I first met Tony Blair on a bitterly cold day in Hackney in March. I’d just read an article in a magazine in which the writer said that one of the many reasons he hated Blair was because he, Blair, never wore an overcoat. Sure enough, Blair bounded coatless out of his Daimler and strode into the new school he was in East London to open. He may dress light, but, having dominated British politics for 11 years now, he brings a lot of baggage: "Huh," I found myself thinking cynically, "no coat, eh, Blair?" I had to remind myself that it doesn’t have much bearing on a man’s character whether he wears a coat or not.
Although maybe he should consider one. With him on another cold day, this time on the M4 between Cardiff and Swansea, he leaned forward to the silent, square-shouldered men upfront and said matily, "Couldn’t bung the heating up, could you, boys?" No doubt some people, not all of them Spectator columnists, will hate him just a little bit more for that "bung" and that "boys". For the further amusement/information of his sworn enemies, I can also confirm that Blair repeatedly used "kids" instead of "children", coarsened his accent on occasions, drank water straight from the bottle and recalled being "potentially very rebellious as a youngster". None of which bothers me at all. The way Labour plays U2’s Beautiful Day before Blair enters a room, however? That I do find irritating.
On that same motorway journey, a rather eerie one, pitch dark except for the green glow of a telephone handset in the armrest between us, a glow which lit Blair’s torso and the lower half of his face, I asked whether he agreed that politicians get to a point where the public just gets fed up with them. "Yes," said the green-lit mouth. And there are a lot of people out there who simply don’t like him? "Yes." Irrespective of anything you say or do? "Yes, that happens. That’s the wear and tear of the job." But doesn’t it bother you, what must amount to millions of people…? "Saying ‘I hate him’? I’m not insensitive to it but you can’t start weeping into your tea about it."
He believes he was elected in 1997 because he, in common with enough of the rest of the country, had moved beyond the class-based politics of the past. He thinks that many of the people who hate him, particularly those in the press given to what he calls "howls of rage", are people who have not made that move. "The people who hate me most on the Right are the people who have got a sort of class traitor thing. I went to a private school, and was reasonably successful, and they’re kind of ‘What on earth are you doing in the Labour Party? You’re a phoney’!" And then, I said, there are people on the Left who also think, ‘What on earth are you doing in the Labour Party’? "Yes. And they constantly say it. And the media say it, as if I arrived from Mars to lead the Labour Party. I was the first leader of the Labour Party to be elected by the entire membership."
I said (I was still fixated on the coat issue) that part of the hatred, maybe, is a hatred of modernity itself, of informality, of the end of deference and so forth, as when Gordon Brown got a kicking for not wearing white tie to the Mansion House. "That’s right," said Blair. "I once talked about ‘the tyranny of the suit’ and God, what a whacking I got for that… they constantly write this stuff. They constantly," his voice rose, "over the years have absolutely made up this stuff about my being disrespectful to the Queen. Completely made- up nonsense! As if there is some inconsistency in the fact that you occupy this position and the fact you can play Johnny B. Goode."
And anyway, I said, on the class traitor point, your father was a self-made man. "Absolutely. He was a foster child brought up in a working-class part of Glasgow and my granny lived in a corporation flat. But I can’t stand all that ‘I’m more working class than you’ business." When he went to Oxford, Blair said, he "realised that there were gradations of privilege. I suddenly saw the difference between going to a very good Scottish private school [Fettes] and going to Eton or Westminster." So, not prolier than thou, or God forbid, posher than thou, but rather: slightly-less-middle-class-than-some-other-people-at-Oxford-University-in-the-early-Seventies. Very Third Way.
I’ve seen Blair four times over the past two months: that time in Hackney; a half-day trip to Hove; an overnight visit to Gloucestershire and Wales; finally a 30-minute interview in his campaign HQ near Westminster. Given the received wisdom about new Labour control freakery, it is worth pointing out that while I couldn’t separate Michael Howard from his press secretary Guy Black, nor Charles Kennedy from his communications chief Jackie Rowley, the Prime Minister talked to me without David Hill monitoring his every word. Alastair Campbell, back in the fold for the campaign but trying to keep a low profile, turned up once or twice. Having not been around in Gloucestershire, for instance, when we got to the hotel on the Gower later that day suddenly there he was in his tracksuit and trainers. How did you get here? I asked. "I ran," said Campbell, wiping his nose in trademark fashion. "Took me 17 days."
