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Tony Blair's permanent summer vacation starts next week, and the British press are indulging in the obligatory "legacy" and "last days" stories.
The overwhelming consensus is that Blair's decision to support George Bush so closely on Iraq has nearly overwhelmed anything and everything else he accomplished as PM. Blair had already been PM for several years when the Bushies stole the 2000 election, and his initial splash on the world stage was very different than the lockstep lickspittle position he found himself in after 2001. "New Labour" and the "Third Way", which had hallmarked his relationship with Bill Clinton, took distant backseats. Still, the overall popular sentiment in Britain is that Blair did a good job on most things EXCEPT Iraq, and he leaves office with much higher public approval ratings than Dubya will.
Here's a piece from 3QuarksDaily contributor Matthias Matthijs that considers the successes and failures of Tony Blair as well as the prospects for his "heir apparent" Gordon Brown (link goes to an interview with Brown in this week's Time Magazine). Matthijs says don't expect much different from Brown.
This brief story from the BBC frames the legacy question in Blair's appearance before the House of Commons liaison committee last week, during which Blair himself was given the opportunity to present his spin on how his administration went and why he did the things he did. Blair said that he always did what he believed was the right thing. It's that very notion of falling back on his own inner sense of "right vs wrong", which, not surprisingly is shaped by his devout Christian faith, that failed him so badly.
This piece in The Guardian by author Martin Amis (one of my favorite writers, BTW), is a much closer look at Tony Blair. Amis was allowed to tag along with Blair recently and get substantial 1-on-1 time with him. Amis writes about the visible ebbing of power from Blair in these final days, and about the strange and rarified world the PM lives in (and, in one of my favorite parts of the article, how incredibly different that world is from the world of the President of the United States). In this article, Blair's own whip-smart mind and his self-awareness come through -- the comparisons to Bush's lack of curiosity and his need to be surrounded by fawning sycophants who keep up the illusion of his imperial throne are powerful.
If you read all three pieces, I think you'll be left with a very good and well-nuanced sense of Blair and his mostly unwanted legacy. Blair is still a young man in terms of political careers, much like Bill Clinton, so it's unlikely that he'll disappear entirely from the world stage. Blair has always had to endure comparisons to Clinton, but most of the time those comparisons are apt. Bill Clinton has done some very interesting tap dancing since 2000, but his circumstances are quite different than Blair's (I don't think anyone expects Cherie Blair to turn up as the next Labour PM), so Blair has the chance to chart a different post-power course. For his sake, I hope he puts as much distance between himself and George Bush as possible and recovers some of his promise.
Very early on in his PM tenure, Tony Blair was lucky enough to see Princess Diana smash into a wall. The cowboy experienced a similar benefit when the planes smashed into the WTC and the pentagon. Lucky men both because otherwise, their countries would have hated them much earlier.
Posted by Karan [URL] at 06/19/07
Well, it looks like Bush still has his hooks in ol' Tony. Word is that he's going to be named a "special envoy to the Middle East" by the Bush Administration.
Kind of pathetic, really.
Posted by Brian [URL] at 06/21/07
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