Tony Blair: ‘I would have stayed if I could, is the truth’

Were you to board an aeroplane piloted by a man who has never previously sat in a cockpit, you’d be alarmed. Were you to face surgery by a woman with no medical qualifications, you’d be frightened. Politics is the one profession that can put someone in a position of great power and responsibility without any prior experience or demonstration of ability. “It’s bizarre,” Tony Blair says. “In any other walk of life, that doesn’t happen.” When he became prime minister in 1997 he was in his early forties and an absolute neophyte at governing. He was much better at it, he believes, towards the end of his decade at No 10 than at the outset. So he’s written a book about the dos and the don’ts of leadership “because government is a science as well as an art”.
In the first flush of taking power, leaders “listen eagerly” because they grasp that they know little or nothing about governing. In the second stage, they know enough to think they know everything and become impatient with listening. Hubris becomes a danger, inviting nemesis. “You’ve got some experience, but your experience makes you believe that you know more than you actually do. And that’s the risk. That’s why I say stage two is the most difficult and many people never get to stage three.” Maturity comes with the realisation that what they know is not the sum total of political knowledge. Once again, “with more humility”, they listen and learn.
What about him? “I think I did get to stage three at the end.” In his third term? “I think for the last few years. Because then I realised just how much more complicated everything was. And since leaving office, I’ve become much more aware of how little I know, rather than how much I know.”
There is a tinge of melancholy to Blair’s reflections on his time in office. He laments “you start at your most popular and least capable and end at your least popular and most capable”.
He admits to “a few false starts and rough patches” since he left Downing Street 17 years ago, but says he now feels “I am, finally, in the place I wanted to be”. He has built an influential outlet for his unsated desire to shape the world in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, known to its staff as “the TBI”. We meet at its central London headquarters, a capacious building with an anonymous frontage that belies its global reach. The institute employs nearly 1,000 staff, far more than used to answer directly to him when he was at No 10. It is in 40 countries “working with governments all over the world”. That has not quenched the ambition of the lean 71-year-old sitting in front of me and speaking as if he still has something to prove. “We will be in 50 countries probably by the end of the year or the middle of next year.”
At the zenith of his power, he believed he’d turned Labour into “the natural party of government”. Yet Gordon Brown’s loss of office in 2010 was followed by the repudiation of New Labour by many in Blair’s own party and three more defeats, culminating in the catastrophically terrible result in 2019. What was he doing on election night in July? “Watching it.” Did he stay up all night? “No, I never stay up all night.” He wasn’t still up to cheer the evictions of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss? “It was pretty obvious once the results started clearing, and I’m an early riser as well.” How does he feel about a Labour parliamentary landslide which almost matched his own in 1997? “Oh, I was really happy,” he smiles. “It’s great. Look, it had been 14 years, and remember the Labour party in 2019 was frankly on its way out of existence. So it’s a remarkable achievement.”
Blair today exudes praise for Keir Starmer, but he hasn’t always been a fan. During the early, troubled years of Starmer’s leadership, the former prime minister made remarks suggesting he was deeply sceptical that the other man could pull it off. “I thought pulling it off was massive, but I have to say he has. And one of the best things he’s done, by the way, is the quality of the candidates that have come in. I know quite a lot of the new young MPs and they’re good, really good.”
The government has “hit the ground running and done a really good job. They seem to have prepared very, very well.”
He approves of the way Starmer responded to the outbreak of far-right violence on Britain’s streets. “I think Keir handled it as well as it could be handled. I give him full marks for it. It was obviously difficult, but he took tough action and that ended it.”
There is much speculation about the texture of Blair’s relationship with Starmer, with some conjecturing that he is a power behind the throne. “Of course, I talk to him. Actually, I don’t give him advice. When we talk, we talk about issues.” He doesn’t want people thinking that his how-to-lead manual was written with the new prime minister as its intended audience and is wary of generating “Blair tells Starmer …” headlines. “This book, it’s not written for Keir,” he insists. “It’s not written because I knew there was going to be a Labour government.”
Which won’t stop everyone from reading it for relevance to the challenges confronting Starmer and warnings about traps to avoid. One of them is about the civil service. In his book, he remarks that “the bureaucracy’s natural inclination is to be bureaucratic”. I ask him to expand. “You have to understand that you can’t really stop that happening. The system is naturally cautious. And the system believes that it’s permanent.” He also cautions Starmer against thinking that he’ll succeed by trying to change the civil service. “My experience is that there is no reform of the system that is going to deliver you big change.”
He’s a fervent advocate of introducing outside expertise to government and effusive about the way Singapore, a city state of about 6 million people, has “brought 1,600 engineers into the centre of government” to push technological innovation. “That gives you an idea of how much expertise you’re going to require from outside government in order to transform government.”
