It’s 17 years since Tony Blair, now 71, left office but he often wishes he were still in Downing Street. (Cherie? Not so much.) So what did he learn about leadership — and what should Keir Starmer do?
“Look, you know, actually, when I was prime minister, Twitter didn’t exist. I didn’t even have a mobile phone. There’d been no pandemic. There was no Ukraine war. Oasis were playing. It was an optimistic period.” Ah yes, now Oasis are back again, maybe it’s time for a Nineties revival. I suddenly remember a young Tony Blair on the steps of No 10 on May 2, 1997, clutching his “Dad” mug, with his kids and Cherie, just out of her nightie, waving at the crowds singing Things Can Only Get Better. He still has that snaggle-toothed smile, slight tan, concerned look and impeccable manners 27 years later as we sit in his chrome and glass office in London drinking espressos.
But surely Sir Tony Blair — “Call me Tony” — wouldn’t want to be leader now, not at 71, when he has his own grade I listed Queen Anne country estate and town house near Hyde Park, myriad grandchildren and can wear £800 ($1700) loafers without socks on a yacht in Sardinia and not care what the press says any more. He still has a limousine outside and a staff of 1,000 at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. He has barely cooked an omelette and certainly hasn’t washed his pristine white shirts for decades or done the supermarket shop. He has all the perks of a statesman without the responsibilities.
Yet there are moments, the former prime minister admits, he still wishes he were in Downing Street; he certainly thinks he would do it better this time round. “Frankly, I had no experience, nothing on how to govern. I hadn’t even been a minister when I entered No 10.” With his doe eyes and bushy tail, he started out being called Bambi by the press, but by the end he was called Bliar by those who blamed him for dragging Britain into the Iraq war. “Well, you start at your most popular and least capable and end at your least popular and most capable,” he says, sounding sanguine. Is that why he’d like another shot, now he has more wisdom? He laughs. When he suggests it to his wife, Cherie, he says, she politely reminds him that it wasn’t all rose gardens the first time.
So, instead, he has written a manual, like how to train your dog or how to lose weight, only his new book On Leadership gives advice and tips about how to run a country. It’s niche admittedly — there are fewer than 200 rulers globally — but for a place like Britain that appears to have run through a great many prime ministers in the past decade, it might be extremely useful. Blair did win three resounding election victories in a row and is one of the few modern leaders who voluntarily stepped down for his successor, his neighbour, Gordon Brown, rather than being ousted. “Don’t bear any grudges,” is one of the mantras in his book.
Sir Keir Starmer could benefit perhaps from Blair’s wisdom. It’s Starmer’s birthday the day I visit Blair in his office; has he given him a copy as a present? “This book is not for him,” Blair says, but realises that sounds mildly rude. “I haven’t given him a copy yet. It’s really important to understand that this isn’t just about my time as PM but the work my institute has done since with different governments around the world. Whether you are running America or Sierra Leone, the lessons are pretty much the same.”
Blair started writing his book three years ago, before, he says, Starmer had even begun to think about how to replace the scrolling fern wallpaper at No 10. “Fifteen countries are waiting to join the programme, about 40 are already in it. Wherever you are in the world, leaders are worried about the same things — it’s how to prioritise, get the right policies, the right teams.”
He’s become the personal trainer to the political elite, encouraging and cajoling them to work smarter, think harder and focus. “Go for it,” he writes. “It’s a great time to be governing.” Is there any country he would refuse to help, dictatorships perhaps, a far-right government or a communist one? “Look, I prefer democracies,” he says, before the now more pragmatic, less innocent, idealistic Blair adds, “but I also understand that some countries aren’t, and the lessons are the same irrespective of whether you are a democracy, dictatorship or authoritarian.” When it’s clear I appear mildly alarmed by the idea that he is helping insalubrious regimes, he adds, “There are lots of countries we say no to. The line is — is the country moving in the right direction? It is in the end all about getting the right things done and that can be done by a democratically elected leader or an undemocratically nominated leader.”
In fact, he admits, it can be hard to achieve a great deal in a 21st-century democracy, with an increasingly volatile electorate, stirred up by social media and populist agitators. “The biggest challenge for democracy is the fact that everything pushes you towards short-term responses to political events, rather than long-term structural change.”
It may take 28 days to alter a habit, but it takes a minimum of 10 years to change a country, Blair suggests. “Think about Britain: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, myself, that’s three PMs in 30 years and there was quite a lot of continuity in policy around business and enterprise. That gives you a certain stability as a country. Then you take it from then to now and it’s like, I mean, we can’t even remember how many PMs we’ve had.” We list them together: Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer.
