Blair’s “Second Coming” (here ‘n’ there)

• Home
• Glasgow By-Election Kerfuffle – 2 Deserters in 48 hours – replaced by MSP Health Spokesman
• More on the Sinking Ship story here: Is Brown’s Number up?
• Brown stands up to the Trades Unions – GOOD for him! Shame he didn’t work harder with Blair to loosen the funding ties when he had the chance. Read Blair’s 2004 speech to the TUC on the Warwick Agreement.
• One Year On Blair still “lethally chirpy”
• Historical point of interest: Notice how many voters wanted Blair to serve “a full third term” after his 2nd heart operation revelations in 2004, and his mention of his intention to serve, if elected. Odd how we got the press message that we all hated him. The few commenters who criticised and described him as a ‘war criminal’ understand little about the quaint British tradition of “innocent until proven guilty”. The press is the main culprit, imho! Today they should be hanging their heads in shame. Well, them AND the Labour party!

Comment at end

6th July, 2008

The reticence is strategic.

[Blair]: “I keep my views to myself. I just have to absorb other people’s.”

[Pictures: May, 2008: The Middle East Envoy greeted by hundreds in the West Bank market
town of Jenin. A few years ago this sort of walkabout would have been unthinkable.]

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We pass through two checkpoints as we enter the Palestinian territory, after which the Palestinian security team take over. When he first arrived, the Israelis offered to handle his security, but only if they had total control. He declined. Eyebrows shoot up when he tells locals of his recent walkabout in Jenin. Cherie and the family worry “from time to time”.

“How can I have the luxury of feeling scared when I’ve sent a whole lot of people into dangerous situations?”

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Lesley White of the Sunday Times has an excellent article here on Mr Blair’s “Second Coming” – take that title as you will!

And just to balance things, The Mail has a most unlikely Blair headline – “Don’t diss me (Gordon) or you will let in Cameron”

Which of these you find more credible is up to you, but Mr Blair does NOT speak in that way. He’s of the generation which likes to use language properly – y’know – nouns as verbs! So, he’d have said “don’t rubbish me”!

Putting aside The Mail’s fondness for ‘poetic’ licence, there could well be some truth to the story, though of course it is vehemently denied by Mr Blair’s spokesman. But even a former prime minister has an opinion or two and a friend or two. And you know how people love to blab!

The Sunday Times article follows:

Two ice cubes in Tony Blair’s glass of white wine are clinking gently as an amber sun sets over Jerusalem. At home the English spring is frosty, and no soul is chillier than Gordon Brown, with his arctic poll ratings and his authority slipping away. His predecessor and former friend, meanwhile, could not be in a sunnier mood, far from the hostile press, from memories of cash for honours, from the legacy of a war he launched in a country 500 miles from where he is sitting chatting on this balmy evening in the Holy Land.

Our former prime minister, now 55, has found his place in the sun. In his new role as Middle East envoy, he looks as tanned and relaxed as a prosperous lawyer on holiday. “Always do peace negotiations in a sunny climate,” he jokes, but he has not selected this job for the weather, or the sightseeing; he has chosen it – God help us, some will say – because this is his second phase of bringing harmony to the world.

It is oddly startling to see again the man who ran our lives for a decade and then vanished, rather like stumbling across a missing person. Having dominated headlines with his electoral victories, his wars and his summer sojourns thanks to Cliff and Silvio, after his resignation from No 10 and the House of Commons last June, he seemingly left his clothes in a pile on the beach and swam off to begin a new life.

Back home we heard rumours of extravagantly remunerated speaking engagements and his expanding portfolio of swanky property – the £3.6m town house in Connaught Square, the £4m Chilterns residence near Chequers, and lucrative advisory jobs with Zurich and J P Morgan, rumoured to be worth two six-figure sums. But rein in your cynicism for a moment. The bits of his new life that matter most to him come without salary. To anyone else, the job of envoy in this political tinderbox would be a holiday in hell; but compared with what Blair’s average day at the office had become – held accountable for body bags and limbless soldiers, the first PM to be questioned by Scotland Yard – it’s a breeze.

