Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street
Corbis, via PBS
The Blair Decade
Anne Lapping, executive producer
PBS
Wednesday, May 23
9-11 p.m. (8-10 p.m. in New York)
By Alexander C. Kafka
Pity the poor producers of The Blair Decade, scrambling to update and re-edit their footage in light of the recent Machiavellian events in London. As the timely program details, a veritable Labour silent coup led to the British prime minister’s announcement this month of his upcoming June 27 resignation.
Yet the filmmakers’ efforts are rewarded in this accessible and compelling portrait not just of Blair but of Labour machinations and British politics in general. The documentary covers a lot of ground in two hours, and the intraparty rupture is the end of a thread that runs throughout: Blair’s complex and problematic relationship with his ostensible right hand, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is also Blair’s presumptive successor.
An American casually following international headlines might have vague inklings of abstract frictions between Blair and Brown. But The Blair Decade brings home the Shakespearean intensity of their long, awkward, and probably ill-conceived collaboration and growing acrimony.
The well-paced if visually uninventive program features a great many informative interview segments with high British and American officials. Former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, British Ambassador Sir David Manning, ex-White House chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former Senator George Mitchell are among them. It would have been wonderful to get Blair or Brown themselves on camera for the joint Thirteen/WNET, Brook Lapping, and Channel 4 UK production, but they were apparently too busy stabbing each other in the back. Instead, news clips are used to strategic effect.
After the death of Labour leader John Smith in 1994, Blair, a middle-class, Oxford-educated barrister, took Smith’s place, fashioning Labour into New Labour, and bringing it from left toward center in the manner of his political role model, U.S. President Bill Clinton. Cordiality toward business, a focus on inflation control, and moves toward integration into the European Union were key planks of the platform. After loss to the Tories in four consecutive general elections, New Labour, under the exceptionally charming, boyish, and articulate Blair, won municipal, then general, elections in ’95 and ’97, respectively.
After those wins, Blair and Brown made a private agreement to share power, with Blair as prime minister overseeing social policy and Brown, as chancellor and political heir in waiting, overseeing economic policy. Symbolic and telling of their Siamese-twin arrangement, Brown became the actual occupant of 10 Downing Street, with Blair, his barrister wife Cherie, and their three children next door at the more-spacious Number 11.
New Labour had the largest Parliamentary majority since 1935 and, at 43, Blair was the youngest prime minister since 1812. The team was bold, confident, and, early on, successful at constructively shaking up the establishment. They took Parliament’s power to determine interest rates and gave it to the Bank of England, remedying both pronounced conflicts of interest and imprudent rate setting. Blair displayed his feel for the public’s mood when he dubbed the late Princess Diana “the people’s princess” and prodded the royals to break tradition and publicly acknowledge the country’s profound grief at Diana's death.
In Washington, D.C., he displayed similar diplomatic instinct in visibly chumming it up with Clinton during the president’s Lewinsky nightmare. In return, Clinton, through Special Envoy George Mitchell, broke with American political precedent and actively intervened in Northern Ireland talks. (The issue had previously been seen as too touchy for U.S. administrations because of the powerful Irish-American voting bloc.) With Clinton’s help, Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, hammered out the Belfast Agreement with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams and the Protestant Unionists’ David Trimble, for the most part ending the Troubles that had plagued Northern Ireland for three decades. (Participants’ retelling of the talks’ suspenseful details makes for some of the documentary’s most compelling interviews.)
Blair displayed similar diplomatic brinksmanship in persuading Clinton to face down Serb President Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. U.S.-spearheaded NATO forces were relying on air power, but Blair, moved by the plight of Kosovar refugees, prodded Clinton to threaten the use of ground troops, a prospect that forced Milosevic into retreat and turned the conflict around. Blair’s commitment of British forces to Sierra Leone ended a decade of war there as well.
At home, though, things were dicier. The economy was humming, but Brown was undermining Blair’s efforts at integration into the EU, and shortchanging the military budget. The two also were working at cross-purposes in details of health and education reform, details that a then-cabinet minister amusingly describes as evoking in Blair a glazed “garden look,” as though he were suddenly staring at a lovely garden and not at intricate position papers.
