Comment at end of page
- The article below, by Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun provides a reasonably well-balanced look at the Blair Years, though he only gives him 6 out of 10! Rather than put together a similar page I have copied it here, with full reference to The Sun and Mr Kavanagh.
- Trevor Kavanagh’s video commentary on Tony Blair With good and bad video clips. Not quite sure why thy have a dreadful clip of a man being attacked in there, but there you are! Can’t edit it, I’m afraid.
- This Sun page has several excellent videos of Blair highlights.
Tony Blair: The verdict
By TREVOR KAVANAGH
The Sun
MAY 11, 2007
WHEN Tony and Cherie Blair bounced into 10 Downing Street on May 2, 1997, the whole world seemed to be cheering.“Sleazy” Tories had been driven into exile. We were witnessing the start of a new golden age of optimism and opportunity.
Anything seemed possible.
Even opponents believed there was something remarkable about this political phenomenon — and felt guilty they could not join the applause.
Perhaps it was the sunshine on that beautiful spring morning.
But Britain — especially Sun readers — really did believe things could only get better.
So how’s he done?
I’ve had a privileged ringside seat throughout the Blair years.
I watched him as Opposition leader and as PM, at party conferences and through three election campaigns.
To see Blair’s resignation and reactions to the news
I accompanied him in the Prime Minister’s jet as he toured the world glad-handing presidents and premiers.
I’ve observed him from my Westminster press gallery eyrie and at his monthly Downing Street press conferences as he sipped tea between questions.
And I share widespread reservations about the wasted opportunities he brought in abundance to the job. But it is impossible to deny his premiership has been a beguiling tour de force.
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| 1997 … Blair arrives at No10 and, right, Diana’s body arrives back in Britain |
Tony Blair will leave an indelible impression on Britain, its politics and our way of life when he packs his Fender guitar and leaves Downing Street for ever.
Love him or loathe him, he is one of the most brilliant political operators of his age.
Yet even he cannot escape the old adage that all political careers end in tears.
For his most ferocious critics, the issue will always be Iraq.
But while he knows the conflict could have been better managed, he has few regrets about toppling tyrant Saddam Hussein.
If he has regrets, it is over his Government’s failure to deliver the public service reforms he promised at the start.
He vowed to “save the NHS”. He promised to be “tough on crime and the causes of crime”. And he spelled out his top priorities — “education, education, education”.
Today, as he waves farewell, Tony Blair himself admits he is “disappointed” by results.
But all this was still to come when he stormed to power in a landslide victory beyond his wildest dreams.
He swept into Number Ten with more authority and public goodwill than any Labour leader in history.
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| Scandal … Bernie Ecclestone |
And he was buoyed by a Rolls-Royce economy which would keep Britain flush for the next ten years.
This unrepeatable combination handed Labour a chance to change Britain for the better.
He had the money and the power to make permanent and beneficial changes to our gridlocked roads and chaotic railways.
He could have transformed the hopeless welfare system.
But this, and other golden opportunities, were missed.
There were spectacular Government initiatives from Day One. Chancellor Gordon Brown lobbed the first bombshell by giving the Bank of England control over inflation. Labour delivered its long-standing promise to bring in the minimum wage.
Spin doctors got to work, transforming staid old UK plc into Cool Britannia. Pop stars poured into Number Ten. The Millennium Dome was opened to an ungrateful nation.
Spin was Downing Street’s Original Sin.
It tarnished the Government’s image and left every official statement and statistic open to doubt.
The Treasury brought in a new accounting system, triple-counting its public spending figures. Budgets became a byword for duplicity.
And a relaxed PM shed his jacket and told the world: “Call me Tony”.
Casual chats on his sofa replaced stuffy Cabinet meetings.
Fears about over-powerful civil servants were solved by putting political appointees in command.
By good fortune, it was Britain’s turn to chair the European Union and the G-8 group of richest nations. It was a fabulous springboard for Tony Blair to address an international audience — and they loved him.