Seeing him now, relaxed and revelling in his new role, he looks like a man given a second chance, a prisoner released from jail, or maybe out on parole, in a hurry to win back the respect and popularity he once took for granted.

“One thing you could say about me,” he says with a shrug, “is that I have no problem moving on.” And then as an afterthought: “I still talk to David and to Gordon.” Gordon? “Oh yes.”

The last time I saw Blair was at his Sedgefield house before the 2005 election, the one he feared he might not win: he looked tired, less buoyant than usual, even in his pyjamas and Ugg boots, but not depressed. He processes stress with brilliant efficiency, and the worst of his dejection over the Iraq war had passed by then.

I fear we had begun to bore him back home; the actor had outgrown the stage. In our conversations he mentioned the nightmare of dealing with foot and mouth disease three times: “It had to be done, but frankly, it’s not what you came into politics for.” No doubt he craved a bigger role bestriding the world: Blair likes celebrity and red carpets and walking with giants, not to mention wealth – why wouldn’t he? – but his desire to be a force for good in the world is a prime and genuine motivator.

He has never been a “Great Britain” jingoist like Margaret Thatcher; he felt our weakness and marginalisation keenly, the would-be Maserati driver who was saddled with a rusty Micra. “Britain in the 21st century has got to get the right idea of itself,” he says. “We are a country of 60m people, which is not a huge amount, in a small geographical space. What we have, however, is immense leverage as a result of being part of Europe and close to America.”

Does being Middle East envoy feel more meaningful than being prime minister? “It was an honour to be prime minister for 10 years. And I don’t look back on any part of it and think it was a waste of time. But I wasn’t dealing with an existential question for millions of people that can determine the security for the region and the wider world. It’s a bigger order of problem.” Would he ever consider returning to No 10? He splutters. “Now that is never going to happen.”

I was a Tory-weary thirtysomething when I first met Tony Blair in 1996, lounging on a sofa in his Commons office, coffee mug in hand, feet on the table, an easy manner that would be spun into a political brand. I thought we would grow old graciously together, but it strikes me now that the job has aged me more than him: the worry about schools, pensions, murderous streets, the rows about the Iraq war, which penetrated my domestic life, opening rifts between family and loved ones. I told Blair about this in 2005.

“I’m so sorry about that,” he sympathised. Six weeks after the birth of my longed-for only child, Tony’s bombs began falling on Baghdad.

I blamed him bitterly, personally. How had the brave new politics come to this? Elsewhere, child poverty, the great crusade of the new-Labour cadre (the bit that showed they still had the heart of the old left), has continued to grow.

I ask him if such reports of failure cut him.

I know the answer before he speaks. Indeed, throughout our conversations I find myself asking him, like an insecure girlfriend, to prove that he still cares. But this man of natural empathy, so easy with the sharing of grief, so blessed with a talent for intimacy with strangers, does not have time for regret or even much reflection on what his role might have been in creating a Britain of knife crime and illiterate 11-year-olds. Was the unprecedented opportunity of three Labour victories wasted? “I see those reports about illiteracy,” he replies quickly, “but people never compare a service with what it was, they measure it against what it should be. Look at what’s happened to the health service – there’s no discussion by the public of NHS waiting times. Ten years before we came to power, and for the first four years we were in power, people waited 18 months on an inpatient list. People were dying on waiting lists for heart operations.”

What about his feelings on the state of the party that made him, an organisation to which he feels maybe gratitude but no sentimental attachment; its rickety finances, abysmal local-election results, and profound identity crisis?

“The best thing I can do for the Labour party having left the stage,” he laughs, “is not to be the source of noises off, or coming back on stage in a bit part saying, ‘Oi! If it were me it’d all be different, you know!’ I couldn’t have done the Middle East job and kept my seat. Even without it I would have wanted a clean break from British politics.” And from the pressures of working with his truculent chancellor, maybe?

“I have a great respect for people who do the job, and that’s why I have been completely loyal since I left and will be always. Unless you’re sitting in the middle of fuel protests you have no idea how incredibly difficult such crises are to deal with. It’s a difficult enough job without your predecessor hanging about causing trouble.”

Did he stop liking the top job? “No, I didn’t. But I always had a desire that one day it would stop.

