Tony Blair

Sep 27, 2023

In his own words.

from this interview with Martin Kettle

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/sep/01/tony-blair-interview-full-transcript

MK: I wanted to start by asking you some practical stuff about the book. What was the process? When and how did you write it?

TB: I wrote it myself, in longhand, usually in chunks of three days at a time because I've been so busy with all the other things I've been doing that I couldn't, as it were, dedicate weeks or months at a time to it.

*******

MK: But you are going to vote?

TB: Yes, I am a member of the Labour party so I have the right to vote.

MK: We'll maybe come back to that in a bit.

TB: When you get my guard down?

MK: Who can say?

********

I was happy with that as prime minister as I would when the issue came up of the presidency of the European Union. I would have gone back into public service. I may still at some time. I don't know what the future holds.

********

I don't know enough about how the government reforms are going to work but one thing I am sure is that our health service reforms were heading in the right direction and that that needs to be deepened. I think the single most important thing, and I was saying this during the course of the 2010 election, is "where was the National Health Service as an issue"?

MK: To which the answer is?

TB: Well it didn't really feature, did it?

MK: Because?

TB: Because actually we sorted the basic problem of the health service.

*********

But – and I am a social liberal in the sense that I am totally in favour of equality, whether on grounds of race or gender or sexuality, and we did a lot of good and radical changes in all those areas – I am absolutely hardline on law and order. I think that the single most horrible thing for people living in areas where there is high crime, high levels of vandalism and antisocial behaviour is just the utterly destructive nature of that type of culture. You cannot be liberal on it. You've got to be completely uncompromising on that. It is not right that people have to suffer this. And I hate it. I hate seeing it. And the trouble is, because of the way the modern world works, and this is my point about technology, whether it's ID cards or DNA or what we introduced in the proceeds of crime legislation, where probably I would have gone far further in changing the normal rules of burden of proof, I don't think you can deal with this law and order issue by the attitudes and policies of the early 20th century when people's anxiety and concern was in an era of large scale poverty that people were being unfairly victimised and treated by the criminal justice system. I don't think that is today's world. You've got these organised crimes that are brutal and merciless in the way that they engage in drugs or people-trafficking. You can't pussyfoot around with them. You've got to get absolutely heavy with them.

**********

MK: In the book you say striking things on two of the libertarian agenda issues. One is hunting, where you say you regret your decision to ban it. The other is Freedom of Information where you say you regret your decision to permit it. Why didn't you say this at the time? Was it a mistake?

TB: On hunting, I think yes on balance it was in the end. It's not that I particularly like hunting or have ever engaged in it or would. I didn't quite understand, and I reproach myself for this, that for a group of people in our society in the countryside this was a fundamental part of their way of life. Anyway, we came to a compromise in the end that, as I think I say in the book, was not one of my finest policy moments but got this through. Freedom of information? I am slightly tongue in cheek about it.

MK: It doesn't read like it. You beat yourself up about it in ways a lot of people would like you to beat yourself up about other subjects whereas this is one that these same people see as one of your achievements.

TB: The trouble with it is it's not practical for government. You end up in circumstances where if you are not careful people will find it hard to give frank advice and have frank conversations if they think what they are going to say is going to be reduced to writing and then published. And in my view this is just a simple practical reality.

*********

When September 11 happened it changed completely my view of the world and the calculus of risk. And I took the view then that, even though obviously it was going to be incredibly difficult, my choice was – you stay apart from the US in this struggle or you join with them. That's the choice. The thing is, as a political leader, you hope you're never faced with such a choice. But I was. And in the end I had to decide what to do. And I decided I could not use as the basis of that decision what was going to be politically popular, because the issue's too serious for that. Look, I'm a perfectly professional politician in the sense that I prefer to be popular rather than unpopular. If I'm faced with a 50:50 choice and the popularity's all one way, I'll probably drift that way.