EU leaders applauded as Tony promised to put Britain at the “heart of Europe”.
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| Praise and criticism … Blair tipped for Nobel over Ulster and, right, famous front page over our fears for the pound |
His debut in Brussels was hailed as the end of Britain’s role as the roadblock to an EU superstate.
Amid fears he would ditch the Pound and sign up to the euro, The Sun swiftly dubbed him “The Most Dangerous Man In Britain”.
In the end, it was the powerful voice of Sun readers — and the intervention of Gordon Brown — that stopped him.
From the outset, the new Prime Minister became obsessed with finding a peace deal for Northern Ireland.
He spent months striving for the Good Friday breakthrough — often leaving important meetings to take crisis phone calls from key players.
At one critical point, as the squabbling sides threatened to storm out, he barred the door and forced them to stay until they reached the historic deal.
This week, ten years on, his legacy was sealed as the old enemies sat down together in a new, power-sharing government. In the meantime, he has notched up a record three Labour election victories and the party’s longest unbroken premiership.
His time in office has been accompanied by the longest period of unbroken economic growth in living memory.
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| Party PM … celebrating the Millennium with the Queen at the disastrous Dome and, right, hosting Noel Gallagher at Downing Street |
In some ways, he leaves behind a more tolerant, prosperous country at ease with ourselves — the envy of our European partners.
But he is accused of putting the United Kingdom at risk with regional powers in Wales and in Scotland, where voters may decide to quit the UK altogether. None of this seemed to worry voters.
For most of the Blair Decade, Tony’s easy smile and sunny disposition made him the most highly approved PM in polling history. His response to the death of Princess Diana — “the People’s Princess” — was a masterclass in presentation.
And his support for the monarchy may actually have saved the Royal Family. He continued to eclipse every other politician on the world stage.
His support for Democrat President Bill Clinton and then Republican George Bush made him an American idol.
He won Clinton’s undying gratitude by publicly backing him in the darkest hours of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And he eloquently captured America’s shock and horror, standing “shoulder to shoulder” with President Bush after 9/11. His support was vital in galvanising UN and Nato backing for toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And he established his humanitarian credentials by using British forces to save the lives of Muslim refugees in Kosovo and beat off a coup in Sierra Leone.
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| Scandal … Peter Mandelson |
For two of his three terms in Downing Street, Tony Blair was wildly popular at home and a major player on the world stage.
It is hard to remember now, but he also had the most positive media coverage of any leader since Winston Churchill in World War II.
Even newspapers hostile to Labour gave him a fair run.
Business chiefs once loyal to the Tories switched seamlessly to New Labour.
From my ringside seat, I have seen the Prime Minister handle memorable moments of high drama and powerful emotion.
Perhaps the most dramatic switch from euphoria to grief came on a summer’s day two years ago in Scotland.
Against all the odds, Tony Blair had led the London campaign for the 2012 Olympics to spectacular victory and celebrated late into the night in Gleneagles, where he was hosting a G-8 summit.
As the news was flashed from Singapore, he was seen dancing with joy as he embraced a startled Downing Street aide.
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| Difficulties … memo leak in 2000 and the September 11 2001 terror attacks that drew him to work with US |
Hours later he was flying to London to survey the wreckage of the 7/7 massacre.
It was a poignant switch from triumph to despair — and showed Blair at his inimitable best.
He was also the original Teflon politician — nothing ever stuck.
But there were plenty of incidents which would have sunk a Tory administration in its most vulnerable days.
They included the 1997 Ecclestone Affair, when Labour had to hand back a £1m donation after a ban on cigarette advertising was lifted for Formula 1 racing.
The public accepted Tony’s explanation that he was a “pretty straight kinda guy”.
Nor was he hurt by the sacking of Cabinet ally Peter Mandelson, first for fiddling his mortgage and then for “helping” an Indian tycoon with a passport application.
Nobody blamed Tony when his wife Cherie fell into the clutches of Aussie conman Peter Foster, boyfriend of her pal and health guru Carole Caplin.
