There are times when I miss Tony Blair. There are times when I look at our gloomy political landscape, peopled with unconvincing leaders, and shed a little tear that he isn’t there any more, with his big ideas, his zeal and his shiny TV teeth. Then I wake up from my anxiety dream, have a cold shower and realise I don’t need to miss him because he’s still bloody there. Like a runaway political train, the man has been trying to run the entire world.
This week it was reported that Blair might step down from his role as envoy for the Quartet of Middle East peace negotiators – not because it places such a strain on the concept of irony, but because of alleged conflicts of interest with his Tony Blair Foundation, thought to have made £80m over the same period. It seems that striking highly secretive oil deals with sheikhs and sultans has proved just that little bit sexier than sorting out Palestine and its blockaded bus routes.
I mean, you can see how it happens. You start out with the best intentions in the world, as Blair probably did in the 1990s. You build some new schools, do some excellent work with Sure Start centres and Northern Ireland, then accidentally turn into Joan of Arc and kickstart a major war. Domestic politics starts looking whiny, and blamey, because everybody hates you, so you move on into a quiet retirement combo of Jerusalem, Saudi royals and private jets. One minute you’re having a quick shandy and a game of billiards with one of your oligarch mates; the next, you find you’ve sold them half a sub-Saharan country and a new transatlantic pipeline, and thrown in a book deal and dinner with a supermodel. And they haven’t even got their second round in yet.
Somewhere along the line, your personal manifesto quietly slips from “Education, Education, Education” into “Grease the wheels of dictatorships, grease the wheels of dictatorships, grease the wheels of dictatorships”. I understand it, I do. It could happen to any of us! So I wasn’t all that surprised when Blair said in a speech last weekend that, though democracy in the Middle East was important, it wasn’t any more important than efficacy, or “effective government taking effective decisions”. Indeed, if you’re trying to run a country unencumbered by the views and beliefs of the entire population of that country, as many of Tony’s new business partners are, democracy really could be a bit of a spanner in the works. Blair’s speech was given in Egypt, where he praised the highly effective work of his new pal President al-Sisi, with whom he’s been having some kind of unspecified relationship. Meanwhile, Amnesty International has reported a surge in harrowing incidents of torture and deaths in police custody since President al-Sisi came to power. Blair used to be the leader of the Labour party and won a landslide election victory: were we all smoking crack?
A biography published this week, Blair Inc: The Man Behind The Mask, argues that he is the only British prime minister in history to merit a book about his life after leaving power, given how much more power he has gained since he stopped being elected for it. What do we have to do to stop him? Stage some kind of intervention? I picture an industrial-sized shepherd’s crook coming on to the stage the next time he charges the International Sanitary Supply Association (yes, this happened) fifty grand to make a speech. It doesn’t always pan out like this for former leaders: Nicolas Sarkozy, once France’s “President Bling-Bling”, now runs a monumentally boring Instagram account, filled with unblingy photos (“Here I am standing awkwardly in a laboratory visiting some scientists on National Microbe Day”).
Still, perhaps it will turn out that Blair has been playing a long game, befriending all these despots in order to pull off some massive revolution in which he shows them the error of their ways, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Through his gentle guidance, the dictators will take the shackles off their repressed people and let everybody dance through the streets, forgetting money and remembering love. Or maybe it will turn out that he really is drunk on his own reflection and lining his sticky little pockets with the greatest love of all: mammon. Who can say for sure? But I’ve got an 80 million quid bet riding on the answer.
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