Misremembering the Blair Years

The morning John Smith died, May 12 1994, I was with the political pack at a Scottish Conservative Party Conference in Inverness. It was moving to see how genuinely grief-stricken his opponents there were, including the Scottish Secretary Ian Lang and Andrew Neil.

There were dryer eyes already speculating who the next leader of the Labour Party was going to be by the time I arrived back at our Westminster Studio. “Who’s it going to be then?” Michael White of The Guardian asked me as I walked in. “Blair, Prescott,” I replied, immediately referring to the party leader and his likely deputy. “Just checking,” Michael nodded. It was that easy to see. 

For all the machinations, the alleged double-dealing by the likes of Peter Mandelson, and the hard work of campaigning, the tide of history was palpably behind Tony Blair. He would go on to win three general elections and be Prime Minister for a decade.

All of which means Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution is predicated on a distorting frame to assess those thirteen years of Labour Government. The premise that it was all about the psychodrama between two men flatters Gordon Brown’s well-milked sense of grievance by promoting the popular misconception that it was all about those two. It wasn’t. 

Blair & Brown is an excellent, honest and painstaking documentary, well worth watching, but “Blair then Brown” would more accurately describe the period. But then, in not mentioning Clause 4, Kosovo, or the attempts to unseat Brown led by James Purnell and others, this programme doesn’t even try to do that.  

Gordon Brown was out of it by the time the Labour leadership became vacant, as he seemed to admit by pulling out in favour of Blair. If they had stood against each other Brown would still have lost. 

Contrary to the impression left in the documentary, Brown did not look like a winner by 1994. For once, after the dashed hopes of Neil Kinnock’s brave leadership, Labour was desperate to win and ready to do it by appealing to the centre-ground. 

The documentary skips over the notorious shadow budget of 1992, which had Brown’s fingerprints all over it and John Smith’s. Two Scotsmen proposing to punish Middle England through the tax system for little gain probably contributed more to Kinnock’s defeat than even the Sheffield Rally. 

Brown would go on to be a highly competent chancellor, overseeing ten years of continuous economic growth. Still, it was Blair who lulled the electorate into paying more tax for public services without feeling the pain.

In the two friends’ fevered discussions, Blair may have suggested that he would let Brown take charge of a lot and would back him as his successor, which he did ultimately – but so what? Brown’s sense of entitlement because “it could have been me,” is delusional. 

It was Blair who dared to deliver social reforms, devolution, and investment in schools and hospitals despite sometimes Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson’s slighting remark that Blair “wasn’t interested in them”. Brown skulked in the shadows. 

His one transformative achievement in the first term honeymoon period, expertly nailed down in the documentary, is blocking consideration of the pound becoming a founder member of the Euro. 

Or was that really the decision executed by his bolder aide Charlie Whelan? 

Arguably this was the fork in the road of Britain’s EU membership, which led to Brexit. It unquestionably propelled Blair into the arms of American Presidents.

Grilled on camera Blair is thoughtful and on edge and acknowledges criticisms of his record. Brown is a tortured soul, ever ready to blame others for his conduct. 

The exception is the Iraq invasion. Blair is still not quite ready to admit that the Iraq invasion turned out to be a mistake, Brown does so – although he does not mention that he supported the action in public at the time, and that, as Clare Short points out in her contribution, he did not speak out against it in Cabinet.

Writing in The Times the Conservative peer Danny Finkelstein finds the Brown version in the documentary “epically dishonest”. A more contemporary take might be that he is telling “his truth”.

 His denial that he constantly pestered, “Tony, when are you going?” is contradicted by the testimony of everyone else in both their camps. He also denies that a downturn in opinion polls put him off calling a general election soon after he took over in 2007. 

I remember the sound of platoons of fairies dropping to the ground in the stunned silence after he made a similar claim at a Downing Street news conference at the time.

The forces of Gordon had the strength to force Blair out a little before he would have gone anyway. Goodbye is the hardest word for every long-serving leader. But the Brown premiership was a footnote to what had gone before. 

As all admit, Brown was overwhelmed by events and found himself as ill-equipped to multi-task as the glibber Blair had been gifted. Prime Minister Brown cared deeply about every issue and demanded briefings about them but then often agonised and moved on to the next challenge without finding an answer. 

His success “saving the world”, a.k.a developing a holding strategy during the global financial crisis, came when he reverted single-minded to chancellor mode. Things could have been worse, but, as George Osborne observes in his pithy appearances in the documentary, when the economy turns against you “your time’s up.” On the opposition benches, Osborne and Cameron were most relieved that they wouldn’t be up against Blair, “a Tory killing machine”.

In what must be an attempt to avoid accusations of bias, there is no commentary script linking Blair & Brown. The soundtrack is entirely composed of extracts from specially conducted interviews and actuality from contemporary news reports. 

The only interviewees were politicians and officials who were “in the room”. This means that some key voices are absent including Mo Mowlam, Robin Cook, and Tessa Jowell because they are now forever silent. 

Many of the people who were interviewed got a single soundbite or even were lost to the cutting room floor. As a political reporter, I had a front-row seat covering the entire period and knew everyone involved. Subsequently, reader, I married one of them – Anji Hunter, here a glittering voice of reason as Tony Blair’s longest-serving aide until she left her post as director of government relations at the end of 2001. 

The documentary spots the important contribution of two pragmatic women – Anji and Sue Nye, her opposite number with Gordon Brown – who patiently maintained constructive engagement while the men in the two camps behaved like “rutting stags”, in Anji’s words, or perhaps more like the rival news teams in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

Sue and Anji’s open channel got round the unproductive thuggery, which divided numbers Ten and Eleven Downing Street in those years. Blair and his ex-diplomat Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell kept their hands clean, but the contributions from Alastair Campbell, Whelan and Ed Balls and the footage of them tell their own rough story. 

Although none of these colourful characters seems as central to the main story of New Labour as the millions of words of Campbell’s diaries would suggest.

Blairites or Brownites, saints or sinners, a thick strand of seriousness runs through Blair& Brown as it did through the same production team’s earlier Thatcher: A Very British Revolution. British politics have moved on. If Thatcher and Lawson or Blair and Brown fought each other over policy and who should be in charge, Boris Johnson has brilliantly turned the rules upside down by avoiding responsibility and, so far, dodging the consequences of any missteps. 

The present ideological stand-off over the economy between those two ambitious princelings Rishi Sunak and Kwasi Kwarteng, has the smack of old politics and smells out of date before it gets properly started. The currents that will tear this government apart are not yet apparent. 

Don’t ask me today, “Who is it going to be then?” I haven’t got the foggiest idea. So far, their time has not come. Meanwhile, Tony Blair still thinks, “we had a genuine vision of the future of Britain, and at some point, we’re going to get back to that”.

Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution is on BBC iPlayer now.