Two ice cubes in Tony Blair’s glass of white wine are clinking gently as an
amber sun sets over Jerusalem. At home the English spring is frosty, and no
soul is chillier than Gordon Brown, with his arctic poll ratings and his
authority slipping away. His predecessor and former friend, meanwhile, could
not be in a sunnier mood, far from the hostile press, from memories of cash
for honours, from the legacy of a war he launched in a country 500 miles
from where he is sitting chatting on this balmy evening in the Holy Land.
Our former prime minister, now 55, has found his place in the sun. In his new
role as Middle East envoy, he looks as tanned and relaxed as a prosperous
lawyer on holiday. “Always do peace negotiations in a sunny climate,” he
jokes, but he has not selected this job for the weather, or the sightseeing;
he has chosen it – God help us, some will say – because this is his second
phase of bringing harmony to the world.
It is oddly startling to see again the man who ran our lives for a decade and
then vanished, rather like stumbling across a missing person. Having
dominated headlines with his electoral victories, his wars and his summer
sojourns thanks to Cliff and Silvio, after his resignation from No 10 and
the House of Commons last June, he seemingly left his clothes in a pile on
the beach and swam off to begin a new life.
Back home we heard rumours of extravagantly remunerated speaking engagements
and his expanding portfolio of swanky property – the £3.6m town house in
Connaught Square, the £4m Chilterns residence near Chequers, and lucrative
advisory jobs with Zurich and J P Morgan, rumoured to be worth two
six-figure sums. But rein in your cynicism for a moment. The bits of his new
life that matter most to him come without salary. To anyone else, the job of
envoy in this political tinderbox would be a holiday in hell; but compared
with what Blair’s average day at the office had become – held accountable
for body bags and limbless soldiers, the first PM to be questioned by
Scotland Yard – it’s a breeze.
Seeing him now, relaxed and revelling in his new role, he looks like a man
given a second chance, a prisoner released from jail, or maybe out on
parole, in a hurry to win back the respect and popularity he once took for
granted.
“One thing you could say about me,” he says with a shrug, “is that I have no
problem moving on.” And then as an afterthought: “I still talk to David and
to Gordon.” Gordon? “Oh yes.”
The last time I saw Blair was at his Sedgefield house before the 2005
election, the one he feared he might not win: he looked tired, less buoyant
than usual, even in his pyjamas and Ugg boots, but not depressed. He
processes stress with brilliant efficiency, and the worst of his dejection
over the Iraq war had passed by then.
I fear we had begun to bore him back home; the actor had outgrown the stage.
In our conversations he mentioned the nightmare of dealing with foot and
mouth disease three times: “It had to be done, but frankly, it’s not what
you came into politics for.” No doubt he craved a bigger role bestriding the
world: Blair likes celebrity and red carpets and walking with giants, not to
mention wealth – why wouldn’t he? – but his desire to be a force for good in
the world is a prime and genuine motivator.
He has never been a “Great Britain” jingoist like Margaret Thatcher; he felt
our weakness and marginalisation keenly, the would-be Maserati driver who
was saddled with a rusty Micra. “Britain in the 21st century has got to get
the right idea of itself,” he says. “We are a country of 60m people, which
is not a huge amount, in a small geographical space. What we have, however,
is immense leverage as a result of being part of Europe and close to
America.”
Does being Middle East envoy feel more meaningful than being prime minister?
“It was an honour to be prime minister for 10 years. And I don’t look back
on any part of it and think it was a waste of time. But I wasn’t dealing
with an existential question for millions of people that can determine the
security for the region and the wider world. It’s a bigger order of
problem.” Would he ever consider returning to No 10? He splutters. “Now that
is never going to happen.”
I was a Tory-weary thirtysomething when I first met Tony Blair in 1996,
lounging on a sofa in his Commons office, coffee mug in hand, feet on the
table, an easy manner that would be spun into a political brand. I thought
we would grow old graciously together, but it strikes me now that the job
has aged me more than him: the worry about schools, pensions, murderous
streets, the rows about the Iraq war, which penetrated my domestic life,
opening rifts between family and loved ones. I told Blair about this in 2005.
“I’m so sorry about that,” he sympathised. Six weeks after the birth of my
longed-for only child, Tony’s bombs began falling on Baghdad.
I blamed him bitterly, personally. How had the brave new politics come to
this? Elsewhere, child poverty, the great crusade of the new-Labour cadre
(the bit that showed they still had the heart of the old left), has
continued to grow.