Is this why he is writing the book, to show future leaders how to stay in power? “Yes, but look, the one thing the book is not is advice to Keir — it wasn’t conceived like that, it wasn’t written like that and it was finished well before the election. It’s something that anyone who is coming into a position of leadership could read. I hope it will have an application outside politics. You could take the lessons — firm objectives, boundaries, the ability to remain calm — to any leadership role.” Even parenting, I am thinking.
Does he really think he would make a better leader now? “Of course. The purpose of the book is to try to shorten the learning curve. There are things that I’ve now learnt that could have been taught before I started.”
But circumstances change; every leader faces a different set of challenges. In Blair’s era, Britain was worrying about millennium bugs, foot-and-mouth disease, Cherie’s contraception, all now forgotten by the majority. The Treasury coffers weren’t empty; one audience member on Question Time in 2005 even complained to Blair that they were being given doctors’ appointments too quickly. Some fundamentals still hold true, the former prime minister believes. “If someone had explained to me what the civil service could do and couldn’t at the very outset, it would have helped.”
True, but surely Blair was a leader for sunnier times, when the country genuinely thought things could only get better. “Today is more anxious, but the basic lessons are still the same. Social media is in some ways a plague, but that makes it all the more important to take a step back, not let yourself get buffeted by the story of the day and remember what you want to achieve.”
It’s all about focusing on the final results, he says. “Don’t worry about the small stuff; it’s not going to be about the bits of semi-gossip and froth. DON’T READ IT,” he writes in the book — he loves capital letters. “No one talks to me about the Millennium Dome any more.” Or the cringeworthy singing of Auld Lang Syne with the late Queen. “It’s important to think about what will really change lives rather than worrying whether you will be judged on trivia.”
Temperament, he says, is obviously very important in a leader, but too often overlooked by voters. A chapter is devoted to avoiding paranoia. Let’s not mention Gordon Brown, who was known to get a little overwrought in Downing Street, or Boris Johnson, who veered the other way, taking nothing but birthday cakes and Peppa Pig seriously. “Of course, you care what people say about you. But you have to be able to create a degree of detachment, otherwise your energy gets diverted from what matters. Cherie was very good at that and at saying to me, ‘If you don’t like the criticism, leave. Don’t stay and complain about it — that’s the way it is.’ "
In On Leadership, Blair writes that he only had two moments of pure delight in his 10 years as leader — and one was winning the bid for the 2012 Olympics. That seems surprising: there was Leo’s birth too, but what about all those supermodels and band members partying at Downing Street to celebrate Cool Britannia, the barbecues with the royals at Balmoral and golf with President Clinton near Chequers. I remember going to Kosovo with him as a reporter, after he’d helped depose Slobodan Milosevic, with everyone shouting, “Toneeeee,” and prostrating themselves at his feet.
Doesn’t he sometimes wish he had enjoyed it all more? “I find it odd to describe it as enjoying — the responsibility felt huge. Maybe it would be different now I am older.” I agree there’s something irritating about leaders who look like they are having too good a time, revelling in their power a little too much. There is a stage for many leaders, he writes, when they’ve been in power for a few years, with everyone fêting them, and they become too hubristic, inviting nemesis. Did he too? “Perhaps.” But now he’s wiser.
I know this isn’t a book specifically about how to run Britain, but what would Blair do now if he were leading a moderately sized European country that felt slightly lost? This is Blair’s happy space, he sits back and enthuses. “I think today you have got two big challenges: one is how you return to high levels of productivity and economic growth; the second is a set of quasi-cultural issues round immigration and crime and so on,” he says. “I believe the answer to both lies in technology.”
That’s an easy response, I reply — of course the architect of New Labour loves a bit of modernisation, but it’s hard to achieve, surely? “This is our 19th-century industrial revolution. It will change everything about the way we live, work and interact and therefore how we understand, master and employ it is the key thing,” he says, sounding a little too smooth.
The problem is that Rishi Sunak adored a bit of AI as much as his Adidas Sambas, and Starmer also professes to be a bit of a tech geek, but it will all cost money Britain doesn’t have; this government has just cancelled the new exascale supercomputer in Edinburgh and abandoned £1.3 billion ($2.7b) of funding for tech. I’m not sure we’re capable of being at the forefront of any revolution at the moment. “No… But in my view, the great opportunity Britain has — which is why I am optimistic — is that after America and China, we are number three in the world in this field of technology, so we should do everything we possibly can to work out how we keep the really good ideas here, develop them and build businesses.”
Blair’s solution is still universities. “They’re the engine for economic growth, they are places where you incubate innovation and we are second in the world on universities. There is this anti-university sentiment now, but no one is forcing children; they want to go.” He doesn’t think there are too many students, or that they are doing Mickey Mouse courses. “We need to keep improving our universities for them, but we have almost more universities in the world’s top 50 [in the Times Higher Education world rankings] than the rest of Europe put together. That is a huge strength.”
