Blair the Bold

Authored by Andrew Apostolou

WHAT makes Tony Blair tick?

To many of his compatriots, the British prime minister is a mystery. A devout Christian in a nation of atheists, he forsook his comfortable background to join the avowedly socialist Labor Party. Blair is emotional, principled and capable of unsentimental ruthlessness. Blair is described by enemies on the left as an American poodle and on the right as a pro-European traitor. A believer in unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1983, Blair by 2003 had become willing to risk his job to take Britain to war alongside the United States in Iraq.

The best answer so far has now been provided by Philip Stephens, a journalist at The Financial Times whose career has progressed in tandem with Blair's. Stephens argues that Blair is a 19th-century liberal, stirred by religious faith and a vague concept of global community.

In his persuasive, short and well-researched political biography, Stephens describes Blair as a man who sees no inconsistency between promoting national interests and humanitarian intervention.

 The value of this book goes beyond its acute observation of an elusive politician. Without aiming to do so, Stephens destroys many of the claims of those who opposed the war with Iraq.

Blair, he reports, was concerned about Iraq from the moment he took office in May 1997. Iraq came up in almost every Blair-Clinton meeting. In his first foreign policy speech in November 1997, Blair said that his determination to force Saddam to comply with U.N. resolutions was “unshakable.” This stance mirrored a much cited letter from the Project for a New American Century, a staple of anti-war conspiracy theories, that was sent to President Clinton in January 1998. Blair, it would appear, was a premature neo-conservative.

Intelligence reports about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein have been politically controversial and, thanks to the dishonesty of news organizations such as the BBC, damaging to Blair.

Stephens writes that publishing intelligence, to educate the public about Saddam, was suggested to Blair in '97 by the second largest opposition party in Britain, the Liberal Democrats. Yet when it came to the war in Iraq in 2003, the same Liberal Democrats voted against war and have since trashed pre-war intelligence.

Despite some shortcomings (the narrative occasionally jumps around), Stephens has produced the best portrait to date of a statesman who has shown himself able to lead both Britain and, when necessary, the West.

The resolve that Blair showed over Kosovo, while others wavered and Clinton dithered, stood him in good stead after 9/11. But then, while Blair may be the leader of the Labor Party, his contemporary political idol was that staunchest of Conservatives: Margaret Thatcher.

Andrew Apostolou is director of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.