Tony Blair The interview
On the morning of our final meeting for this article, in mid-September, Tony Blair gave me a tour of the art on display in his London office. On a wall facing his desk, on the far side of a substantial room, is a 19th-century painting of a Cairo street scene. On another, a present from Cherie, Blair’s wife: a black and white photograph of an Orthodox Jew sitting beside a market stall. On a third wall, a painting of pilgrims on the outskirts of Jerusalem, also 19th-century. Most imposing is a large map of Africa and the Middle East. As we looked at it, Blair marvelled at the size of Africa, and then he pointed out Israel — we’d been there, together, a few days earlier — and remarked on how tiny it is compared to the Arab states surrounding it.
We continued the tour. Alongside the family snaps of Tony and Cherie and their four children, now all grown up, there’s an eye-catching photograph of two small boys playing football on a dirt pitch in, he thinks, Rwanda — another country we’d visited together. Looking around the room, I made some bland comment on the fact he was surrounded by images of his present preoccupations, the concerns he spends the majority of his time on, and that he returns to most regularly in conversation: peace in the Middle East, economic and political development in Africa.
I confess I hadn’t noticed that other than a maquette for a statue of Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister of the Sixties and Seventies, there were no obvious representations of Britain, or Britishness. But I think Blair noticed, suddenly, because as soon as I made my remark he took off at a clip, opened the doors to an adjoining sitting room — I grabbed my voice recorder and scuttled along behind him — and began to talk me through the pictures on the walls: British scenes by British artists. It’s a fraught business, the giving of interviews, the management of a public reputation, especially one such as his.
The Office of Tony Blair is an organisation — you might even say an idea — as well as a physical space. It is headquartered, for the moment, in a terraced townhouse — stucco ground floor, brick above — on a corner of Grosvenor Square: prime Mayfair real estate. Blair left Downing Street in 2007 with, as he put it to me, “three people and four mobile phones: no office, no back-up, no nothing.” In the nine years since, he has built a new infrastructure to enable him to do all the things he wants to do. (There are many.) He now employs around 200 people on his various ventures, philanthropic and otherwise. These are funded by his own money, earned through his commercial work,