His greater fear is that there are too many — both the young and among his generation — who aren’t motivated to do anything. He is always telling his children to work hard first, then play hard, not the other way round. This is a septuagenarian who thinks nothing of visiting 40 countries in a year on his global circuit, exhausting his bodyguards as he flits round the world, keeping up regular gym appointments, and is horrified when I ask if he has any chillaxing retirement plans.
“We have a big, big problem with people leaving the workforce,” he says. “It is a huge problem and we are going to have to go deep to try to deal with it. We are going to have to really think through welfare and how we reskill people and, again, technology has a lot to do.” The young in India don’t work nine to five, he stresses. “The basic point is you cannot afford to continue with this level of people of working age not working, never starting, quitting early. People have lost their way.”
I suspect this is a man who is not a massive fan of four-day weeks, working from home and duvet days. For a moderniser, he can appear a remarkably old-fashioned boomer. When I once asked him whether he’d tried any therapy, he looked bemused. For a man who encouraged us all to emote when Princess Diana died, he is stiff-upper-lipped about his own life, embarrassed by too much introspection or soul-searching. But what does he think has happened to the British psyche? Why do people feel more vulnerable and fragile now, less able to engage with life? “I think it’s a result of several things: stagnant real wages, the pandemic, but also countries need a real sense of direction and purpose. They need to know where they are going — that is part of the job of the political leader. People have to feel the future is going to be challenging but also exciting, with possibilities. I think we lost direction.”
If the former prime minister put the British on the couch, he would tell them that they need to stop being so introspective and thinking that their best days are behind them. “No country can succeed or improve with that attitude. If we want to keep up, we are going to have to change, be tough-minded, be out there hustling and bustling — and that includes everyone.”
Blair admits he felt lost after he left Downing Street, floundering for a while, finding it hard to build a new life. “When I was creating the institute, it was hard work,” he says. “We were like a start-up trying to get people interested. It was exhausting, but unless you are prepared to work you won’t get anywhere. I think it’s sad if people are just giving up. You should wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose and go to sleep counting your blessings, or your days will feel pretty empty.”
He does advise some downtime for leaders — and the rest of us — to strum that guitar or play some five-a-side football. “Holidays — take them. Angela Rayner clubbing in Ibiza doesn’t matter. Keir buying a cat or a dog? Do what you want — the public don’t really care. But you have to sacrifice stuff. It’s full-time being PM. You can’t switch off entirely.”
His own resilience, he concedes, may have come from the setbacks he encountered as a child. He’s always been reticent talking about his early life, but since he has left office, we have discussed how his father, a self-made barrister with a dream to become a Tory MP, had a serious stroke when he was 40 and his youngest son was only 10. The only words the elder Blair could say were “good” and “tea”. “It definitely disciplined me that life was uncertain,” the young Tony said. His older sister was also ill with rheumatoid arthritis in hospital and, when he was 22, just as he was finishing at Oxford University, his mother died of cancer. “I think you acquire a certain urgency in your desire to fulfil yourself,” he concedes.
But he refuses to see this as astonishingly bad luck for the Blair family. “Despite all the difficulties, I felt lucky and loved. I honestly believe that if you have a sense of victimhood, it’s hard to achieve anything. A lot of the work we do now is with some of the poorest countries in the world. You see far worse problems: no electricity, sanitation; if they fall ill, little decent healthcare. We have a lot to be grateful for. I am very sympathetic to people who have serious mental health problems, but it’s important that we try to create a sense of possibilities in life, not just the drawbacks.”
His book on leadership never mentions the word “nanny”; he doesn’t believe that citizens in any country need to be lectured or scolded. But he does feel they can be helped to do the right thing with nudges such as sugar taxes and bans on smoking in public places. I can’t see him puffing away in a pub garden. “We need to ask people to have a sense of personal responsibility and help them to do it, offer people the opportunity to sort themselves out if they are living an unhealthy lifestyle.”
Blair has been called messianic by several of his contemporaries, but he sounds at times more like a life coach — everything is about becoming our best selves. Another of his ideas, which he failed to accomplish over two decades ago, is to convince the British to adopt ID cards, but Starmer has just ruled them out again. “You have a passport, a driving licence, social security number; it’s sensible to have it all in one place to do your private and public business. Australia has just introduced them. When you look round the world, the right digital infrastructure is becoming an essential part of success.”
It’s easy to have goals and ideas when you’re out of office, but they are a harder sell when you are in Downing Street, having to juggle competing voices and interests and balance the books. “It isn’t the job of the leader simply to find out what the public wants and try to do it; it’s the job of the leader to set out where you think the country should go and persuade people to follow you,” he says. “They may not love you, but in the end they respect you more.”