I never felt it was my whole life. My weakness as Labour’s leader and as prime minister was that I always had it within myself to walk away rather than cling on by my fingernails. People will say I did it too long, but I never for a moment felt, ‘My life ends when this ends.’ I left without a sense of grievance or desperation.” How about regret? “No regret. I look back with pride on the city-academy programme and elements of the health service, energy policy, nuclear power, Northern Ireland, inner-city regeneration. Though some of the big decisions like Iraq or Afghanistan were controversial, I know I was trying to do the right thing.” What was the toughest time personally? “Everything since September 11, because I was putting people in situations of real danger.”

They say all political careers end in tears, but Blair’s has been a cheery wave goodbye, no backward glances, no breathing space before the new job. “It was my inclination just to start a new life and get on with it, because a clean break followed by a vacuum is not a great idea.” Was his departure not a wrench? “I feel I should say, ‘Oh yes,’ but the truth is I didn’t feel sad. I missed some of the people, but not the job. It was just so busy in the run-up to going. The main thing was to get through things like the last Prime Minister’s Questions. I didn’t want to be pompous and I didn’t want to be mournful. I wanted to pay respect to the place. In spite of what people say, I’ve always had a great respect for parliament, although I didn’t like it, I certainly feared it at times. I was never going to get carried away screaming and kicking, clinging on with my fingernails. I wanted to be out, physically and mentally capable of the next chapter.”

And what about the relief in escaping scrutiny over his party’s finances? “The so-called cash-for-peerages was very difficult, but by then I’d become capable of getting above it. I just grew a carapace that allowed me to carry on doing the job. I never got overly upset about all that. I was determined not to feel self-pity.”

It is easy to imagine that Tony Blair had been coveting this new post for years: the Middle East’s crucible of conflict obsessed him well before his own foreign policy in the region brought him to grief. One of his “conditions” for supporting the US in the action against Iraq was that they re-engage with the peace process; George Bush’s publication of the (as yet untravelled) “road map” was in part to assist his junior partner in his arguments for intervention against Saddam. Blair had clearly reasoned that this struggle required a mediator who could muster some belief in achievable resolution, that Israel would learn to trust, that Palestinians would stop hating and be rewarded with a state of their own.

Having made unelectable Labour the natural party of government for a decade, he sees himself as a man who gets the better of hopeless causes, a winner, and the disaster of Iraq doesn’t appear to have dented that. He has God on his side, after all: reconciliation in the Middle East would mean not just a Nobel peace price but a triumph of faith. So far the crowd pleaser has yet to convince, however. Negativity – derision, even – swirls around him like early morning fog.

His job is to help prepare the Palestinians for statehood; since he has been in place, Palestinian per capita income has fallen, roadblocks and support for Hamas have increased. Notwithstanding the recent Hamas ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, the picture still looks bleak. Part of me wonders if his seizing of the poison chalice was a new take on the old “masochism strategy” – choosing the rockiest road to prove his sure-footedness, ensuring all successes are against the odds and therefore glittering; or maybe a way of atoning for the bloodshed in Iraq.

“Obviously, I take a different view of the war from most people, but it’s true that I feel a great sense of responsibility for this region. I don’t feel I’m putting something right, because I see all this as the same basic struggle: getting rid of Saddam, the Palestinian peace process, pushing back against Iran, sorting out Lebanon, a struggle about which the western world is pretty much asleep.”

) ) ) ) )

In the tranquil American Colony hotel in disputed east Jerusalem, the fourth-floor button on the lift is locked; climb the stairs and you are met with a security gate and an armed guard. The handsome honey-coloured 19th-century residence, chosen for its competitive rates and its perceived neutrality as a venue, is where you find Tony Blair for at least a week of every month, heading a low-key operation in which media coverage is avoided for fear of upsetting the fragile balance. The envoy has 13 full-time diplomats at his disposal, some provided by the UN and foreign donors (the UK’s Department for International Development underwrites around 10% of costs), some on secondment from the World Bank, the Gendarmerie, the Foreign Office.