I ask him if such reports of failure cut him.
I know the answer before he speaks. Indeed, throughout our conversations I
find myself asking him, like an insecure girlfriend, to prove that he still
cares. But this man of natural empathy, so easy with the sharing of grief,
so blessed with a talent for intimacy with strangers, does not have time for
regret or even much reflection on what his role might have been in creating
a Britain of knife crime and illiterate 11-year-olds. Was the unprecedented
opportunity of three Labour victories wasted? “I see those reports about
illiteracy,” he replies quickly, “but people never compare a service with
what it was, they measure it against what it should be. Look at what’s
happened to the health service – there’s no discussion by the public of NHS
waiting times. Ten years before we came to power, and for the first four
years we were in power, people waited 18 months on an inpatient list. People
were dying on waiting lists for heart operations.”
What about his feelings on the state of the party that made him, an
organisation to which he feels maybe gratitude but no sentimental
attachment; its rickety finances, abysmal local-election results, and
profound identity crisis?
“The best thing I can do for the Labour party having left the stage,” he
laughs, “is not to be the source of noises off, or coming back on stage in a
bit part saying, ‘Oi! If it were me it’d all be different, you know!’ I
couldn’t have done the Middle East job and kept my seat. Even without it I
would have wanted a clean break from British politics.” And from the
pressures of working with his truculent chancellor, maybe?
“I have a great respect for people who do the job, and that’s why I have been
completely loyal since I left and will be always. Unless you’re sitting in
the middle of fuel protests you have no idea how incredibly difficult such
crises are to deal with. It’s a difficult enough job without your
predecessor hanging about causing trouble.”
Did he stop liking the top job? “No, I didn’t. But I always had a desire that
one day it would stop.
I never felt it was my whole life. My weakness as Labour’s leader and as prime
minister was that I always had it within myself to walk away rather than
cling on by my fingernails. People will say I did it too long, but I never
for a moment felt, ‘My life ends when this ends.’ I left without a sense of
grievance or desperation.” How about regret? “No regret. I look back with
pride on the city-academy programme and elements of the health service,
energy policy, nuclear power, Northern Ireland, inner-city regeneration.
Though some of the big decisions like Iraq or Afghanistan were
controversial, I know I was trying to do the right thing.” What was the
toughest time personally? “Everything since September 11, because I was
putting people in situations of real danger.”
They say all political careers end in tears, but Blair’s has been a cheery
wave goodbye, no backward glances, no breathing space before the new job.
“It was my inclination just to start a new life and get on with it, because
a clean break followed by a vacuum is not a great idea.” Was his departure
not a wrench? “I feel I should say, ‘Oh yes,’ but the truth is I didn’t feel
sad. I missed some of the people, but not the job. It was just so busy in
the run-up to going. The main thing was to get through things like the last
Prime Minister’s Questions. I didn’t want to be pompous and I didn’t want to
be mournful. I wanted to pay respect to the place. In spite of what people
say, I’ve always had a great respect for parliament, although I didn’t like
it, I certainly feared it at times. I was never going to get carried away
screaming and kicking, clinging on with my fingernails. I wanted to be out,
physically and mentally capable of the next chapter.”
And what about the relief in escaping scrutiny over his party’s finances? “The
so-called cash-for-peerages was very difficult, but by then I’d become
capable of getting above it. I just grew a carapace that allowed me to carry
on doing the job. I never got overly upset about all that. I was determined
not to feel self-pity.”
It is easy to imagine that Tony Blair had been coveting this new post for
years: the Middle East’s crucible of conflict obsessed him well before his
own foreign policy in the region brought him to grief. One of his
“conditions” for supporting the US in the action against Iraq was that they
re-engage with the peace process; George Bush’s publication of the (as yet
untravelled) “road map” was in part to assist his junior partner in his
arguments for intervention against Saddam. Blair had clearly reasoned that
this struggle required a mediator who could muster some belief in achievable
resolution, that Israel would learn to trust, that Palestinians would stop
hating and be rewarded with a state of their own.
Having made unelectable Labour the natural party of government for a decade,
he sees himself as a man who gets the better of hopeless causes, a winner,
and the disaster of Iraq doesn’t appear to have dented that. He has God on
his side, after all: reconciliation in the Middle East would mean not just a
Nobel peace price but a triumph of faith. So far the crowd pleaser has yet
to convince, however. Negativity – derision, even – swirls around him like
early morning fog.
