This interesting, sometimes surprising book has a subject, but also an object. Yet the latter – its obvious target, and primary reader – is mentioned not once by name. Tony Blair has long reflected on leadership: what it means, how to do it well, how to cope with its pressures, when to relinquish it. But in the early autumn of 2024, this feels as much like a work of contemporary commentary as a handbook on governance.
He argues that leadership follows three stages. The first is when the new leader is listening eagerly; the second comes when they think they know everything, and finally, there’s a third stage of maturity when “once again, with more humility, they listen and learn”. The book’s purpose, he says, is to shorten the learning curve and get leaders to the third stage more quickly.
The first paragraph of the first chapter seems crafted to attract the attention of the reader Blair must surely have been thinking of most as he wrote it. It is a plea for a plan. A plan, he explains, “is a route map for governing. It sets out the destination, the milestones, and above all, the priorities… It focuses the mind of government. Indeed, in a certain sense it creates the mind of government.”
If that isn’t a conscious nod to Keir Starmer’s “mission government”, I’m a banana. As Starmer did in August, Blair argues that “it takes ten years to change a country” – during which two terms, a leader must be laser-focused on priorities that will change the lives of voters and able to relegate media criticism, second-order crises and all scandals other than lethal ones.
The missions, it seems, are all. Blair’s analysis of the debilitating lack of confidence inside today’s democracies, and the rise of populism – the politics of grievance, not solution – returns to the importance of delivering on concrete, clear improvements in daily life. Calm down. Stay focused. For if conventional democratic politics doesn’t seem to work, then whoever is promising the biggest shake-up and provokes the most outrage will succeed: “Everything in this book is designed to explain why delivery, making the change which works, is the only real test of government. But it is also the only way to protect democracy.”
Any book written by Blair, particularly one with leadership in the title, is going to rustle up the familiar critiques of his record, of which more later. But his qualification for writing this book goes beyond his decade as prime minister. Seven years ago he founded the Tony Blair Institute, and has since been crossing the globe advising other leaders in democracies and, more controversially, in non-democracies.
There is always the danger of a smug “leaders’ clubhouse” perspective on the world, which too casually dismisses outside criticism, and is too susceptible to the severe problems leaders face. Unsettlingly, Blair capitalises the word “Leader” throughout. Yet his institute has given him a perspective no other leading British politician can rival. Informed examples from Kenya, Estonia, Senegal, Korea, Singapore and many other countries abound. The result is a profoundly non-insular analysis. For anyone properly interested in modern politics, it will be, I suspect, vastly more important than the memoirs of a certain other prime minister, to be greeted with hysteria later this autumn.
Blair’s book is a guide full of practical advice from a man who has reflected on his own failures and successes – advice on how to select, shape and manage the best team; how to reorganise a torpid bureaucracy to deliver change; how to handle meetings; the importance of the diary and of time; the dangers of paranoia and arrogance; above all, how to distinguish between what matters and what it does not.
It’s an easy read. Along the way, we get insightful jokes and one-liners. Israel’s Shimon Peres, talking to a successor who is agonising about handling the peace process in the prime minister’s official residence in Jerusalem: “Look, you have a choice: you are here in this famous address as leader of the country. Do you want to be in the history book or the visitors’ book?”
Blair on AI technology: “Such things, once invented by human ingenuity, are never disinvented by human anxiety.” On feuds: “People fall out with you, but you should always be prepared to let them fall back in.” On decision-taking: “Calculate too much, and you miscalculate.” On law and order: “The characteristic people value most in any society is stability.”
All of this is useful and timely. If it is somehow Blair’s appeal for relevance in the time of Starmer, it deserves success. But that also requires a clear-eyed look at the darker side of his own record. On Iraq and Afghanistan, he admits a “fundamental miscalculation” in believing nations could be moved after invasion to democracy, despite the lack of proper institutions of government and the presence of religious sectarianism. “This was not an example of hubris in the sense of disdain for others or a belief in the overweening capacity of Western leadership to affect change,” he writes:
“It was a misplaced assessment that the world as it should be could be forged from the world as it is, and that democracy could be transplanted into a political body that was going to have multiple pressures to reject the organ. The belief in the inherent superiority of a democratic system gave us an exaggerated view of where, how and where it could take root.”
There is a touch of tragic realism here, albeit late. I quote this passage in full because I don’t think we have had quite this admission from Blair before. During the invasion of Iraq, when I was reporting on the politics of the war, there was plenty of similarly wise analysis from the Foreign Office in London and the State Department in Washington. I remember one senior official telling me that because of Iraq’s tribal and religious divisions, “You can’t just bomb it and then expect it to turn into Minnesota with palm trees.” They weren’t listened to.
What happened to Iraq was a catastrophe. We cannot, of course, know the terrible things that would have happened had Saddam Hussein remained in power, but a better understanding then about the dangers of demolishing states you disapprove of would have gifted us a safer world today. So when the author dismisses Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy as foolish because “it implied a standard of morality that is completely inconsistent with the conduct of a country’s affairs in the real world” – and, to be fair, Blair explains lucidly why he thinks that – many readers will want to jam in their heels and argue.
Another big gap is the almost uncritical attitude to big corporations. The private sector is largely portrayed here as an admirable, politically neutral tool to modernise the state, with no understanding of its propensity for short-termism and gorging shareholders rather than investing, or ignoring the bigger social picture while driving towards monopoly.
This admiration for the private sector leads Blair into a curious political muddle over Elon Musk. Blair warmly (and justifiably) praises Musk as an extraordinary innovator who goes back to first principles with his cars and rockets. Elsewhere, there is a passionate, more predictable, passage about the venom and vitriol saucing social media, and the importance for political leaders of ignoring it. What, then, of the Elon Musk who gleefully tells his 195.5 million followers that the UK is on the edge of civil war, who platforms extremists and taunts Starmer as an anti-free-speech fascist?
There is a lack of dots being joined here. The truth is that the private sector isn’t ever politically neutral. It produces as many dangerous megalomaniacs as democratic politics, with fewer handrails, and these days often with more influence. It seeks to gouge profit from public need. A book on political leadership really should have confronted that directly.
I have more sympathy for another contentious aspect of the book, which is the optimistic glow that descends whenever AI is mentioned. Blair is often teased by technophobes and pessimists for seeing artificial intelligence as the answer to everything. Here, he rather effectively doubles down. He gives clear examples of how this revolution can make government work better, for less money: “The task of the Leader is first to accept the magnitude of this ‘real world’ change, then to explain it, and finally to weave it into an exciting and enthusing political narrative.” At a time when, as he says, healthcare systems are teetering on the brink, criminal justice systems are dysfunctional, planning is slowing down essential infrastructure projects and yet traditional tax-and-spend answers aren’t available, he is surely right about most of this.
Will he be heard? This part of the book is less for Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves than Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary and, on health, Wes Streeting. But AI is going to be vastly important, and is perhaps the aspect of Westminster’s next decade that is least predicted or understood by conventional political journalism.
Tony Blair is never going to be uncontroversial. He is coming back into fashion, but he will not be hugely popular again. He is a deeply thoughtful, highly experienced and self-critical man who deserves to be taken seriously by anyone interested in how democratic power is effectively wielded. I hope, very much, that his unacknowledged primary reader, one Keir Starmer, opens this and does more than rifle through.
On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century
Tony Blair
Penguin, 368pp, £10.99
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[See also: We must break up the tech platforms that threaten our democracy]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire