Halfway through this brilliant, unusual book is a sentence you won’t hear from any current prime minister or president. “It’s a great time to be governing,” writes the man who left Downing Street 17 years ago. You will find here none of the gloom about how intractable the world’s problems are, none of the whingeing about how hard politics has become. That smile that first infatuated and then infuriated Britain shines through all 40 chapters of Tony Blair’s On Leadership.
His message is that things should only get better — if the leaders of governments focus on delivery, embrace technology and seek respect rather than love. That word “Leader” with a capital L appears on almost every page. Blair is not a believer in a first among equals or the light touch. For him that’s a fantasy of the academics who study politics, not those who practise it. He defines leadership as being “of advancing and not just being; of action and not mere analysis; to resolve the problem and not simply articulate it”.
So this book is very much aimed at those in the arena getting their hands dirty. It’s not a memoir — he’s written one already — although it is laced with anecdote. Nor, despite its lofty title, is it an abstract work of political philosophy. It has some smart commentary on current events, such as the Ukraine war, tension with China and the artificial intelligence “revolution”, but it’s not a manifesto.
It is instead an instruction manual for leaders; a political version of the “secrets of success” book that you see on the business book shelves in airports. So there are chapters on how to conduct a foreign negotiation, how to manage a bureaucracy, how to handle the media, how to deal with enemies and fawning acolytes, how to switch off by finding “that little touch of Zen” . . . and how to manage your inevitable downfall.
Those on the left who would rather lose than betray unworkable ideals will be as disappointed in Labour’s record election winner as they always have been. Blair calls out the “deaf ear” tendency in progressive politics that is embarrassed by the views of the working classes they claim to represent. He says natural gas is “essential” to the green energy transition. He warns politicians on the heated issue of Gaza that the public is wary of the presence of Islamist groups among the ceasefire protesters.
His message on public services is to keep the users (parents and patients) front of mind, not the producers (doctors and teachers); combine reform with investment; and let the private sector in as a partner. This makes for uncomfortable reading for a Keir Starmer government that just handed out large pay awards to striking doctors and train drivers without asking for anything in return.
Those on the populist right, of course, get short shrift. The whole book is a riposte to the premiership of Boris Johnson. Blair is contemptuous of politicians who merely echo what the public wants to hear and mistake the shallow “trust” awarded to those “plainspeakers” with glib answers for the deeper trust that comes when people respect that you will do things they don’t like, and are unpopular, but they know need to be done. Like, he says, balancing the public finances.
Blair is free with his self-criticism. An ethical foreign policy was the “foolish” promise of a naive opposition. In Iraq and Afghanistan he was “hubristic” about the ease of entrenching a democracy. At home he wasn’t good at looking after his most loyal supporters, the Blairites.
“I have been surprised, shocked and more than occasionally appalled at how much I have learnt since leaving office,” he writes. “I have kept maturing,” adds Britain’s most active ex-PM ever. That tone of “if only I knew then what I know now” permeates the book, indeed could be its raison d’être: listen to what I’ve learnt, not what I did, he says. But I wonder if Blair is right when he says was a better prime minister in his second five years in office than his first five.
One of his key lessons for leaders is to focus on their domestic priorities, keep foreign travel to a minimum and avoid distractions. But after 2002, Iraq drained his government of political capital. He is dismissive of the changes that governments can make simply by passing a law, and values the much harder, more complex structural changes — such as driving patient choice over providers in the NHS — that led to lasting improvements in public services.
But will history remember the foundation hospitals and academy schools in east London of the later Blair years? Or will the early landmark legislation to make the Bank of England independent, create a Scottish parliament and impose a minimum wage be his signature domestic achievements? Only the last of those does he celebrate.
There is an assumption throughout the book that the longer a leader is in office, the more experienced, and hence better, they become. But I have also seen how they accumulate baggage. Policy mistakes grow like barnacles and can’t be easily scraped off. Governments groan under the weight of all the things they’ve said in the past that no one wants to unsay. Prime ministers become surrounded by an adviser team that has only ever known them as premiers. A soft corruption sets in, where respect for the rules dissipates and every senior official has been appointed to their post by the current administration.
Democracies need change. Fresh blood and the “anything is possible” enthusiasm that comes with inexperience have a place, too. There’s a reason why Americans decided presidents shouldn’t serve more than two terms, and a reason why only two British prime ministers since the second world war have celebrated 10 years in office — and were then ejected shortly afterwards.
One of them, of course, was Blair. When I first became an opposition MP in 2001, he was at the height of his powers. When I called him “The Master” among our gang of modernising Tories, it was only partly tongue in cheek, and I only got the chance to live some of the life he writes about once he had left the stage.
However, what this book captures about Blair is not just his mastery of the political arts, but his infectious optimism about politics itself. Unlike so many others, he seeks out the better halves of our human natures. We could do with what he calls that “uplifting spirit” essential to great leadership here, and around the world today.
The book is informed, intelligent and interesting — but it is more than that. It is the most practically useful guide to politics I have ever read. His publishers will want to sell many copies, but I think Blair himself wrote this book with a much smaller audience in mind. I felt like it had been written specifically for me — or at least a younger me, 10 years ago.
It’s the lifetime learnings of a once leader for current and future leaders. Even if only a handful of them read it, and do their job better, then the author will think his restless energy will have been put to good use.
On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century by Tony Blair Hutchinson Heinemann £25, 368 pages
George Osborne is chair of the British Museum and a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer
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