His job is to help prepare the Palestinians for statehood; since he has been
in place, Palestinian per capita income has fallen, roadblocks and support
for Hamas have increased. Notwithstanding the recent Hamas ceasefire,
brokered by Egypt, the picture still looks bleak. Part of me wonders if his
seizing of the poison chalice was a new take on the old “masochism strategy”
– choosing the rockiest road to prove his sure-footedness, ensuring all
successes are against the odds and therefore glittering; or maybe a way of
atoning for the bloodshed in Iraq.
“Obviously, I take a different view of the war from most people, but it’s true
that I feel a great sense of responsibility for this region. I don’t feel
I’m putting something right, because I see all this as the same basic
struggle: getting rid of Saddam, the Palestinian peace process, pushing back
against Iran, sorting out Lebanon, a struggle about which the western world
is pretty much asleep.”
) ) ) ) )
In the tranquil American Colony hotel in disputed east Jerusalem, the
fourth-floor button on the lift is locked; climb the stairs and you are met
with a security gate and an armed guard. The handsome honey-coloured
19th-century residence, chosen for its competitive rates and its perceived
neutrality as a venue, is where you find Tony Blair for at least a week of
every month, heading a low-key operation in which media coverage is avoided
for fear of upsetting the fragile balance. The envoy has 13 full-time
diplomats at his disposal, some provided by the UN and foreign donors (the
UK’s Department for International Development underwrites around 10% of
costs), some on secondment from the World Bank, the Gendarmerie, the Foreign
Office.
The “boss”, as he is still called, takes me over to a UN map of the West Bank
and begins to point out strategic locations; there is something of the
excited amateur enthusiast in his urgency, and it’s curious to see the
big-picture politician so involved in the minutiae. “Look, the bits in red
are the settlements… these are roadblocks, these are earth mounds.” Blair
requested the envoy’s remit be extended from responsibility for the
Palestinian economy to include security, meaning he can raise issues of
access and movement, and he takes a perverse pleasure in the difficulty of
the task, how you get the settlers out, how you make a deal when Israel is
so entrenched.
On the morning of May 13, Blair holds a press conference; correspondents from
the Israeli, British and European press are gathered in the hotel to hear
details of his strategy for the area. His plans include renewed efforts on
the northern Gaza sewage project, an opening up between Nablus and Jenin to
permit free passage of agricultural workers, an industrial park sponsored by
the Germans to attract investment. The jewel among these promises is an
experiment in the West Bank settlement of Jenin in which the Palestinians
are to be given responsibility for security and the Israelis are to cease
incursions.
This is my first close-up glimpse of Blair for five years. The room seems
small and the audience, maybe 30 people, seems weirdly intimate for the
global superstar, but later in the day will present an even more surreal
scene when he repeats his presentation to Palestinian journalists at
Ramallah’s cultural palace, with its gleaming marble and theatre. In the
room are just three cameras, six journalists, and an air of this being
hardly worth their time. Blair stands between two Palestinian flags and
repeats his speech with an interpreter in a grubby anorak at his side. “I
totally understand the anger and the frustration the Palestinians feel,” he
tells them, ploughing on regardless. When I mention his uncharacteristic
grasp of the detail later, he replies that he would never have been able to
“solve Northern Ireland unless I was completely on top of the detail. I
could have described the dismantling of watchtowers”.
His personal role in the Good Friday agreement matters to him here.
“Actually,” says Blair, “the similarities are extraordinary, not least that
at first everybody in Northern Ireland said it’s hopeless because the other
side doesn’t want peace. That is what both sides say now. What each side
says about the other is essentially true – namely what the Palestinians say
about the injustice of occupation, and what the Israelis say about the
security problems. You have to deal with those realities, and change things
practically.
“You will not get a peace deal first. It has to begin on the ground, with
people seeing changes in their daily lives. I think the two sides want
peace. I am optimistic. People say, after 10 years as prime minister, going
through all this terrible stuff, didn’t I lose my ideals, but I’m as
idealistic as ever. The Israelis have got to make a psychological shift so
that they’re not saying, ‘If a state happens, okay,’ but that they are going
to help make it happen. I think that has begun. They wouldn’t have agreed
this package a few months back.”
And what of Blair’s own family life? In the week after our meeting, on May 20,
was Leo Blair’s eighth birthday, but it seemed unlikely his father would be
present to help him blow out his candles. “I’ve got to re-balance,” says the
guilty father on our trip to Jericho. “I regret not having spent more time
with my children while they were growing up.” Can’t the family join him
here? “It’s difficult with Leo’s school, but we’re going to try and sort it
out so that they can come with me more. Cherie can be away when I’m home, so
we have to be careful not to miss each other.”