Unlike flying a plane or becoming a doctor, there is no training in how to lead, so it’s not surprising many appear to flounder. “The thing that is most bizarre about government is that once you get in, you realise it is like being a CEO. That is a skill set that is very different from campaigning. You still need that ability to communicate, but if there is one central thing this [book] is about, it’s policy and delivery. Campaigning and politics needs to become secondary; it’s almost always a disaster if you are just about your party, positioning and ideology.”
There are some recent leaders, like Liz Truss, who did have a vision and tried to push through radical reform — she only lasted 45 days. “I try not to be critical about anyone who has done the job as I know how difficult it is. But generally, the most important thing about any leader is not their retail skills, but their ability to find solutions. Without getting into individual PMs, part of the most difficult thing for Britain in these past years has been the absence of coherent long-term thinking — you just get snatches of different types of leadership with different perspectives and ways of doing things and it has caused a lot of confusion.”
Blair keeps stressing that he doesn’t want to interfere or advise Starmer, who he says has made a great start. “Of course, I have conversations with cabinet ministers, but I am not perched on their shoulder yapping away, because there is nothing more irritating than that.”
But the one piece of advice he gives leaders in all countries is to be a change-maker not a placeholder. Don’t just sign your name in the visitors’ book; write yourself into the history books. He is disarmingly frank at the end of On Leadership about his own desire for power. “The moment I saw what power was, and what it could do, I wanted it,” he writes, “to change the world, to put principle into practice, to be respected and recognised as a person with power.” He admits that politics requires ambition, wheeling and dealing, ruthlessness and a little luck. Power, he says, is like a drug, which is painful to give up. But crucially he adds, before he sounds too like Scar in The Lion King, ambition should never eclipse principles. “You have to have a plan to improve your country, otherwise what is the point in being there.”
The former Labour leader would like to be remembered for overseeing the Good Friday peace agreement, transforming inner-city schools and public services. But for years all some could remember was his taking Britain into the Iraq war. Blair, who usually loves a bit of geopolitical strategic analysis, tenses as soon as the word Iraq is mentioned, but he says he understands that it is part of his legacy. And he is willing “once more” to reiterate why he took the decision to invade the country, based on what the world now knows was flawed intelligence. “I always took the view, i) America’s closest ally, ii) key player in Europe, iii) build a department of international development into the best soft power in the world. Of course, I realise people will still bring Iraq up. I always say I am happy to take full responsibility for the decision I took.” That’s not going to pacify those who still believe he behaved atrociously. But Blair is unrepentant.
He only mentions Iraq four times in the book’s index, the same as Japan. Despite the 2.6-million-word, seven-year Iraq inquiry, his views haven’t changed, he says. He still believes Britain had to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with America. “The UK had to decide whether to be a real ally, making real commitment, or whether it would merely cheer from the sidelines. We chose the former and there will be many who think that choice was wrong. But I believed it was crucial for Britain in the long term to remain America’s closest ally. There is no ‘have your cake and eat it’ philosophy of policymaking — choices can be really tough,” he says. The real mistake, he believes, was to assume that democracy could be easily transplanted into countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. But he is determined the anger about Iraq shouldn’t “eclipse almost completely the achievements”.
Whoever becomes president at the next US election, Britain should still hug America tightly, he says. “On an objective basis, America has re-emerged in the past two or three years as easily the strongest country on earth with the most resilient economy. When I left office, our average wages were slightly above those of America; now they are 40% behind. Its technology is leading the world, it’s the biggest oil and gas producer, its military is still easily the most capable and yet its politics is quite dysfunctional. There is no doubt there are a great deal more dangers globally than there were in my time, so America remains an incredibly important ally.”
Last time we met, when I asked what still kept him awake at night, he answered — and this was a month before the war started — “Russia invading Ukraine.” Does he now worry, like some global strategists, that a Third World War is round the corner. “No, but for me the problem with Brexit was always the loss of engagement with our own continent, because if you think about the way the world is developing, there will be three superpowers — America, China and India — by the middle of this century. India’s population alone will be more than 1.5 billion. It will be more than the population of America and Europe put together and doubled. Meanwhile our birth rate is going down. So, it’s clear that smaller countries will have to group together to sit at the same table.”
Much of what he says sounds sensible. He is still the master of the middle way, but even with his determination to encourage states around the world to espouse his moderate Goldilocks politics — not too hot or cold — the centrists appear to be losing out this century. “Populists exploit grievances, but they don’t create them. You cannot just be the mushy middle. You have to show people that their lives will get better,”he replies.
Protect Your Legacy is almost the final chapter, before Leave with Grace. Blair is not going to let anyone take down his portrait without a fight for “open-mindedness, tolerance and innovation”. But if he ever tires of lecturing leaders, he would be great as a motivational speaker.
On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century by Tony Blair (Hutchinson Heinemann) is on sale now.
Written by: Alice Thomson
© The Times of London