Then, of course, 9/11. There are no great revelations on that score here, but some interesting back story and reminders. Blair came to D.C. to visit President Bush and evaluate whether the neocon administration would react imprudently and disproportionately in Afghanistan. Let in early on Bush's Iraq plans, Blair, who had been authorizing fly-overs in Iraq since the previous U.S. administration, was of like mind and committed to sending British troops in an invasion. That remained so even after the Bush team, fearing that the issue would topple the Blair regime before it toppled Saddam’s, offered to let Blair off the hook, saving face by giving some noncombatant auxiliary aid. Blair wouldn’t hear of it, and spent his immense political capital ramming the decision through Parliament and even going on a masochistic publicity tour through the U.K. debating some of the decision’s very vocal opponents. He was deeply eloquent in presenting the case for Saddam's possession and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
The question remains why he was so convinced, and why he was, overall, such an ardent advocate of the invasion, shrugging off the warnings of French President Jacques Chirac, among many others. Again, no lightning strikes of insight from the documentary, but some helpful clues. First off, Blair, though quietly, is a church-going Bible-carrying man of faith who may have been more in accord than generally realized with Bush’s clash-of-civilizations mindset. The prime minister’s successes in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and diplomatic virtuosity in Northern Ireland, may have encouraged his sense of being not just a major, but a crucial, player on the world stage, and indeed he was in selling the Iraq invasion internationally in a way that Bush couldn’t.
But along with various New Labour scandals and indirect blame, however fair, for the 2005 London subway bombings, the Iraq decision has gradually cost Blair his job and perhaps his historical reputation as well. Some of the talking heads in The Blair Decade think Blair has been a remarkably good prime minister, but could have been a great one, were it not for Iraq.
Time will tell. Meanwhile, worthy work for skilled psychobiographers will be to decipher how much Blair’s involvement and, maybe, overinvolvement abroad was spurred by Brown’s sabotage of the prime minister’s power at home. And let's remember that like Clinton at the end of his second term, Blair is a relatively young man. The Blair Decade may be ending, but there’s no good reason to think that will be the last chapter in his extraordinary public life.
It will also be interesting to see whether Brown and his New Labour team can bolster a party in deep trouble, or whether, accomplished political vipers that they've shown themselves to be, they’ll leave it as they found it—in tatters.
The Blair Decade
Anne Lapping, executive producer
PBS
Wednesday, May 23
9-11 p.m. (8-10 p.m. in New York)
By Alexander C. Kafka
Pity the poor producers of The Blair Decade, scrambling to update and re-edit their footage in light of the recent Machiavellian events in London. As the timely program details, a veritable Labour silent coup led to the British prime minister’s announcement this month of his upcoming June 27 resignation.
Yet the filmmakers’ efforts are rewarded in this accessible and compelling portrait not just of Blair but of Labour machinations and British politics in general. The documentary covers a lot of ground in two hours, and the intraparty rupture is the end of a thread that runs throughout: Blair’s complex and problematic relationship with his ostensible right hand, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is also Blair’s presumptive successor.
An American casually following international headlines might have vague inklings of abstract frictions between Blair and Brown. But The Blair Decade brings home the Shakespearean intensity of their long, awkward, and probably ill-conceived collaboration and growing acrimony.
The well-paced if visually uninventive program features a great many informative interview segments with high British and American officials. Former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, British Ambassador Sir David Manning, ex-White House chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former Senator George Mitchell are among them. It would have been wonderful to get Blair or Brown themselves on camera for the joint Thirteen/WNET, Brook Lapping, and Channel 4 UK production, but they were apparently too busy stabbing each other in the back. Instead, news clips are used to strategic effect.
After the death of Labour leader John Smith in 1994, Blair, a middle-class, Oxford-educated barrister, took Smith’s place, fashioning Labour into New Labour, and bringing it from left toward center in the manner of his political role model, U.S. President Bill Clinton. Cordiality toward business, a focus on inflation control, and moves toward integration into the European Union were key planks of the platform. After loss to the Tories in four consecutive general elections, New Labour, under the exceptionally charming, boyish, and articulate Blair, won municipal, then general, elections in ’95 and ’97, respectively.
After those wins, Blair and Brown made a private agreement to share power, with Blair as prime minister overseeing social policy and Brown, as chancellor and political heir in waiting, overseeing economic policy. Symbolic and telling of their Siamese-twin arrangement, Brown became the actual occupant of 10 Downing Street, with Blair, his barrister wife Cherie, and their three children next door at the more-spacious Number 11.