As for spin, you decide. In Swansea, before a radio phone-in, Blair’s aides prepped him on the questions he would face. Who would he support in the following day’s rugby international between Wales and Ireland? Blair didn’t say anything and, to my mind, as an Anglo-Scot, he didn’t much care either way. "You’re the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom," urged Campbell, "you’ve gotta go for Wales." "Well, the truth is I would support Wales," said Blair, half-distracted. On the radio, he said Wales. (Not a tough call really, given where we were.) Another question: what music did he like at the moment? One aide suggested Keane, a good safe choice. Blair was firmer on that. He’d put on an old Aerosmith album the night before, and that’s what he said on the radio. Not many votes in Aerosmith, I should think.
Being with Blair was all planes, trains and automobiles, smart offices and spanking-new community or business centres. His world must smell disproportionately of new carpets and First Class, of the rich leather of luxury cars and recycled aircon at 12,000ft. He goes everywhere very fast, in a phalanx when on foot or a convoy when on wheels, 75mph up the Westway to RAF Northolt, one old boy on the A40 saluting the cavalcade, another younger man giving it the finger. Motorcycle outriders clear the traffic up ahead. At a roundabout near Cheltenham, Countryside Alliance territory, JFK-in-Dallas territory, one large man objected to this practice, clambering out of his pick-up to remonstrate. In the best British tradition, no one took much notice of him. "In my country," observed a visiting American journalist, "he’d be dead."
"You’re not living a real life in this job," Blair admitted. "There’s no point pretending." But pretending is what his critics say Blair does too much of. They were saying it long before Iraq. I’ve always thought, if Tony Blair is such a great actor, as Michael Howard and others allege, why do so many people think he is such a phoney? He can’t be that good a performer, can he? And in my opinion, he’s not. Out on the stump, he’s effective, especially in smaller groups, he does the "Why are you hiding there at the back? I bet you do all the work!" routine quite well, but he can be awkward too, and occasionally tentative and even curiously detached. He hasn’t got the common touch I’ve seen in John Reid and (surprising perhaps but true) Jack Straw. "Let’s not go backwards," he told one group of supporters, "that wouldn’t be wise." Hardly "To the barricades!", is it?
In the Gloucestershire village of Highnam, after meeting an invited audience, Blair made an unscheduled stop at a ballet class in the old village hall. No one, least of all the Prime Minister, seemed to know what to do, so the ballet mistress, an imposing woman, began bossing him about like one of her small charges. He didn’t say anything particularly smooth or winning. He didn’t act at all, and a little acting was just what was called for. He mostly just stood there looking, as I think Nick Danziger’s photograph makes clear, like a bit of a dork. This is probably how most of us would have looked in the same situation. It was not the behaviour of a great thespian-manqué. "You’re staying for the ladies’ tap class?" said the mistress. "Er, no," said Blair. "I’ve got to go to Swansea."
I found the less attention on him, the more impressive he was. It’s become a commonplace to say of Michael Howard that he’s a more likeable man in person than he appears on television. Having met them both, with and without cameras around, I think the observation is more true of Tony Blair. Whenever a TV camera appears, he does his rictus grin and his feet apart, hips-and-jaw forward stance. Away from the film crews, Blair was more charismatic, more relaxed and much more normal than his public persona suggests. Of the three party leaders, Blair was the least like A Politician, insofar as politicians can often appear shifty and evasive. Yet to many, Blair exemplifies evasive politicians. Again, many people thought this long before the Iraq war. I said when people complain, "We don’t know where we are with Blair", did he understand why they said that? "Yes, I do. But the people opposed to me were always going to say one of two things, either new Labour has turned into old Labour or there’s something wrong with this man’s character." Agreed, I said, but I’m thinking more of people who don’t outright dislike you, people such as, say, Paddy Ashdown (who got on well with him personally) who wrote in his diaries that your problem was that you’d ditched socialism and hadn’t replaced it with another coherent set of beliefs.