The “boss”, as he is still called, takes me over to a UN map of the West Bank and begins to point out strategic locations; there is something of the excited amateur enthusiast in his urgency, and it’s curious to see the big-picture politician so involved in the minutiae. “Look, the bits in red are the settlements… these are roadblocks, these are earth mounds.” Blair requested the envoy’s remit be extended from responsibility for the Palestinian economy to include security, meaning he can raise issues of access and movement, and he takes a perverse pleasure in the difficulty of the task, how you get the settlers out, how you make a deal when Israel is so entrenched.

On the morning of May 13, Blair holds a press conference; correspondents from the Israeli, British and European press are gathered in the hotel to hear details of his strategy for the area. His plans include renewed efforts on the northern Gaza sewage project, an opening up between Nablus and Jenin to permit free passage of agricultural workers, an industrial park sponsored by the Germans to attract investment. The jewel among these promises is an experiment in the West Bank settlement of Jenin in which the Palestinians are to be given responsibility for security and the Israelis are to cease incursions.

This is my first close-up glimpse of Blair for five years. The room seems small and the audience, maybe 30 people, seems weirdly intimate for the global superstar, but later in the day will present an even more surreal scene when he repeats his presentation to Palestinian journalists at Ramallah’s cultural palace, with its gleaming marble and theatre. In the room are just three cameras, six journalists, and an air of this being hardly worth their time. Blair stands between two Palestinian flags and repeats his speech with an interpreter in a grubby anorak at his side. “I totally understand the anger and the frustration the Palestinians feel,” he tells them, ploughing on regardless. When I mention his uncharacteristic grasp of the detail later, he replies that he would never have been able to “solve Northern Ireland unless I was completely on top of the detail. I could have described the dismantling of watchtowers”.

His personal role in the Good Friday agreement matters to him here. “Actually,” says Blair, “the similarities are extraordinary, not least that at first everybody in Northern Ireland said it’s hopeless because the other side doesn’t want peace. That is what both sides say now. What each side says about the other is essentially true – namely what the Palestinians say about the injustice of occupation, and what the Israelis say about the security problems. You have to deal with those realities, and change things practically.

“You will not get a peace deal first. It has to begin on the ground, with people seeing changes in their daily lives. I think the two sides want peace. I am optimistic. People say, after 10 years as prime minister, going through all this terrible stuff, didn’t I lose my ideals, but I’m as idealistic as ever. The Israelis have got to make a psychological shift so that they’re not saying, ‘If a state happens, okay,’ but that they are going to help make it happen. I think that has begun. They wouldn’t have agreed this package a few months back.”

And what of Blair’s own family life? In the week after our meeting, on May 20, was Leo Blair’s eighth birthday, but it seemed unlikely his father would be present to help him blow out his candles. “I’ve got to re-balance,” says the guilty father on our trip to Jericho. “I regret not having spent more time with my children while they were growing up.” Can’t the family join him here? “It’s difficult with Leo’s school, but we’re going to try and sort it out so that they can come with me more. Cherie can be away when I’m home, so we have to be careful not to miss each other.”

In the past year he has adopted a portfolio of projects: envoy, adviser to Rwanda and Sierra Leone, climate-change campaigner, champion of sport for children, lecturer at Yale, all underpinned by the real focus of his post-parliamentary life, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. In office, Blair, who converted to Roman Catholicism last year, didn’t much discuss his Christianity (“We don’t do God,” Alastair Campbell famously decreed, and once privately to me: “He thinks we’re all bloody heathens”), but now he means to talk about little else, having defined religion rather than secular politics as the power axis of the future.

“This is what I want to be involved in for the rest of my life,” he says. “It’s about how to make globalisation work. Globalisation pushes people together. We have to ensure faith doesn’t pull them apart. Politics is not about left and right any more, it’s about open and closed. The point of the inter-faith efforts is keeping minds open, because extremism shuts them down.” His foundation will build a war chest and partner with other groups addressing global poverty, disease and extremism to realise the UN’s eight “millennium development goals” adopted in 2000.