Starmer is banking on his “mission boards” to deliver his goals. Will that work?
“Yeah, sure, if they’ve got clarity about [their] mission, provided they’ve got good people on them.”
Delivery will be key to whether the Starmer government prospers or fails. “It’s always the same thing. The challenge of democracy is delivering its efficacy. The reason for the rise of populism is all to do with the fact that people don’t believe governments are delivering for them.”
One of Blair’s sternest warnings is not to put off hard decisions, but get cracking on the crunchy stuff. “In retrospect, I would have reformed earlier, faster.” But don’t expect it to make you popular. “If you say, ‘Do you think the country needs radical change?’, everyone will say, ‘Yeah, yeah, it does.’ But if you ask them what they mean by radical change, then you’ll get five different answers. And that’s the challenge of government.”
The book is engaging, insightful, provocative and derisive of “place-holder” leaders who lack the grit to be “a change-maker”. “Leader” is capitalised throughout. He relates with approval an anecdote told him by Shimon Peres, the late prime minister of Israel. When one of his successors was in a dither, Peres demanded: “Do you want to be in the history book or the visitors’ book?” “Go to it!” exhorts Blair. “It will be tough, but if you don’t step up to the challenge, the visitors’ book is where you will end up!”
Often exclamatory, the book’s prose style sometimes puts you in the presence of a shouty fitness instructor. More than a few phrases bellow his injunctions in CAPITAL LETTERS. He concludes one chapter by barking: “Make the centre STRONG!” The leader must be “The Great Persuader”, “The Great CEO” and the “Decision-Maker”. Many are going to think this a macho concept of leadership. He shrugs: “I don’t know what macho means nowadays, but unless you’re driving from the top it won’t happen. It won’t happen for several reasons. It won’t happen because the system won’t have a clear enough direction if it doesn’t get it from the very top. It won’t happen because too many issues require many departments to work together. And you need the centre to do that. And it won’t work because, in the end, the authority, the leader, is the thing that makes things happen.”
He is wary of devolving power, even though, as prime minister, he presided over the creation of the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd and mayoralty of London. “I often come across countries where they’ve been advised, often by well-meaning international institutions, to decentralise all their power. And what they find then is they can’t make anything work. There are no levers to pull. And down in the regions in developing countries they don’t have the capacity. So you’ve taken a problem you could solve and given it to a whole lot of people who can’t solve it.”
He reckons that voters crave leadership and that the worst thing that can befall a leader is to be seen as weak and bullyable. “I can’t think of a country that’s undergone a significant process of change that hasn’t had a strong leadership from the centre driving it.”
Reform is a slog. Blair contends that it takes a minimum of 10 years to change a country, which is longer than most leaders, at least in democracies, can expect to get. “All the change that matters to a country is the long term. And long-term structural change, it takes time.” He continues: “The problem is keeping people with you. If you’re making change, it’s going to be resisted strongly by the losers, and the winners will be unknown and probably therefore silent.”
His trajectory in office took him from record-breaking approval ratings to mass demonstrations of protesters calling him “Bliar”. A section of the book addresses how to deal with being attacked. His answer: “DON’T READ IT!” Isn’t it rather important for leaders to know what voters think of them, even when it is unpleasant?
“Of course,” he concedes. “And, by the way, there’s no leader that isn’t aware of public opinion and you’ve got to listen to sensible criticism. But what I’m really saying is, if you’re not careful, you can become completely psychologically derailed by criticism, and you can’t allow that to happen, you’ve got to carry on, you’ve got to realise it just comes with the territory.” He becomes especially animated talking about “vicious” social media. “You know, you start scrolling through social media that’s written about you, it’s going to do your head in.”
Some think we are living in the last-chance saloon for centrist government. Should the Starmer project flop, so it is feared, something wicked this way comes: hard-right nativist populism. “My anxiety is that people have to experience the populist so-called solutions before they understand that it’s not a good idea. I mean, would the country vote again for Brexit today? I doubt it. Populism, in my view, is always about the exploitation of grievance. It raises the anger rather than providing the answer.” As its opponents, “you’ve got to provide the answer”.
“Even if you take difficult issues like immigration, most people will congregate around a system of controlled immigration. Now, that’s not anti-immigrant, but in favour of control.”
When he came into office at the end of the 20th century, there was a widespread and cosy notion that the world had been won for liberal democracy. Looking back, doesn’t that now seem naive and complacent?
“Yeah, I think there was a certain naivety in that, but I would also say that the naivety was to do with an exaggerated sense of the power of reason. If you look at the Russian leadership today, is this a good thing for Russia? Leave aside what it’s like for the rest of the world, is it a good thing for Russia? No. The smart young people are leaving Russia. Will the Chinese experiment of pulling the Communist party back into the centre of everything, will that work? I don’t think so. So we might have been naive about the power of reason to drive people in the direction of greater liberalism and democracy and openness, but I don’t think we were wrong about the consequences of moving in the opposite direction.”