New Labour had the largest Parliamentary majority since 1935 and, at 43, Blair was the youngest prime minister since 1812. The team was bold, confident, and, early on, successful at constructively shaking up the establishment. They took Parliament’s power to determine interest rates and gave it to the Bank of England, remedying both pronounced conflicts of interest and imprudent rate setting. Blair displayed his feel for the public’s mood when he dubbed the late Princess Diana “the people’s princess” and prodded the royals to break tradition and publicly acknowledge the country’s profound grief at Diana's death.
In Washington, D.C., he displayed similar diplomatic instinct in visibly chumming it up with Clinton during the president’s Lewinsky nightmare. In return, Clinton, through Special Envoy George Mitchell, broke with American political precedent and actively intervened in Northern Ireland talks. (The issue had previously been seen as too touchy for U.S. administrations because of the powerful Irish-American voting bloc.) With Clinton’s help, Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, hammered out the Belfast Agreement with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams and the Protestant Unionists’ David Trimble, for the most part ending the Troubles that had plagued Northern Ireland for three decades. (Participants’ retelling of the talks’ suspenseful details makes for some of the documentary’s most compelling interviews.)
Blair displayed similar diplomatic brinksmanship in persuading Clinton to face down Serb President Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. U.S.-spearheaded NATO forces were relying on air power, but Blair, moved by the plight of Kosovar refugees, prodded Clinton to threaten the use of ground troops, a prospect that forced Milosevic into retreat and turned the conflict around. Blair’s commitment of British forces to Sierra Leone ended a decade of war there as well.
At home, though, things were dicier. The economy was humming, but Brown was undermining Blair’s efforts at integration into the EU, and shortchanging the military budget. The two also were working at cross-purposes in details of health and education reform, details that a then-cabinet minister amusingly describes as evoking in Blair a glazed “garden look,” as though he were suddenly staring at a lovely garden and not at intricate position papers.
Then, of course, 9/11. There are no great revelations on that score here, but some interesting back story and reminders. Blair came to D.C. to visit President Bush and evaluate whether the neocon administration would react imprudently and disproportionately in Afghanistan. Let in early on Bush's Iraq plans, Blair, who had been authorizing fly-overs in Iraq since the previous U.S. administration, was of like mind and committed to sending British troops in an invasion. That remained so even after the Bush team, fearing that the issue would topple the Blair regime before it toppled Saddam’s, offered to let Blair off the hook, saving face by giving some noncombatant auxiliary aid. Blair wouldn’t hear of it, and spent his immense political capital ramming the decision through Parliament and even going on a masochistic publicity tour through the U.K. debating some of the decision’s very vocal opponents. He was deeply eloquent in presenting the case for Saddam's possession and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
The question remains why he was so convinced, and why he was, overall, such an ardent advocate of the invasion, shrugging off the warnings of French President Jacques Chirac, among many others. Again, no lightning strikes of insight from the documentary, but some helpful clues. First off, Blair, though quietly, is a church-going Bible-carrying man of faith who may have been more in accord than generally realized with Bush’s clash-of-civilizations mindset. The prime minister’s successes in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and diplomatic virtuosity in Northern Ireland, may have encouraged his sense of being not just a major, but a crucial, player on the world stage, and indeed he was in selling the Iraq invasion internationally in a way that Bush couldn’t.
But along with various New Labour scandals and indirect blame, however fair, for the 2005 London subway bombings, the Iraq decision has gradually cost Blair his job and perhaps his historical reputation as well. Some of the talking heads in The Blair Decade think Blair has been a remarkably good prime minister, but could have been a great one, were it not for Iraq.
Time will tell. Meanwhile, worthy work for skilled psychobiographers will be to decipher how much Blair’s involvement and, maybe, overinvolvement abroad was spurred by Brown’s sabotage of the prime minister’s power at home. And let's remember that like Clinton at the end of his second term, Blair is a relatively young man. The Blair Decade may be ending, but there’s no good reason to think that will be the last chapter in his extraordinary public life.
It will also be interesting to see whether Brown and his New Labour team can bolster a party in deep trouble, or whether, accomplished political vipers that they've shown themselves to be, they’ll leave it as they found it—in tatters.