His altruistic roles are unpaid. When I ask him about his income, he implies that his lucrative consultancies for Zurich and J P Morgan are a way, in the words of one of his aides, to “pay the bills”, a struggle in which his reputed £5m book deal and his fee of £100,000 on the public-speaking circuit will help. But the Blairs have a reported mortgage liability of £5m on six properties, and at his new offices in Grosvenor Square he employs 25 staff. Euan Blair, who earns £30,000 as a Morgan Stanley trainee, is thought to have bought a first flat in Islington for £550,000, one assumes with parental help, so the mystery of his father’s personal finances remains.

Of course, he could have made much more had he not assumed his portfolio of good causes. His Africa team are to spend several months with the Rwandan government advising on policies to stimulate business and private-sector investments, establishing an independent think-tank. Same in Sierra Leone. His climate-change team is preparing a blueprint to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050 with the backing of China and the US; it will deliver a report to the G8 group of industrialised nations this year.

) ) ) ) )

To reach Tony’s terrace, where he receives a stream of supplicants, I pass through his bedroom, which is chaotic – a pair of trousers dumped on a stack of newspapers, a Waitrose plastic bag, rumpled sheets, old coffee cups.

In an anteroom next door stands a treadmill, a bench press and an exercise mat – all used daily. We eat lunch under huge parasols, overlooking east Jerusalem’s temples and mosques, the trickle of water irrigating potted plants. Waiters bring fish and roasted vegetables, but Blair takes three bites and stops. He is careful about health, especially since his arrhythmia, which is now in check but likely to return as the years pass.

Out here on the terrace, the old charm is in full swing as Israeli journalists, local newspaper bosses, the chief rabbi (so smitten he invites Blair to Friday dinner at home) drop by for “a chat”. He tends to listen more than talk as he sips his strong Arab coffee, fudges a bit, lets sentences trail off in midair, courts being interrupted. The reticence is strategic. “I keep my views to myself. I just have to absorb other people’s. People say the situation is impossible but it’s not. It could be resolved. But it will require focus. In a year’s time, if it’s not significantly better, it’ll be significantly worse.”

This year’s deadline for a settlement – before Bush leaves office – sounds naive, if not slightly unhinged, given the deterioration of relations since the second intifada, with the Israeli army raiding the West Bank every night in search of suspected jihadis and the knife-edge possibility it will march back into Hamas-controlled Gaza. Even while we are talking, a woman is killed in a rocket attack on a shopping centre in Ashkelon.

This is not like the battles of domestic politics. The warring interests are entrenched, the demoralisation on one side and the fear on the other requiring more than an honest broker. Amid predictions of a third intifada, Blair must be a dream weaver for people who have stopped daring to hope, a narrator for a story that has lost the plot. You can see why he thinks he fits the bill. He’s not often asked about Iraq: these people have their own grievances, most were glad to see Saddam go, the soldiers dying are not their young men. The Palestinians I speak to, the waiters, shopkeepers and taxi drivers, might think Blair is wasting his time, but they hate him far less than the average north London liberal.

“I can honestly say, since I’ve been here, no one has challenged or asked me to justify the war. That’s not to say they don’t object to my closeness to Israel, but a lot of the senior Palestinians are close to people in Israel. I remember an early conversation when I was working with Mahmoud Abbas and a journalist asked if my closeness to the Americans was a problem between us. Abbas looked at me and said, ‘That’s the reason he’s useful. If you can’t get on with the Americans and the Israelis, you can’t help us.’”

On a balmy evening, Blair is in chinos and a crisp blue shirt; a Palestinian businessman pays his respects on the terrace; except he doesn’t. He tells Blair there is no point his being here. “Go home, go and do your stuff, be president of the EU, Sarkozy will get you in. You won’t achieve anything. Israel will just play cat and mouse with you. Abbas is useless. Peres will talk for ever and do nothing. The Israelis will agree to getting rid of a roadblock, then you leave town, a bomb goes off and two more are put in their place.”