Cherie had to make an embarrassing TV statement about the problems of a working mum “trying to keep all the balls in the air” after Foster used her name to win a discount on some Bristol flats.
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| United … Blair stands firm with Bush at a 2006 White House press conference over the conflict in Lebanon |
Yet despite constantly high ratings this was an insecure Government.
Ministers were under siege about familiar issues — crime, anti-social behaviour, family breakdown.
And there was a series of fly-on-the-wall documentaries showing unflattering glimpses of Downing Street and the Treasury at work.
In 2000, I was handed a series of brown envelopes full of secret memos, one of them from Chequers, in the PM’s own handwriting. Labour, he said, was seen as “out of touch” over violent crime, court sentences, support for gay rights, Europe and the decision to scrap married couples’ tax relief.
The father of four wrote: “It is bizarre that any government I lead should be seen as anti-family.
“All these things add up to a sense the Government — and this even applies to me — are somehow out of touch with gut British instincts.”
His personal polling guru, Philip Gould, wrote a memo which also ended up in my hands. Voters were turning against the PM, he said.
“TB is not believed to be real. He lacks conviction. He is all spin and presentation.”
And Tony seemed to confirm that view with this famous request: “We need two or three eye-catching initiatives. I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible.”
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| Pressure … 2005 general election and the Cheriegate scandal |
It was about that time that he promised to march yobs off to the nearest cashpoint machine to pay on-the-spot fines.
Scandals came and went, but Tony Blair’s personal ratings remained untarnished.
Or perhaps not.
The PM’s critics will blame the Iraq war for wrecking his golden run. They dismiss as a whitewash the Hutton Report which cleared Downing Street over the controversial weapons of mass destruction dossier.
But Tony Blair will go to his grave convinced that he was right to join the invasion that ended Saddam Hussein’s reign as the Butcher of Baghdad.
And that Jacques Chirac’s paranoid anti-Americanism stopped this being a UN-backed operation.
Tony Blair supported action to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan — as did the rest of the world at the time.
He has no illusions about the subsequent eruption of Islamic violence, especially in Britain.
But he believes the fanatical fringes of Islam had already declared war on the Western way of life long before the events of 9/11.
What disappoints him is not his foreign adventures, but his domestic failures. I believe the rot began to set in here long before he sent Our Boys into action.
Disillusion began with mass immigration and the nightly TV images of so-called refugees pouring across the Channel from France.
Ministers made a token show of resistance.
And when Home Office minister Barbara Roche admitted we were being “swamped by bogus asylum seekers”, she was swiftly silenced.
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| Overshadowed … the Iraq war and the dodgy dossier will define premiership |
Officially, at least 1.5 million have arrived over ten years, with perhaps as many again here illegally.
When ten new Central European states joined the EU, we opened our doors to all-comers.
And while ministers predicted no more than 13,000 would take the opportunity, the true figure ended up at 650,000.
Today, even the Home Office admits public services are “buckling” under the sheer numbers involved.
Meanwhile violent crime and shootings have risen alarmingly.
Both developments, coupled with increasing evidence of wasted taxpayers’ money, have damaged Labour’s poll ratings.
The party’s image was not helped by John Prescott’s grotesque romping with secretary Tracey Temple.
Nor the fact that he remains Deputy Prime Minister on a salary of £133,000 a year plus valuable perks.
To make matters worse, there is now a viable Opposition.
Tony Blair has seen off four Tory leaders — John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith and Michael Howard.
For nine of his ten years he had a clear run. But the arrival of David Cameron has transformed the chemical equation.
Last week, the Tories scored enough votes for victory in a General Election, and Labour had to make do with a meagre 27 per cent.
That result was more than just a mid-term blip. Labour cannot count on recovering those lost votes once the punters see sense.
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| Feud … a 2005 bout of the TB-GBs |
They may have been happy to cough up more tax in a good cause — the NHS and schools — but now they have begun to notice it has been misspent.
