CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE BLAIR STITCH-UP PROJECT
Tom Bower is to biography what Cruella de Vil was to dalmatians. Once you are his subject, you are also his victim. In his introduction to this, his new biography of Tony Blair, he asks us to ‘please accept that what follows – my 21st book – while fuelled by curiosity is not motivated by prejudice’. Really? The book’s title is Broken Vows; its subtitle The Tragedy Of Power. It’s hard not to detect a certain degree of prejudice in those phrases. Chapter titles include Demon to the Slaughter, Unkind Cuts, Lies and Damn’d Lies, Managing the Mess, The Cost of Confusion and Self-Destruction. If this is curiosity, it’s akin to the shark’s curiosity at the sight of blood.
‘Were we all fooled at the outset by a brilliant actor, or did an honest man fall victim to the temptations of power?’ he asks. ‘Did he embark on government in bad faith or, infected by vanity and unmoored values, did he slowly lose his way amid situations he did not understand?’ These questions may be phrased as a choice of verdicts, but only in the sense of ‘guilty – or guiltier?’
Bower goes on to describe his book as ‘the fullest narrative yet available about the workings of the Blair government’, but it is nothing of the kind. It is solely concerned with the failings of the Blair government, which are not the same as the workings. Any achievements are almost entirely ignored. Northern Ireland, for instance, barely merits a look-in (five fleeting mentions, compared to a full eight pages on Bernie Ecclestone).
Having devoted hundreds of pages to slagging off Blair’s record on schools and hospitals, Bower acknowledges, in a half-sentence towards the bottom of page 540, that ‘Waiting times for treatment had been dramatically cut, and the new schools and hospitals improved the atmosphere surrounding public services’. But he then adds that Blair ‘offered nothing fundamentally new… New buildings were not the same as new ideas’. Indeed not; but, on the other hand, if I were a pupil or a patient, I might prefer a new school or a shorter waiting list to a new idea.
Bias is pervasive, the facts bent to show Blair in the worst
possible light. Here is just one example. At one point, Bower derides Blair for ‘sniping that Glenn Hoddle’s belief in reincarnation was “very offensive” and should bar him from being the coach of the England football team’. But it was not Hoddle’s belief in reincarnation that Blair found offensive: it was his belief that people born with disabilities were being punished for their sins in a former life.
By putting thoughts into Blair’s head, Bower obscures the boundary between truth and conjecture. This means that when he writes a sentence like ‘Democracy, he had decided, hindered effective government’, Bower is implying this is what Blair really thought. Yet no sources are given and no proof offered. It is not what Blair thinks after all, but what Bower thinks Blair thinks, or what Bower wants Blair to think, which is not the same thing at all.
As the book progresses, the authorial voice becomes so loud that it threatens to overwhelm the voice of its subject. Speaking as prime minister at his very last Labour party conference, Blair ‘craved an audience, but he did not love those who cheered. On the contrary, he hated their ingratitude. He had never loved the common man’. This is the stuff of pantomime.
Any student of journalistic hyperbole will welcome Broken Vows as a textbook. Those around Downing Street are always being hit by bomb- shells, or going into meltdown, or shell-shocked, or hitting a brick wall. Rollercoasters and precipices and explosions abound. Alastair Campbell and Gordon Brown seem to take it in turns as to who can be the most ‘incandescent’. If they’re not storming out, they’re fuming, wielding knives, fanning the flames or reversing the tide. The final 45 pages are much more lively, dealing as they do with Blair’s fishy life since Downing Street, which seems to be largely devoted to buying more and more property and accumulating more and more money, all under the aegis of a smoke-and-mirrors umbrella company – Tony Blair Associates – straight out of the pages of a John Grisham novel.
If Bower is to be believed, Blair has spent £25m on property since 2007, and pockets an ever-increasing fortune from ‘advising’ all sorts of capitalist enterprises, from JP Morgan to a French luxury goods conglomerate.
His going rate for a speech is £250,000 plus £50,000 in ‘expenses’. Not long ago, he even flew to Orlando to make a speech to the International Sanitary Supply Association, for manufacturers of toilet cleaners.
But he’ll only come if there’s enough cash up front: last year, he turned down £125,000 for a 20-minute speech to a conference in Stockholm. The subject? ‘Feeding the Hungry’. It looks as though the hungry will have to feed themselves.
Blair’s ‘spokesperson’ has already described the book’s allegations as variously ‘squalid, distasteful and pathetic’.
The book would carry more weight if Bower were not hamfisted, so clearly focused on seeing the worst in everyone. ‘Blair’s hair had turned grey, and, despite spending an hour most days in the gym, his youthful looks had faded,’ he writes, just a few pages before the end. But whose youthful looks haven’t faded by the age of 62?
The authorial voice becomes so loud that it threatens to overwhelm the voice of its subject