***********************************

The reason for that, let me explain it, is that in my view what was shocking about September 11 was that it was 3,000 people killed in one day but it would have been 300,000 if they could have done it. That's the point. To me, once I had got that in my mind – and because it was essentially religiously driven too, so that you're not talking about people making a political calculation, you're actually talking about people who believe they will go to paradise if they kill large numbers of other people – I decided at that point that you cannot take a risk on this. This is why I am afraid, in relation to Iran, that I would not take a risk of them getting nuclear weapons capability. I wouldn't take it. Now other people may say, come on, the consequences of taking them on are too great, you've got to be so very careful, you'll simply upset everybody, you'll destabilise it. I understand all of those arguments. But I wouldn't take the risk of Iran with a nuclear weapon. You've just got to … In the end sometimes the greatest joy in politics, but unfortunately you find it more often in opposition than you do in government is to end up without binary choices. But occasionally in government, I'm afraid, you do end up with such choices – and this was one of them. And that's why I did what I did. It wasn't because I was ignorant of the political consequences. It was that I had decided that I couldn't take this decision on any other basis.

*********

You describe what you call the 'ugliest' meeting you ever had with Gordon Brown, with him in a "venomous" mood, about Adair Turner's report on pensions in March 2006. Why was it so important?

TB: I did think a lot about it. But it was in the Andrew Rawnsley book, and the version's not entirely accurate, so I corrected it.

MK: Basically he said he would take the loans for honours question to an NEC inquiry if you and John Hutton did not abandon the Adair Turner proposals on pensions. He made a threat. You've written this.

TB: Look, towards the end it got extremely difficult and there's no point in denying that. The basic disagreement was over policy, frankly, really.

**************************

MK: However, you do say that whatever New Labour had in part Diana had in whole. Was she New Labour?

TB: No, I'm not saying that. It's more in the sense that, at the time in 1997, we very much captured the mood. But she was someone who had this extraordinary, intuitive ability to capture a mood. I'm not saying it was necessarily the same mood.

MK: You relate a conversation at Chequers in 1997 where she got cross with something you said. What did you say?

TB: It's probably better to leave that as it is really.

MK: Did you say to her she should not marry Dodi Fayed?

TB: No I didn't say that. But I what I did say to her, and that's the reason I don't describe it in detail, was that it should remain private really. But having said that I got on with her extremely well and liked her very much.

MK: You say early in the book that you came to regret accusing the Tories of sleaze so much in the pre-1997 period. Why?

TB: I do think the whole debate about politics is on the wrong basis at the moment in terms of MPs' expenses and that type of thing. The issue is not whether MPs are sleazy. Most MPs are very public-spirited people. The issue's actually the efficiency of politics today. How do you attract the right calibre of people into politics? How do you get a sufficiently broad gene pool or talent pool for politics. I think it's a very easy thing for oppositions to do, because you will get full media support on the basis of going after the government over sleaze and you think, at least we did when we were in opposition, that it will all be different. But then it's not, because politicians are human beings and they get themselves into scrapes.

*********

MK: Which leaves Europe where?

TB: We are crazy in Europe if we do not understand the way the world is changing. The European Union is an absolute necessity. For a country like Britain, Europe is vital to our strategic national interest in the future. We are going to be 60 million people in a small geographic space. We're still going to be a major country in years to come. But you are going to have China with a population, what, 20 times that of the UK, and India, roughly the same, whose economies are going to dwarf ours in the future and who are going to have a political and economic power that is vast, with massive social and economic implications for us. And that's just China and India. And look at Brazil and Indonesia, also massive players. So all over the world you have this paradigm shift. And we're in danger of having a 20th century political debate. You can't afford that any more.

*******

You describe an amusing conversation with Alex Ferguson in which he says, essentially, if you have a difficult player in your teams, leave him out. Why didn't you leave your difficult player out.

TB: And, as I say, so what happens if he's still in the squad and the dressing room afterwards. I didn't ask his advice. I assure you I didn't debate reshuffles with Alex, but he was always very good value on leadership.

********

If you look at the changes that were made – not just in areas like the constitution, devolution and so on, the mayoral reforms, and the changes in public services and welfare, the major changes in how Britain is or was as a country, symbolised when we won the Olympic bid – there have been huge changes. The Labour party had never won two successive terms. We won three. We were in power for 13 years, twice as long as the next longest serving Labour government in our 100-year history.

********

The Sheep that thinks it's a Wolf

Discussion about this post