Blair comments that this is not always the case: when a student was killed by a Qassam rocket launched from Gaza recently, there was no such retaliation. The urbane doomsayer is undeterred: the good, educated Palestinians have left; only the scum and gangsters remain. Blair listens with unfaltering patience, eventually seeming to win him over to his company if not his mission. Later another wealthy entrepreneur drops by for a drink and a less gloomy suggestion. “We must go out in London,” he says. “You go out? You like Harry’s Bar? And Annabel’s for dancing?” Blair looks mock-horrified, telling him it had better be somewhere “respectable”. The guy offers him a holiday in his house in Marbella. “You been to Marbella?” “Yes,” says Blair. “Where d’you stay?” “It was a long time ago. I was probably staying in a shack. It was before, you know…”

Blair’s interpersonal formula is unchanged, that juxtaposition of personal likability with a relish of harnessing unpopular causes. He is gifted at making friends. The former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar had dropped in for breakfast. Later, Blair had been to meet Israel’s head of security, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, who tells him jokes – one of a series of one-on-ones in which “people will open up to me” because he has resisted “blabbing all over the place”. I ask about Ashkenazi, considered by many the nation’s de facto leader. “He’s a really good guy, actually, but he is under no illusions. He’s been helping put this new package together, but if something goes wrong, he’ll be told he was a fool to listen, that his job is protecting their security. You have to have some understanding of Israel’s problem, which, by and large, they think Europeans don’t. If Israel got out of the West Bank tomorrow, Hamas would take over.”

We set off for our trip to the West Bank, sirens honking, blue lights flashing, in a city where nobody pays much attention, Blair’s security team leading and tailing us. The Land Cruisers have blacked-out windows and reinforced doors, heavy as tombstones. We are heading over the hills, and down below sea level to the decimated town of Jericho. He points past me. “That’s the Mount of Temptation over there, where Jesus was for 40 days and 40 nights. I visited it recently.” Was he tempted? He smiles: “There was no one around to tempt me…

“The first time that I came to Jericho, I was like an excited tourist and I said to the driver, ‘Show me where the walls are.’ He said, ‘I seem to remember they all fell down.’”

We pass through two checkpoints as we enter the Palestinian territory, after which the Palestinian security team take over. When he first arrived, the Israelis offered to handle his security, but only if they had total control. He declined. Eyebrows shoot up when he tells locals of his recent walkabout in Jenin. Cherie and the family worry “from time to time”. “How can I have the luxury of feeling scared when I’ve sent a whole lot of people into dangerous situations?”

In the governor of Jericho’s residence, a group of farmers have come to put their case. “The Israelis are planting on our land and we don’t even have enough water to drink.” The visitor, who refused to condemn Israel for its bombing of Lebanon, listens carefully, eating an apple. Later, out on the parched hillsides of the Jordan valley, a farmer says he has invested half a million in his farm and will invest another million if he has a guarantee “that the Israelis won’t come with their bulldozers. All we need from the Israelis is a guarantee of being left alone, and in six years you will see a green line around Jericho”.

This strikes a chord with Blair, the frustrated entrepreneur who can see nothing so clearly as the wasted opportunity for agriculture and tourism. An inventive farmer has discovered that the nature of the local water replicates sea water and has started a sea-water fish farm, selling his produce to Israel. Blair is impressed by this. “Any time the Palestinians are given the space to make something of their lives, they’re actually very capable people.” It is his use of the word “actually” that makes me start. I would call their willingness to move beyond dispossession to diversification through fish-farming not so much capable as amazing – wouldn’t he? “Yes, yes, I would.”

There is no doubt that in Blair’s mind he has moved not only on, but up, and that the ladder to that promotion was provided by the most right-wing American president in living memory, his buddy George. When I ask if it is frustrating not to have the pedals and levers available to a national leader, he smiles; I have missed the point. “Truthfully, the British prime minister has limited power to affect this. Maybe 80 years ago he did. The only way I affect it is by persuasion. And by giving people a sense of strategy and a plan. No one outside the US president has meaningful levers in their hands. (As we talk, Bush is flying in for Israel’s 60th birthday with a reported 800 staff, 100 vehicles, his own food and water. He will stay at the King David hotel, where Blair will meet him, and Jerusalem’s roads will be impassable.) I think I’ve had an impact on the degree to which he commits to this. He has visited the area more than any other US president. The way he has focused on this since my appointment has been greater than at any time.”

The opening session of Shimon Peres’s conference to celebrate his nation’s birthday is chaired by Blair, who is treated by the 84-year-old president like an adopted son. As we leave, people grab his hands with tears in their eyes and whisper “God bless you” in his ear. He returns the smiles, unembarrassed. “Thank you, thank you, we are doing what we can…” The adoration is worn as lightly as ever; what a change from his last beleaguered Downing Street years, when his personal approval rating dropped to 28%.

