certain that "a short, sharp punitive campaign of the greatest speed and ferocity" would have collared the slippery Osama bin Laden, let alone destroyed al-Qaeda.
On Britain's future, there is no mention of the next chapter. Wheatcroft offers Oliver Cromwell's valediction - "Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" But what then? Will Yo, Brown! demand a less servile special relationship with the US? How will an enfeebled Parliament and an Executive too craven, in the main, to defy Blair, live with their failures once he is gone?
Wheatcroft does not speculate, but the inference is that practically anyone would do better than a Prime Minister who ignored the history whose blessing he invoked. Where Blair's predecessors erred on the side of peace, he wanted war. Where Harold Wilson defied US hopes of "just one goddamn battalion of the Black Watch" in Vietnam, he sent extravagant quantities of British soldiers to suffer and die.
On the whole, Blair deserves a filleting delivered so skilfully that one scarcely notices that its victim has, in a sense, escaped. The "genius" and the "magic" of Blair are mentioned, scathingly, but the emphasis on his flaws provides few clues as to why such a master of deceit and folly retained the capacity to persuade a Cabinet and legislature to endorse a war that many, Wheatcroft included, correctly forecast as a bloodbath-in-waiting, lacking any criterion that might render it just or legal.
Blair the monster is held fully to account in this timely book. Blair the magus - and that trait lurks somewhere in his make-up, for how else could he have beguiled so many for so long? - is left for some other judge to unravel. It won't be history. Any Prime Minister who so flagrantly perverts its natural course may hope in vain for a kinder verdict than this one.
Publisher: Politico's
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