A lot of analysis suggests that the world today is as dangerous as it was in the 1930s. More so, because this time the competing powers have vast arsenals of nuclear weapons. “I find this really difficult,” he frowns. “People I respect say this is true, that the world is much more dangerous, that it’s heading towards conflict … And yet I still find it hard to believe that China has an interest in big-power conflict.”
He surprises me with his sanguinity about the consequences of Donald Trump returning to the White House. “I’m not worried about that,” he says of the threat that the US could abandon Nato to leave Europe to fend for itself. “I don’t think that will happen.”
Can Kamala Harris beat Trump? He thought the Democrats’ convention was “very well run and put together” but swerves calling the contest on the grounds that it is “impossible to predict”. He refuses to be pressed on this: “The one thing you should do when you’re in a position of either having been British prime minister or are British prime minister is stay out of American politics. You work with whatever comes out.”
Over his time at No 10, he evolved from the consensus-seeking crowd-charmer of the early years to a divisive, conviction-driven warrior over Iraq. These days, his eyes take on a messianic gleam about artificial intelligence. There’s no consensus yet whether AI will make the human species smarter, stupider, slaves to the machines or come to be seen as over-hyped. Blair, who devoted the most recent conference of his institute to the subject, is among the most zealous of the believers. “Is this akin to the 19th-century Industrial Revolution … an event that then changes the world? It ushered in ultimately a new type of politics. It gave birth to the welfare state. Now, is this as big as that? I think, yes it is. Possibly it’s even bigger. Supposing I’m right and it’s that big, then it should dominate the political debate, but it’s not really part of the political debate yet.”
There’s irony in the rather breathless way Blair evangelises about AI. When he was prime minister, the late Paddy Ashdown showed him email for the first time. “It will never catch on, Paddy,” he said. Blair told one of his sons, who works in the tech sector, that he had agreed to speak at a symposium on cryptocurrency. “What should I tell them?” he asked. Came the reply: “Tell them you’re sick.” In the book, he remarks that he does not have a “scientific mind” and confesses to “huge gaps” in his understanding of technology.
I suggest he’s been bedazzled by the self-interested boosterism of the tech companies with their claims that AI is the future of everything. He leans towards me to argue back: “You bring together 25 of the top companies in the UK and say ‘how important is the technology revolution to you?’ And each one of them will tell you it’s vastly important.”
“If it were mere hype, I don’t think you’d find the top companies in China to be technology companies. I don’t think you’d find the emerging ones in India to be technology companies. OK, there’s always a risk of over-hyping, but I would say the bigger risk now is under-hyping.”
As prime minister, he tried and failed to introduce state ID cards. He argues that digital ID will “happen eventually” and is contemptuous of resistance to it. “People give more information to Netflix and Amazon than they do to government for a digital ID. It’s ridiculous.” Nor does he share any of the qualms about exploiting NHS health data for medical research. “I personally have absolutely no problem with that at all. Take some of the rare diseases. If countries were sharing their health data on some of the rare diseases, you would accelerate by a factor of five, 10 times the research in these things.”
He also believes that AI will provide “really, really good tools for governing more efficiently”. Linking that thought to his book, I wonder whether one day we might have AI leaders? Though I put this to him in a mischievous spirit, he takes it extremely seriously. “It’s the great question. If you look at AI as a co-worker, and not as a replacement, wouldn’t you, before you did a particular policy, if you had all the available data, to assess what the likely outcome of that policy would be, wouldn’t that be a good thing?”
“OK, I’m about to introduce policy X and probably in different countries people will have tried to do X. What’s been the experience?”
One of his tips is that leaders should never bear a grudge. Does he really not hold any? “Yes, I don’t.” Not even against those who forced him, Labour’s only leader to win three back-to-back elections, out of office? “Yes, because I can understand those politics. There’s no point. What does it benefit you in the end? Of course, you’ve got to be ruthless as a leader sometimes, but being mean is usually unproductive.”
He also counsels leaders to tend to their “legacy” in a chapter reflecting his disappointment that he wasn’t more protective of his own. “There are some people who want to make the legacy all about Iraq and that’s all I ever did. The day I left office in 2007, we had improving public services, a strong economy, we were America’s closest ally, we’d won the bid for the Olympics, we had peace in Northern Ireland, and $2 to the pound.”
Another thing he says is that leaders never want to leave. I’ve not heard him admit this on the record, so I put it to him that he didn’t really want to quit No 10 when he did? “No,” he acknowledges. “I would have stayed if I could have, is the truth.” There’s a grimace. “But it was impossible by then.”
How to relinquish power without regret. That move has eluded him. And every leader I have ever met.