There is a further thrill when the movie star Jon Voight strides up and embraces him. “You are a hero, on this side of the Atlantic and on the other side. Thank you for the amazing work you do.” Blair seems gobsmacked. As we walk away he says: “God, that’s so surreal. He’s the father of Angelina Jolie, isn’t he?” I tell him they are on non-speaks. “What about?” he asks, intrigued.

Soon after my trip, I see Blair in London, at his swanky new office on Grosvenor Square with four floors, one for each of his new passions.

I imagine him in the lift, travelling silently from “Climate Change” to “Peace Process”; a department store of one man’s personal crusades.

His HQ is immaculate: cream carpets, fresh white paint, low olive leather sofas, light flooding in. When I arrive he is sitting behind a desk jabbing at a laptop. “Look, I’m doing it on my own, I’m not very good but I’m getting better.”

On the mantelpiece behind his desk are the same framed family snaps – a 1998 family portrait, kids on ponies, Kathryn aged about eight – unpacked from Downing Street, framed in brown, and looking dowdily out of place. “I need to get some new ones,” he says unprompted. “They don’t look right here, do they?”

This is Thursday, June 5, a throwback to his old life: GMTV sofa in the morning, an appearance before the International Development Committee after that, a speech at the Ark charity dinner in the evening. “Today feels too much like the old days,” he groans. What was it like to be back in parliament? “Two lines of sketch writers on either side of me… I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m sliding back into the past.’” The past? I have never known a man more ruthlessly and viscerally attached to the future, allergic to nostalgia and sentimentality.

Tony Blair did not turn out to be the leader I thought he would be when I woke up on May 2, 1997, properly cheerful about politics for the first time in years, properly convinced. But if we are surprised at the twists of his premiership, so is he: Europhile, peaceable Bambi turned out to be the pro-American champion of liberal interventionism, and still is, however pear-shaped its later excursions. “If you’d told me on May 1, 1997, that I’d be engaged in four armed conflicts, I’d have been amazed.” And then, for a moment, he turns into a character from P G Wodehouse, the love of whom he shared with Michael Foot, party leader when Blair unsuccessfully fought the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election on a CND manifesto, the bright young man of promise. “It’s not surprising to be surprised,” he grins. “And I’m not surprised in the least!” He claims not to have much time for pondering his assessment by history: too busy making it is what he quite possibly reasons.

“I don’t think much about legacy. Iraq, Afghanistan… You can’t tell what the foreign- policy judgment on them will be at a later stage.” How long do you need to be able to take a view?” He shakes his head. “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that a year is a bit too soon.”

Do I still admire my old political pin-up, a man I’ve believed in, disavowed, accused and latterly observed trying hard to be of service? Actually, I do. Old habits die hard.

The Spectator is busy reading between the lines on this interview. They ask which “David” he is talking to? Miliband or Cameron? Must admit the question flashed through my mind too – then I let it go. A commenter at The Spectator suggests “Davis”! They also wonder why ‘David’ is mentioned before Gordon, and the latter almost as an afterthought!

//////////

According to The Mail, Mr Blair is privately unhappy about Brown’s record as PM. If he were happy, he’d probably be in a minority of one.

Excerpts from The Mail article:

Tony Blair has accused Gordon Brown of ‘dissing’ his record and believes he needs to stand down if Labour is to have a realistic chance of avoiding a catastrophic General Election defeat.

But the former Prime Minister has told his allies not to plot against his successor for fear that it will cause an angry Labour backlash and encourage Mr Brown to dig his heels in.

Mr Blair’s stark assessment of Mr Brown’s prospects was disclosed by senior Labour figures amid a new round of infighting among Cabinet Ministers tipped to replace him if he quits.

Since stepping down, Mr Blair has tried to avoid commenting publicly on Mr Brown. Last month, he said: ‘I said when I left that I was going to be 100 per cent supportive of Gordon and that is what I continue to be.’

