A born-again Blairite?
As a teenage conservative I abhorred the Labour PM, but am reassessing him in the light of his vilification by the Left
I was nineteen when Tony Blair led New Labour to victory on 1 May 1997. As a Conservative teenager, I had my fingers tightly crossed for our local candidate in North East Fife, the Hon. Adam Bruce, an aristocratic lawyer who was occasionally accompanied by his elderly father, the Earl of Elgin and Kincardine (then serving as Lord Lieutenant of Fife). Reader, we did not carry the seat.
The Blair years were spent in furious impotence, raging as Tony took a wrecking ball to institutions like the House of Lords, and challenged much of what I held dear about the UK. I recognised the hopeless situation of the Conservative Party under William Hague and then (Jesus, what were we thinking?) Iain Duncan-Smith, but I argued passionately (and, in retrospect, wrongly) against policies like the national minimum wage and a massive increase in investment in the NHS. I loathed Blair’s shininess, his slick, demotic ease and mass appeal. It was, I thought, a cheap conjuring trick, the reduction of politics to sales rather than ideas; and that it was devastatingly successful just made me angrier.
For the past ten years, as in my childhood, I have once again been behind the party of government. I largely checked out of party politics for more than a decade, while I was a senior official in Parliament, and now, in the May/Johnson era, I find that it is the Left for whom Tony Blair is now the great hate figure. New Labour, new danger…
In ideological terms, I could hardly be further from Jeremy Corbyn and his apostles. But that is the way of politics: people have different ideas and they set them out for the electorate, hoping that their recipe for success will find favour. The excoriation of Blair, New Labour and seemingly anything successful in the party’s history has caused me to look again, to re-evaluate and to look at those pivotal years with the benefit of mature hindsight.
The distance of time has allowed me to accept that Blair, centrist sans pareil that he was and is, got some big things right. Huge spending on social housing brought almost all of our housing stock out of the most dismal condition; schools benefited in terms of investment, with results improving and the gap between the lowest attainers and the highest closing; and acceptance of the NHS internal market and the creation of primary care groups pointed towards a genuinely revolutionised health service with the patient at its core.
In some ways, Blair did not go far enough. Investment in public services was not complemented by as much reform as was needed, in part because of the Labour Party’s position as a hostage of vested interests, and the real radicals of the time, like Alan Milburn, Frank Field and John Hutton, left office disappointed men. But the central tenet, even if Blair could not present it in this way for political reasons, was choice, and that is a fundamental belief of conservatives.
There were missteps. League tables, instead of a metric to measure improvement, became a target in themselves and therefore lost their meaning. The decision that an arbitrary 50% of school leavers should attend university was a grossly distorting policy which led universities to chase numbers, and the funding that went with them; and it ignored the notion that many careers needed not a degree but solid vocational training. And devolution, at least in Scotland, has not shot the nationalist fox, as was promised. Rather it has provided a forum for separatism to blossom to an extent where the Union may not survive the decade.
Nevertheless, Blair transformed British politics. It is a fatuous argument that he was a Tory in disguise, but he certainly turned his party away from default public ownership, and helped temper the left’s reflexive belief that the man in Whitehall knew best. As a prophet is without honour in his own country, however, he fell out of favour almost as soon as he left office, and his pursuit of post-Downing Street riches did nothing to maintain his reputation.
The war in Iraq remains the greatest stain on his time in power for many. Certainly, the country was sold a false prospectus, and there was bad behaviour within the intelligence community to support a political decision Blair had already taken to support George W. Bush without reservation. Prima facie, I still believe the removal of Saddam Hussein was a good thing. The Iraqi dictator had butchered his own people by the tens of thousand and defied the international community with apparent impunity. Sanctions were not working and he was a threat to regional security. If the ‘how’ was bloodily miscalculated, the ‘why’ seemed (and seems) noble enough.
Now the former prime minister has crept back into the public consciousness, long hair and all. Corbynites recoil anew at the sight of the traitor, but I suspect I am not alone in the weird comfort of seeing an old face, aged now and bearing the scars of experience. Watching a recent interview on Newsnight, I said out loud “God, but he was good at this”, ‘this’ being politics. He seems now like a grown-up among rebellious and destructive children, and the vitriol of the Left only makes him seem more sympathetic.
Am I a Blairite now? Well, no. I still see the messianic fervour which gripped him so tightly in his Downing Street years. He ran government very poorly, and had no sense of the UK’s history and heritage—at least, not a sense which coincides with mine. But his presence is still impressive, and his feel for the pulse of the nation endures. We wanted the same things, he and I—opportunity, choice, growth, fairness, success—and however we differed on the means I see no echo of those ends in the current Labour Party. I am still a Conservative, but I am, perhaps, two decades later, Blair-curious.