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Why Tony Blair has to go

Jonathan Freedland

Nobody sells New Labour like Mr. Blair, and the faithful are anxious about losing him. For all that, there was no appeal for him to stay.

IN THE end he did play "that last encore" and still managed to leave the crowd wanting more. That was what his Downing Street advisers had hoped for, at least according to the memo setting out the Blair farewell tour, leaked at the start of the month.

And on Tuesday the Prime Minister pulled it off perfectly. He closed his speech and left the stage, leaving the audience to gape at a stirring video montage, complete with pounding soundtrack, of highlights from the Blair years: the defeat of arch-Thatcherite Michael Portillo on May 1, 1997, the Good Friday agreement, a third election victory in 2005. To rhythmic applause, he came back out, working the crowd, touching a succession of hands. His aides wanted him to go out like a rock star, and so he did.

Indeed, as he basked in the flashbulbs and ovation, a cheeky thought struck. Tony Blair will never get a better send-off than this. Any other departure — say, a brief announcement to the cameras outside No 10 — would count as a terrible anticlimax by comparison. On Tuesday he faced a packed, cheering arena, brandishing placards bellowing their gratitude: "Tony, you made Britain better," even "We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah." So what if they were clearly hand-scribbled by party apparatchiks? The effect won't be matched again.

The logical, self-interested move would be for Mr. Blair to shock us all and quit next week, ideally on Wednesday morning, thereby wiping out all media coverage of David Cameron's speech to the Conservative party conference. It would be a last act of service to Labour — and the one way to guarantee that the Blair era ends on a high.

But don't hold your breath. Instead, the Prime Minister will probably carry on, waiting to reach the next great peak. In the meantime, he has given his party an intense 56-minute reminder of what it'll miss when he's gone — and what it won't.

Undeniable skill

Top of the first category is the man's sheer, undeniable skill as a political performer. Clare Short, the former Cabinet Minister who resigned over Mr. Blair's backing of George W. Bush in Iraq, calls him an "actor-presenter," but if she's right he's an Oscar-worthy actor-presenter. (Tellingly, he even compared his own speech to an Oscar winner's, just before he offered thanks to his agent.) He can do it all: hold a large hall rapt, yet still sound right on television; hit every emphasis and cadence; move effortlessly from light to shade. Not for the first time, he defused a current political problem with a joke, quipping that he at least knows his wife is never going to run off with the bloke next door. It was an implicit confirmation that Cherie Blair had indeed branded Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, his longtime wannabe successor, a liar — but it worked like a charm.

Labour audiences are not the only ones to have got used to this — we all have. For a decade we've come to think that this kind of skill is normal, just as Americans grew blasé after eight years of Bill Clinton's wizardry. Then they got George W. Bush and realised that they had witnessed a once-in-a-generation talent. When Mr. Blair has gone, we may come to the same realisation.

And it will have a political consequence. For what Tuesday demonstrated is that no one can explain New Labourism better than Mr. Blair. Year in and year out he has faced a party that is confused by what it feels are serial ruptures from Labour tradition — such as the involvement of the private sector in health and education — and he has patiently argued that, no, on the contrary, this or that move actually represents the fulfilment of Labour ideals.

He did it again on Tuesday, defending the use of private companies in the national health service and business-sponsored city academies. It's not always honest, and often relies on false dichotomies — as if Labour can either invite the private sector in or allow public services to wither, with no middle way between the two — but it does work. We know from Mr. Brown that this kind of policy will continue — but will he be able to explain it as effectively?

Paradoxically, Labour will also miss Mr. Blair's uncanny knack for avoiding public identification with the party he leads. For 12 years he has positioned himself as apart from, and often at odds with, Labour. Since the party remained unloved by the electorate, that made smart political sense: witness the polling that shows voters, when asked to place politicians on the left-right spectrum, always put Mr. Blair somewhere in the middle — exactly where they are. (They put Labour and, tellingly, Mr. Brown to the left of themselves.)

That came at a cost, as the Prime Minister repeatedly picked fights with his party, trampling over their most cherished ground. They won't miss those battles, and on Tuesday they had a taste of life without them, as Mr. Blair tickled the faithful's soft spots — from index-linked pensions to environmental burdens on business — that once he'd have kicked. But that feat of positioning was one reason why Mr. Blair was able to dominate British politics for so long, winning Labour three full terms for the first time in its history.

Indeed, that simple fact is what they will yearn for most: Mr. Blair's talent for winning. On Tuesday he dispensed some nuggets of electoral wisdom, talking like a street fighter anxious to "take apart" Mr. Cameron's Conservatives, and you could feel a ripple of anxiety: will we be able to do it without him?

For all that, there was no appeal for him to stay. Indeed, when he said it was "right to let go," his audience clapped. That is because on Tuesday Mr. Blair also offered a reminder of why he had to leave — and why they will be relieved when he has.

It came in the passage about international affairs. Suddenly the applause died as the Prime Minister announced that terrorism is unconnected to foreign policy, and only enemy propaganda would say otherwise. Mr. Blair is one of the very few people left on the planet who still believes this: even the CIA now concedes that the invasion of Iraq has fuelled terrorism rather than curbed it. So when Mr. Blair said that a withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan would be "a craven act of surrender," he said it to silence.

Scepticism also greeted the Prime Minister's promise to dedicate his remaining time to finding a peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Perhaps some delegates remembered the conference speech of 2002, when Mr. Blair guaranteed "final status" Middle East talks by the end of the year. Of course, that promise came to nothing, and in this area Mr. Blair has simply promised too much and too often. Those passages were not the lengthiest section of the speech, but they cast a shadow over the rest. They explain why Mr. Blair, for all his sorcerer's powers, could not go on and on and on.

He said on Tuesday that the British people would always prefer a wrong decision to no decision at all, that they would forgive a mistake. But that is only partially true. Yes, the public handed Mr. Blair another majority in 2005, but it was on a paltry share of the vote. The decision to invade Iraq is a mistake that has hardly been forgiven: instead it engendered a distrust that forced Mr. Blair to announce his eventual departure and that lives on to this day.

Still, no one can touch Mr. Blair's panache on the podium. He proved that again in Manchester — even as he showed exactly why his time is now up. In that sense, his aides could not have planned it better: Tuesday was the perfect farewell. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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