Say what you like about him – and I often do – but Tony Blair remains inescapable. Perhaps that is why, almost 30 years after he first entered No.10 as Prime Minister, Channel 4 has a new three-part series following his journey from Fettes to Iraq.
The series features interviews with Blair’s wife Cherie and their children, and given the access, it’s a notably forgiving portrait, only slightly undercut by the occasional awkward cameo from Peter Mandelson.
Still, it shouldn’t be waved away. It plays, from start to finish, like a TED talk on the uses of ambition – and, with disarming frankness, Blair reveals what it takes to transform a country.
In the days leading up to the death of former Labour leader John Smith in 1994, Blair was on holiday in Paris with Cherie. He had a premonition that Smith’s heart condition would soon kill him, and the pair immediately started planning his path to the leadership of the party. He was successful, and in three years’ time became Prime Minister.
Callous, cunning and calculated: the criticisms the Right makes of Blair, the Left also made of Margaret Thatcher. It’s therefore unsurprising that the Iron Lady described New Labour, with its modernising zeal and rejection of socialism, as her greatest achievement. What the two prime ministers certainly had in common was that they came to power with a vision for how Britain ought to look once they were finished with it.
It is precisely how effective Blair was at transforming his vision into reality that made him such a destructive force. From the struggle to police our borders to the dire state of our universities, much of our current malaise can be traced back to Blair’s governments.
Through a comprehensive package of constitutional reforms, Blair utterly reshaped the state. It was he who established the devolved assemblies of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, stoking the disunity that now characterises our kingdom. In 1998, he passed the Human Rights Act, incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, thus outsourcing our ability to control inward migration to judges in Strasbourg. Not content with handing over decision-making to unelected officials abroad, he formalised this arrangement at home with the creation of the Supreme Court and a thicket of quangos.
Despite being a Prime Minister propelled to power in no small part due to his youthful energy, he also ended up ruining things for the young. Elected under the banner of ‘education, education, education’, Blair made it his mission to get 50% of school leavers into universities. We’ve now surpassed that, and have a generation of young people who have nothing to show for their three years studying postmodernism because they can’t get a job and have zero vocational training to fall back on. And while the Left loves to blame Maggie and council houses for the housing crisis, it was on Blair’s watch that house prices really started to zoom out of control, with pretty much no attempt to compensate by building more homes.
You might well say that it’s a bit of a cop-out blaming a leader who left Downing Street almost 20 years ago for our problems, particularly as we had 14 years of Tory rule between then and the current Labour Government. Yet regrettably, besides Brexit, the Conservatives did very little to change the Blairite constitutional settlement. Contrary to the promises made by almost all of the prime ministers we had in the meantime, the quangos remained intact and influential, and we continued to be hamstrung by European judges when it came to controlling migration.
Another enduring legacy of the Blair government, as predicted in 1997 by the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, was the proliferation of fringe beliefs about race and gender, and the subsequent entrenchment of these theories into law. The Tories failed to take action against this too, tying themselves up in knots about whether men could be women, importing American racial politics in the days of Black Lives Matter and presiding over the explosion of a human resources industry that holds employers hostage.
Ruinous though it’s been, you can’t help but admire just how effective the Blairite project was. By moulding the state to his political agenda, he was able to deliver lasting change. And although Kemi Badenoch has exhibited some much-needed self-reflection, it cannot be understated just how unprepared the Conservative Party was to take on the state that Blair built. In the face of such a deeply entrenched and sophisticated institutional structure, a traditional, evolutionary approach to political change was never going to cut it.
Regardless, the public have had enough. In Keir Starmer we have a Prime Minister still steeped in the trappings of Blairism – with his infatuation for human rights law and the Islington elite – yet he is the most unpopular since records began. There is now a contest underway on the British Right to provide an alternative model for Britain.
Both Badenoch and Nigel Farage could do worse than to watch Channel 4’s Blairite love-in, because voters are through with tinkering. Over the coming months and years, it will be up to either leader to prove that they have a plan to overhaul Blairism once and for all, and rebuild the state in a way that unlocks growth and opportunity through conservative means.