He praised Mr Brown as ‘probably the most successful finance minister in the world for a decade’ – pointedly omitting his performance as Prime Minister.

However, The Mail on Sunday has learned that in private, Mr Blair is scathing about the man who plotted to oust him. Senior sources say he has accused Mr Brown of blundering by ‘dissing’ his achievements in power.

‘Tony believes Gordon made a fatal error by trying to rubbish certain aspects of what New Labour did, in particular all his nonsense about Tony being all style and no substance,’ said one.

‘By trying to distance himself from some of New Labour’s policies, he has left a gaping hole for Cameron to take advantage of.

‘When Gordon took over, Cameron was in big trouble. Now he is miles ahead and it is all Gordon’s fault. He tried to rub Tony’s nose in it over Iraq and made a fool of himself when he went to Iraq during the Tory conference for a feeble publicity stunt and got caught out.’

Mr Blair is said to have had detailed, regular discussions with political allies over whether Mr Brown should be challenged or allowed to carry on.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the former Prime Minister believes that while it would be in Labour’s interests for Mr Brown to step down, he should not be pressured into it.

‘Some of Tony’s friends think Brown must be got rid of by whatever means,’ said a source.

‘Others agree with Tony that Gordon is a disaster, but if we try to do anything about it, it will not help in the long term. Gordon will claim he is the victim of a Blair conspiracy.’

When Mr Blair resigned he was bitterly disappointed that David Miliband, his former policy chief, failed to challenge Mr Brown.

Mr Blair still believes that Mr Miliband would make the best successor, although some Blairites prefer Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell. More here

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GLASGOW EAST BY-ELECTION

Losing one candidate is unlucky, especially after the present MP had to resign for health reasons. But losing TWO in 48 hours looks as little … er .. careless.

Are they all rats abandoning the sinking ship? Are they afraid of being the candidate dubbed with the title – “the candidate who got rid of Brown”?

WITH ‘FRIENDS’ LIKE THESE …

Just to confirm the muddle of thinking of some on the ‘Left’ as to which direction they are facing, it seems that Solidarity hope that Salmond’s SNP win the seat to try to force out Gordon Brown. Tommy Sheridan commented ”We have got no problem with the SNP winning this election. Solidarity will be pleased to see the demise of Gordon Brown.”

JOHN RENTOUL, IN THE INDEPENDENT

LABOUR AWAITING THE ISSUE THAT WILL TOPPLE BROWN

“But no one knows what effect an internal election and a new leader would have on the opinion polls, even while they are convinced that a new leader could not be worse than Brown.

So they wait for The Issue. What to say about an election is a second-order question that partly depends on when Brown goes. And that depends on when The Issue comes along and the Parliamentary Labour Party goes into an emotional spasm.

The abolition of the 10p tax rate, as reflected in the Crewe by-election, nearly tipped them over. There were those around Brown, I understand, who thought he might be toppled that weekend. It was dangerous because Labour MPs felt that their leader had offended their principles.”

ANDREW RAWNSLEY, GUARDIAN asks:

COULD A GLASGOW KISS PROVE FATAL FOR BROWN

“Precisely because the seat has been so impregnably Labour for so very long, no one had any political incentive to pay much attention to the people of one of the most deprived places in the United Kingdom. Suddenly, these folk matter to the politicians. Boy, do they matter. They have the fate of a Prime Minister to play with.

This is going to be a remarkable contest for a variety of reasons. Byelections are usually battles between a government defending a record and an opposition attacking it. In this peculiar case, the protagonists are both in government, Labour at Westminster, the Scottish National Party in Edinburgh.

No one seems to have noticed a crucial date in the calendar. On the Friday we get the byelection result, Labour’s National Policy Forum begins meeting. Party activists will be gathered with trades union leaders, members of the national executive and ministers. That will be a lethal place for Gordon Brown to be if Labour has just lost in Glasgow. Some of the very poorest of his fellow Scots have the Prime Minister’s life in their hands.”

Well, domestic political life anyway! As Mr Blair has shown, there is life AFTER politics – at least for some.

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Tags: blair unhappy with brown, don't diss me, jenin, labour by-election glasgow, middle east peace envoy, The Mail, The Times, tony blair second coming, West Bank