Lost in the desert

Tony Blair's distinctive combination of somewhat priggish moralism and raw political calculation, coupled with his lack of an identifiable ideological base, constitute both his greatest asset and greatest liability. If that sounds familiar to American observers, it should.

Consider the following. Blair was a brilliant young lawyer married to another one, a splashy, controversial woman who is sometimes deemed to be the ideological driving force in the household. (Cherie Blair was openly upset about her husband's decision to befriend George W. Bush after the divisive 2000 election, wondering aloud during a flight to Washington why the Labor government should be nice to "those people.") Both had political ambitions, but the couple decided the electoral realm had room for only one of them at a time. (The Blairs agreed that the first of them to be elected to Parliament would get the other's support. Both ran in the 1983 general election, but Tony was awarded a solid Labor district, while Cherie faced an unbeatable Conservative incumbent.)

Whatever his faults may be, Blair is a born politician, an energetic and charismatic performer. He quickly rose to the top of a listless center-left political party that had spent a generation in the doldrums, while right-wing radicals had reshaped society. He drove out the party's most ossified elements, put a halt to its endless infighting and brought it back into power. His manner is personable, ingratiating and non-ideological; his message is carefully calibrated to appeal to the expanding middle class that thinks of itself as neither liberal nor conservative. His stated goal, however, was ambitious: the creation of a new social compact, focused equally on rights and responsibilities, that will split the difference between the social-democratic vision of equality and the free-market vision of unfettered individualism.

OK, you know where I'm going with this. But wait, there's more. Blair's first term in office was strategic and cautious, mainly focused on establishing confidence in his government's competence. It worked, or at least it worked enough. Although beset by minor squabbles on both the left and right, he was reelected comfortably. But in his second term, when a political leader is supposed to be set free from narrow political concerns to build his historical legacy, the wheels came off.

Maybe this is forcing a point too far, but Blair has now been enmeshed in a crisis that is largely of his own creation (but has been magnified by his enemies). He has barely survived a humiliating legislative vote and now seems to be limping, gravely wounded, toward the end of his political career. His once-vaunted "Third Way" politics now look like a set of buzzwords past their sell-by date. Many in his own party wonder whether he has led them into a bottomless swamp of compromise where they have lost touch with their core values and core supporters.

As alluring as these similarities between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton may be -- and as much as these two friends tried to cultivate the notion that together they commanded a new political tide -- the differences between them may be more instructive. Clinton's presidency was undone by his own personal failings, and by the ruthless attacks of ideological opponents who gleefully seized upon his philandering and mendacity. Blair, by all accounts, is a man of tremendous rectitude, who until recently has faced little serious political opposition.

Under Britain's parliamentary system, Blair has had full control of government for seven years, something Clinton could only dream about. As a result, even his worst enemy of the right or left would have to agree that his accomplishments have been impressive. He transformed the national mood, helping to create an optimistic boom climate in the late '90s that led to London's international recognition as a vibrant capital of fashion, design and (incredibly) cuisine.

With Clinton's help, Blair forged a provisional peace in Northern Ireland after 30 years of civil war. Regional assemblies for Scotland and Wales, and various wonky but significant constitutional reforms, have brought Britain's antiquated mode of government into the modern age. Under the radar, there was even some "old Labor"-style socialism (as Cook calls it, "social justice by stealth"). Funds were quietly poured into public education and the National Health Service -- repairing at least some of the sabotage of the Maggie Thatcher-John Major era -- and new government subsidies have lifted thousands of low-income children and elderly people out of poverty.

As Cook discusses, Blair, like Clinton, has had a tendency to rub left-leaning grass-roots activists of his own party the wrong way. This may be a necessary corollary of mainstream electability, but it has had the peculiar effect that both men have neither claimed nor received credit for some of their most progressive endeavors. (Here again, though, the difference between the political cultures of the two nations is striking: No serious participant in British political life could support the death penalty, oppose legal abortion or argue for any healthcare system other than the government-run National Health Service.)

Blair has exacerbated the problem by deliberately distancing himself from the great tradition of the 20th century Labor Party. His hero is not Harold Wilson, or James Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a servant who became Britain's first socialist prime minister, or Clement Attlee, the architect of the postwar welfare state. It isn't even David Lloyd George, the Liberal Party radical who pointed Britain on the road to industrial democracy after World War I.

Instead, as Stephens discusses at length, Blair's professed model is William Gladstone, the ruling-class Tory-turned-Whig who became the great social reformer (and great international interventionist) of the Victorian age. Now, Gladstone was a remarkably progressive figure -- by the standards of the 19th century British Empire. Blair's grandiloquent self-comparisons to Gladstone smack simultaneously of Kipling-esque nostalgia, an inflated sense of his own significance and a startling lack of historical perspective. Gladstone was the political leader of a mighty military empire on which the sun never set; he was clearly among the two or three most important world leaders of his day. Tony Blair is the premier of a cute little island nation on the edge of the Atlantic that can't decide whether to be an American adjunct or the third most important country in Europe.

The Gladstone analogy suggests that Blair's strategic decision to hew close to George W. Bush, and perhaps moderate the wacko policies of the neocons around him, went hand in hand with Blair's desire to be a force on the global stage and make his mark on history. The tragedy of Tony Blair lies in the fact that the very qualities that allowed him to revamp Labor and rescue Britain from the Tory death-grip also led him to defy the U.N., his own public, the great mass of world opinion and probably the wishes of his own wife, and bet everything on an ill-considered war that was almost guaranteed to make him look bad. (One Machiavellian possibility, which Cook briefly entertains, is that the Bush White House predicted that one way or another Blair would come out of Iraq with egg on his face -- and was delighted at the prospect.)

During Bill Clinton's last, rueful presidential visit to Chequers, the prime minister's country house, in December 2000, Stephens reports that Blair asked Clinton how he should deal with the incoming President Bush. "Be his friend," Clinton reportedly told him. "Be his best friend. Be the guy he turns to." Not even the genius political mind of Clinton, one suspects, could have imagined where that friendship would lead. Many people on both sides of the Atlantic have been mystified by the close relationship between the English social-democrat and the Texas born-again. (Both are practicing Christians, which makes Blair something of an anomaly in modern British politics, but Stephens and Cook both underplay this potential connection.) Cook reports telephoning former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the fall of 2002, as the Iraq crisis thickened. She asked him in disbelief: "Just what does Tony Blair think he's doing?"

As Cook muses repeatedly, if any other Labor politician had been living at No. 10 -- or, alternatively, had the hanging chads in Florida shaken out differently -- we would have had no war in Iraq, or at least not the disastrous one we got. (The question of whether any other Labor politician could have been elected in the first place can never be answered.) A passionate lifetime advocate for the power of international law, Blair has now done more than almost anyone on the planet to undermine it. "Nobody in their right mind would dispute that Iraq is a better place without Saddam," Cook writes. "But the world is most certainly not a safer place now that we have reasserted the unilateral right of one state to invade another."

It is far too early to render any final historical judgment on Tony Blair -- or on Bill Clinton. Historians and political scientists will publish books for decades to come about these two friends, their joint and separate efforts to respond to new political realities and fight for the political center, and their respective crises. But Blair's case is the one we see before us now, and in some ways it is the more dramatic and interesting of the two. No one interested in what will become of the left in the 21st century can ignore the story of his rise, and his fall.

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