In the past year he has adopted a portfolio of projects: envoy, adviser to
Rwanda and Sierra Leone, climate-change campaigner, champion of sport for
children, lecturer at Yale, all underpinned by the real focus of his
post-parliamentary life, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. In office, Blair,
who converted to Roman Catholicism last year, didn’t much discuss his
Christianity (“We don’t do God,” Alastair Campbell famously decreed, and
once privately to me: “He thinks we’re all bloody heathens”), but now he
means to talk about little else, having defined religion rather than secular
politics as the power axis of the future.
“This is what I want to be involved in for the rest of my life,” he says.
“It’s about how to make globalisation work. Globalisation pushes people
together. We have to ensure faith doesn’t pull them apart. Politics is not
about left and right any more, it’s about open and closed. The point of the
inter-faith efforts is keeping minds open, because extremism shuts them
down.” His foundation will build a war chest and partner with other groups
addressing global poverty, disease and extremism to realise the UN’s eight
“millennium development goals” adopted in 2000.
His altruistic roles are unpaid. When I ask him about his income, he implies
that his lucrative consultancies for Zurich and J P Morgan are a way, in the
words of one of his aides, to “pay the bills”, a struggle in which his
reputed £5m book deal and his fee of £100,000 on the public-speaking circuit
will help. But the Blairs have a reported mortgage liability of £5m on six
properties, and at his new offices in Grosvenor Square he employs 25 staff.
Euan Blair, who earns £30,000 as a Morgan Stanley trainee, is thought to
have bought a first flat in Islington for £550,000, one assumes with
parental help, so the mystery of his father’s personal finances remains.
Of course, he could have made much more had he not assumed his portfolio of
good causes. His Africa team are to spend several months with the Rwandan
government advising on policies to stimulate business and private-sector
investments, establishing an independent think-tank. Same in Sierra Leone.
His climate-change team is preparing a blueprint to cut carbon emissions by
50% by 2050 with the backing of China and the US; it will deliver a report
to the G8 group of industrialised nations this year.
) ) ) ) )
To reach Tony’s terrace, where he receives a stream of supplicants, I pass
through his bedroom, which is chaotic – a pair of trousers dumped on a stack
of newspapers, a Waitrose plastic bag, rumpled sheets, old coffee cups.
In an anteroom next door stands a treadmill, a bench press and an exercise mat
– all used daily. We eat lunch under huge parasols, overlooking east
Jerusalem’s temples and mosques, the trickle of water irrigating potted
plants. Waiters bring fish and roasted vegetables, but Blair takes three
bites and stops. He is careful about health, especially since his
arrhythmia, which is now in check but likely to return as the years pass.
Out here on the terrace, the old charm is in full swing as Israeli
journalists, local newspaper bosses, the chief rabbi (so smitten he invites
Blair to Friday dinner at home) drop by for “a chat”. He tends to listen
more than talk as he sips his strong Arab coffee, fudges a bit, lets
sentences trail off in midair, courts being interrupted. The reticence is
strategic. “I keep my views to myself. I just have to absorb other people’s.
People say the situation is impossible but it’s not. It could be resolved.
But it will require focus. In a year’s time, if it’s not significantly
better, it’ll be significantly worse.”
This year’s deadline for a settlement – before Bush leaves office – sounds
naive, if not slightly unhinged, given the deterioration of relations since
the second intifada, with the Israeli army raiding the West Bank every night
in search of suspected jihadis and the knife-edge possibility it will march
back into Hamas-controlled Gaza. Even while we are talking, a woman is
killed in a rocket attack on a shopping centre in Ashkelon.
This is not like the battles of domestic politics. The warring interests are
entrenched, the demoralisation on one side and the fear on the other
requiring more than an honest broker. Amid predictions of a third intifada,
Blair must be a dream weaver for people who have stopped daring to hope, a
narrator for a story that has lost the plot. You can see why he thinks he
fits the bill. He’s not often asked about Iraq: these people have their own
grievances, most were glad to see Saddam go, the soldiers dying are not
their young men. The Palestinians I speak to, the waiters, shopkeepers and
taxi drivers, might think Blair is wasting his time, but they hate him far
less than the average north London liberal.
