Anyone with even the slightest interest in politics is sure to be gripped by Channel 4’s three-part documentary on Tony Blair, which started last night.
For me personally it was part-history lesson, part-nostalgia. It harked back to a more innocent time before my own brush with Westminster rearranged my world for ever.
I’ve often said that politics is a slow process of brutalisation, a kind of prolonged dissection of the soul, and that is starkly reflected here.
Blair himself, his face etched with deep lines, is living proof of how, in the end, power can – and usually does – twist a human being out of shape.
Gone are the confidence, charm and vanity of Blair’s younger self. He now cuts something of a haunted, hesitant figure.
That familiar smile is uncertain, the expression in his eyes distant, as though transfixed by some inescapable internal turmoil. The man who once famously felt the hand of history on his shoulder now clearly feels that hand pressing down uncomfortably hard.
Nevertheless, he remains defiant, defensive even, about his decisions, almost fiercely protective of them, as though he is trying as much to convince himself of his own righteousness as he is the viewer.
Tony Blair’s story is Shakespearean, told in three acts: Rise, Iraq, Fall, in Channel 4’s three-part documentary, writes Sarah Vine (Tony and Cherie Blair move into No 10 in May 1997)
Blair’s story is Shakespearean, told here in three acts: Rise, Iraq, Fall. It would make an excellent musical play in the style of Hamilton (Alastair Campbell would have all the best lines), the story of how a politician of uncommon ability and promise at first won – but then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, ultimately undermining trust in politicians to the point where democracy has become fractured almost beyond repair.
Speaking of Shakespeare, the documentary opens with a reference to one of the Bard’s most enduring characters.
‘Some say you were his Lady Macbeth,’ says the interviewer to Cherie Blair. ‘If anyone thinks Tony’s my puppet, they just don’t understand the nature of the man,’ she replies with a slight rictus smile, ignoring the inherent misogyny of the question.
One assumes she must be used to it by now. Whatever you think of Lady Blair, she perhaps more than any political wife in recent history was criticised for taking too much of an active role in her husband’s political life.
Her predecessor, Norma Major, was the archetype of the dutiful political spouse, happiest away from the melee at Chequers.
She was discreet, modest, understated – everything Mrs Blair was not.
Cherie loved politics and she loved the limelight, and she made no secret of either: a fact that had Labour traditionalists clutching their pearls.
Britain may have been the first major Western democracy to elect a woman prime minister in Margaret Thatcher, but back in 1990s Westminster it might as well have been the 1950s when it came to prime ministerial wives. (Although not, interestingly, prime ministerial husbands: Denis Thatcher got away with murder.)
Poor Cherie was ill-equipped for the role, perhaps because she had political ambitions herself (much is made of this in part one). She was the opposite of the smile-and-wave spouse, although she did her best.
I watched the whole documentary with my daughter, who is no stranger to people coming up to her father Michael Gove and calling him names (Pictured: Sarah with her ex-husband in 2016)
She dressed badly and photographed even worse and had a succession of terrible haircuts – characteristics I recognise all too readily in myself when I look back on my own days in the political limelight before and during the Brexit wars.
Cherie’s presence throughout this documentary, along with two of their children, Euan and Kathryn, was to me a constant reminder of the price political families pay for the proximity to power.
I watched the whole thing with my daughter, who is no stranger to people coming up to her father Michael Gove (former Conservative MP and secretary of state for several government departments) and calling him names, or having reporters camped outside the house shouting questions, or random lunatics threatening to stab him to death on the school run.
One of her 18th birthday presents (she is 22 now) was a card informing her that if he didn’t… (and here the details must be redacted for legal and security reasons), then he would not live to see her 19th. Looking back, that kind of broke me – and hurt us deeply as a family. Given everything, I imagine the Blairs went through much worse.
Tony and Cherie were really Britain’s first ‘First Family’ to raise young children in the political glare. ‘I remember it being terrifying,’ says Kathryn, talking about the fallout from the Iraq war and the baying crowds outside Downing Street.
‘At least social media hadn’t yet been invented,’ remarked my daughter darkly. As for Lady Macbeth, I too have felt the bristles of that same brush, having once dared to express an opinion while offering encouragement to my ex-husband during the fateful week after the Brexit referendum.
But when men get things wrong, it is always expedient to find a woman to blame. It was ever thus, from the Garden of Eden onwards.
Having experienced that trope myself, even from some of my closest so-called ‘friends’, I can sympathise with Cherie’s position. It’s not easy being held to account for actions that were not one’s own. But such is the lot of the political wife.
Cherie Blair in the documentary. ‘If anyone thinks Tony’s my puppet, they just don’t understand the nature of the man,’ she says
Blair, his face etched with deep lines, is living proof of how power can twist a human being out of shape. Gone are the confidence, charm and vanity of Blair’s younger self, writes Sarah Vine
It’s interesting that at no point are the couple interviewed together. According to Peter Mandelson (who features heavily), ‘that marriage was the rock on which Tony’s political career was made’. And yet it’s clear that his attention was often elsewhere. ‘He’s never bought me flowers,’ she reveals.
For his part, Blair himself barely mentions Cherie; but he does credit Peter Thomson, the Australian priest he met at university and who shaped his deep religious conviction. Peter, says Blair, was ‘the single biggest influence in my life’, adding that there is not a day that goes by, even now, that he doesn’t think about him.
The other great influence in Blair’s life was, of course, George W. Bush. As Sally Morgan, his former adviser, points out so obviously and at once so wisely: ‘An awful lot of politics, in the end, is about people and relationships.’
Never was a truer word spoken. Politics is all about personalities, and how well – or badly – they rub along. Entire governments can rest on the success or failure of individual relationships, as we have seen so often in recent years, as we see currently.
In Blair’s case it wasn’t just that he and Bush shared a deep Christian faith, it was also that Blair viewed the so-called ‘special relationship’ between America and Britain as crucial in the fight against genuine evil.
There is a real sense that both men saw the response to 9/11 – including the Iraq war – as a kind of crusade, their very own version of a holy war.
That, as the novelist Robert Harris points out so astutely, was Blair’s downfall.
There was never any doubt that Saddam Hussein was a bad man who gassed his own people and committed untold atrocities. But even if there had been weapons of mass destruction, the invasion would still have been ill-advised because of the unintended consequences that stemmed from it.
The sad truth is that, in coercing Parliament into an invasion, Blair did not, as he had hoped, ‘drive evil from our world’, but unwittingly nurtured the green shoots of an even greater evil: fanatical Islamism and the wellspring of terrorism it has engendered.
Almost 30 years after Blair came to power, the Taliban is more powerful than ever in Afghanistan, while Sudan and other parts of Africa are witnessing terrible massacres of non-Muslims.
The regime in Iran is rampant, killing its citizens in a way that makes Saddam look like a rank amateur. Isis and its many offshoots export their deadly credo to the rest of the globe.
‘Whatever the dangers of the actions we take,’ Blair once said, ‘the dangers of inaction are greater.’
Sadly, that has not turned out to be true. For the man whose messianic zeal and unfailing self-belief propelled him to the highest office in the land, ultimately his legacy can be summed up in a short but devastating description from Macbeth: ‘Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on the other.’
Like Macbeth, Blair will always be haunted by his moment of madness.
As for Cherie, she is left wondering what might have been.