Child poverty has increased. The number of young unemployed has grown. Newly trained doctors and nurses are in revolt because they cannot find jobs.
Yet GPs and consultants have been awarded huge pay rises for doing less work.
Older workers and those already retired blame the Government for wrecking the world’s best pension schemes.
And, after ten years, the number of people of working age claiming unemployment-related benefits is barely unchanged at 5.6 million.
Mr Blair regrets not doing enough to shake up the bureaucracy in the NHS, education and welfare services — before spending taxpayers’ money.
And whatever warm words he eventually conjures up for Gordon Brown as his successor, he blames his Chancellor for most of the failings.
Tony and Gordon are the giants of New Labour. Yet the tension between them flows through their Downing Street years like a running sore.
What began as close friendship in the 1980s was transformed into bitter rivalry when Tony nabbed the Labour crown in 1994.
Since then, New Labour has been beset by periodic bouts of what has become known as the “TB-GBs”.
In the early years, Tony handled the explosions of fury from next door by ignoring them. But in recent years the eruptions have become dangerously threatening.
The Chancellor believed he had a promise from Tony that he would step down as PM after a term and a half. Tony insists there was only one deal — to leave Gordon in charge of all economic decisions — including, thankfully, the euro.
But as criticism of wasted cash and inefficient service grew, he regretted even that.
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| Triumph to tragedy … London was hit by bombs the day after Olympics win |
In 2002, the PM was so incensed by Gordon’s opposition to reform that he decided to sack him.
When I revealed this in The Sun, there was a blazing row between the two men and — despite encouragement from his closest allies — Tony changed his mind.
In 2005, he came close to splitting the Treasury in two and offering Gordon the Foreign Secretary role.
But by then his authority as Prime Minister had begun to seep away.
He was chastened by the slump in support for Labour at the 2005 election and promised he would not lead the party into a fourth term.
From that moment, he was heading for the door, pushed firmly on his way by Gordon.
Today, he accepts Labour has not lived up to his promises, especially in run-down inner cities where anti-social behaviour is rife.
“What I have learned over these ten years is that the original analysis I had was incomplete and therefore misguided,” he confessed recently.
I think he had the best guidance available — Frank Field, who he hired to “think the unthinkable” — only to sack him.
Tony Blair will read out shopping lists of success stories. And there are plenty.
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| Relaxing … PM in casual pose |
But despite the famous “scars on my back” inflicted by Leftie unions, too much money has been spent, wasted and cannot be spent again.
Sure, there are more doctors and nurses. Waiting lists are shorter. Fewer are dying of cancer.
But the gap between rich and poor is growing and, thanks to tax bungles, millions of poor people are even poorer.
Headmasters say we are turning out an “unemployable” army of under-educated youngsters.
And the UN brands Britain the worst place in the developed world for children to grow up.
Tony Blair will blame himself for not acting sooner.
But the person he really believes is at fault is Gordon Brown.
At one point, during the 2001 elections, I asked the PM why he hadn’t used his enduring popularity to accomplish more in his first term.
“Well, Trevor,” he explained patiently. “We’d been in Opposition for 18 years. When we came to power we had to spend the first term learning how to use the clutch and brakes.”
That was a rare slip.
New Labour spent its first term in power with one objective only — to win a second.
But no Government is entitled to a dry run while it learns the ropes. It cannot count on a second chance.
So how will Tony Blair be remembered?
Even today, battered by recriminations over Iraq, millions of supporters will be sorry to see him go.
Others will see him as being preoccupied with the trappings of power and bored by the grinding work of government. Political allies and impartial analysts predict history is likely to be kinder to a man who tried to do his best.
My forecast is that his failures, real and imagined, will soon be forgotten or forgiven.
Voters will miss his sunny smile, his easy style and his “Aw, shucks” self-effacement.
I predict those with grudges against New Labour will turn their wrath against his successor.
And Gordon Brown may not be able to turn on the charm he needs to fend it off.