“I can honestly say, since I’ve been here, no one has challenged or asked me
to justify the war. That’s not to say they don’t object to my closeness to
Israel, but a lot of the senior Palestinians are close to people in Israel.
I remember an early conversation when I was working with Mahmoud Abbas and a
journalist asked if my closeness to the Americans was a problem between us.
Abbas looked at me and said, ‘That’s the reason he’s useful. If you can’t
get on with the Americans and the Israelis, you can’t help us.’”
On a balmy evening, Blair is in chinos and a crisp blue shirt; a Palestinian
businessman pays his respects on the terrace; except he doesn’t. He tells
Blair there is no point his being here. “Go home, go and do your stuff, be
president of the EU, Sarkozy will get you in. You won’t achieve anything.
Israel will just play cat and mouse with you. Abbas is useless. Peres will
talk for ever and do nothing. The Israelis will agree to getting rid of a
roadblock, then you leave town, a bomb goes off and two more are put in
their place.”
Blair comments that this is not always the case: when a student was killed by
a Qassam rocket launched from Gaza recently, there was no such retaliation.
The urbane doomsayer is undeterred: the good, educated Palestinians have
left; only the scum and gangsters remain. Blair listens with unfaltering
patience, eventually seeming to win him over to his company if not his
mission. Later another wealthy entrepreneur drops by for a drink and a less
gloomy suggestion. “We must go out in London,” he says. “You go out? You
like Harry’s Bar? And Annabel’s for dancing?” Blair looks mock-horrified,
telling him it had better be somewhere “respectable”. The guy offers him a
holiday in his house in Marbella. “You been to Marbella?” “Yes,” says Blair.
“Where d’you stay?” “It was a long time ago. I was probably staying in a
shack. It was before, you know…”
Blair’s interpersonal formula is unchanged, that juxtaposition of personal
likability with a relish of harnessing unpopular causes. He is gifted at
making friends. The former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar had
dropped in for breakfast. Later, Blair had been to meet Israel’s head of
security, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, who tells him jokes – one of a
series of one-on-ones in which “people will open up to me” because he has
resisted “blabbing all over the place”. I ask about Ashkenazi, considered by
many the nation’s de facto leader. “He’s a really good guy, actually, but he
is under no illusions. He’s been helping put this new package together, but
if something goes wrong, he’ll be told he was a fool to listen, that his job
is protecting their security. You have to have some understanding of
Israel’s problem, which, by and large, they think Europeans don’t. If Israel
got out of the West Bank tomorrow, Hamas would take over.”
We set off for our trip to the West Bank, sirens honking, blue lights
flashing, in a city where nobody pays much attention, Blair’s security team
leading and tailing us. The Land Cruisers have blacked-out windows and
reinforced doors, heavy as tombstones. We are heading over the hills, and
down below sea level to the decimated town of Jericho. He points past me.
“That’s the Mount of Temptation over there, where Jesus was for
40 days and 40 nights. I visited it recently.” Was he tempted? He smiles: “There
was no one around to tempt me…
“The first time that I came to Jericho, I was like an excited tourist and I
said to the driver, ‘Show me where the walls are.’ He said, ‘I
seem to remember they all fell down.’”
We pass through two checkpoints as we enter the Palestinian territory, after
which the Palestinian security team take over. When he first arrived, the
Israelis offered to handle his security, but only if they had total control.
He declined. Eyebrows shoot up when he tells locals of his recent walkabout
in Jenin. Cherie and the family worry “from time to time”. “How can I have
the luxury of feeling scared when I’ve sent a whole lot of people into
dangerous situations?”
In the governor of Jericho’s residence, a group of farmers have come to put
their case. “The Israelis are planting on our land and we don’t even have
enough water to drink.” The visitor, who refused to condemn Israel for its
bombing of Lebanon, listens carefully, eating an apple. Later, out on the
parched hillsides of the Jordan valley, a farmer says he has invested half a
million in his farm and will invest another million if he has a guarantee
“that the Israelis won’t come with their bulldozers. All we need from the
Israelis is a guarantee of being left alone, and in six years you will see a
green line around Jericho”.
This strikes a chord with Blair, the frustrated entrepreneur who can see
nothing so clearly as the wasted opportunity for agriculture and tourism. An
inventive farmer has discovered that the nature of the local water
replicates sea water and has started a sea-water fish farm, selling his
produce to Israel. Blair is impressed by this. “Any time the Palestinians
are given the space to make something of their lives, they’re actually very
capable people.” It is his use of the word “actually” that makes me start. I
would call their willingness to move beyond dispossession to diversification
through fish-farming not so much capable as amazing – wouldn’t he? “Yes,
yes, I would.”
There is no doubt that in Blair’s mind he has moved not only on, but up, and
that the ladder to that promotion was provided by the most right-wing
American president in living memory, his buddy George. When I ask if it is
frustrating not to have the pedals and levers available to a national
leader, he smiles; I have missed the point. “Truthfully, the British prime
minister has limited power to affect this. Maybe 80 years ago he did. The
only way I affect it is by persuasion. And by giving people a sense of
strategy and a plan. No one outside the US president has meaningful levers
in their hands. (As we talk, Bush is flying in for Israel’s 60th birthday
with a reported 800 staff, 100 vehicles, his own food and water. He will
stay at the King David hotel, where Blair will meet him, and Jerusalem’s
roads will be impassable.) I think I’ve had an impact on the degree to which
he commits to this. He has visited the area more than any other US
president. The way he has focused on this since my appointment has been
greater than at any time.”
The opening session of Shimon Peres’s conference to celebrate his nation’s
birthday is chaired by Blair, who is treated by the 84-year-old president
like an adopted son. As we leave, people grab his hands with tears in their
eyes and whisper “God bless you” in his ear. He returns the smiles,
unembarrassed. “Thank you, thank you, we are doing what we can…” The
adoration is worn as lightly as ever; what a change from his last
beleaguered Downing Street years, when his personal approval rating dropped
to 28%.
There is a further thrill when the movie star Jon Voight strides up and
embraces him. “You are a hero, on this side of the Atlantic and on the other
side. Thank you for the amazing work you do.” Blair seems gobsmacked. As we
walk away he says: “God, that’s so surreal. He’s the father of Angelina
Jolie, isn’t he?” I tell him they are on non-speaks. “What about?” he asks,
intrigued.
Soon after my trip, I see Blair in London, at his swanky new office on
Grosvenor Square with four floors, one for each of his new passions.
I imagine him in the lift, travelling silently from “Climate Change” to “Peace
Process”; a department store of one man’s personal crusades.
His HQ is immaculate: cream carpets, fresh white paint, low olive leather
sofas, light flooding in. When I arrive he is sitting behind a desk jabbing
at a laptop. “Look, I’m doing it on my own, I’m not very good but I’m
getting better.”
On the mantelpiece behind his desk are the same framed family snaps – a 1998
family portrait, kids on ponies, Kathryn aged about eight – unpacked from
Downing Street, framed in brown, and looking dowdily out of place. “I need
to get some new ones,” he says unprompted. “They don’t look right here, do
they?”
This is Thursday, June 5, a throwback to his old life: GMTV sofa in the
morning, an appearance before the International Development Committee after
that, a speech at the Ark charity dinner in the evening. “Today feels too
much like the old days,” he groans. What was it like to be back in
parliament? “Two lines of sketch writers on either side of me… I thought,
‘Oh no, I’m sliding back into the past.’” The past? I have never known a man
more ruthlessly and viscerally attached to the future, allergic to nostalgia
and sentimentality.
Tony Blair did not turn out to be the leader I thought he would be when I woke
up on May 2, 1997, properly cheerful about politics for the first time in
years, properly convinced. But if we are surprised at the twists of his
premiership, so is
he: Europhile, peaceable Bambi turned out to be the pro-American champion of
liberal interventionism, and still is, however pear-shaped its later
excursions. “If you’d told me on May 1, 1997, that I’d be engaged in four
armed conflicts, I’d have been amazed.” And then, for a moment,
he turns into a character from P G Wodehouse, the love of whom he shared
with Michael Foot, party leader when Blair unsuccessfully fought the 1982
Beaconsfield by-election on a CND manifesto, the bright young man of
promise. “It’s not surprising to be surprised,” he grins. “And I’m not
surprised in the least!” He claims not to have much time for pondering his
assessment by history: too busy making it is what he quite possibly reasons.
“I don’t think much about legacy. Iraq, Afghanistan… You can’t tell what the
foreign- policy judgment on them will be at a later stage.” How long do you
need to be able to take a view?” He shakes his head. “I don’t know, but I’m
pretty sure that a year is a bit too soon.”
Do I still admire my old political pin-up, a man I’ve believed in, disavowed,
accused and latterly observed trying hard to be of service? Actually, I do.
Old habits die hard.
