Cherrie Blair’s Autobiography Would Have Been Useless. If Not For One Confession

May 29, 2008

I have read Cherie Blair’s autobiography. All the glorious 407 pages of it, excluding the index which covers an impressive 14 pages. And this is what I would like to ask: how on earth did people like Tony and Cherie Blair ever end up at 10 Downing Street? How in the world has this double act managed to occupy the prime minister’s residence for ten long years without having been caught out as the simpletons and opportunists that they both are? And isn’t it remarkable how during that period the Blairs had managed to surround themselves with people who had absolutely no style or substance.

Mrs Blair’s autobiography entitled Speaking for Myself reveals that she had very limited understanding of politics, or pretty much anything else. So petty and irrelevant is her perception of people and events that at times I even caught myself thinking that somewhere in the end of the book there would be a short paragraph saying that everything that I had read was, in fact, fiction. I thought it would say: ‘Mrs Blair wants you to know that it’s all just a bit of fun really and that everything she has written in her autobiography has been made up by her. The real stuff is coming out soon in her husband’s memoirs and you can order an advance copy of How I Saved The World All By Myself for £45 plus £5 postage & packing.’

But alas, I have not found any such message anywhere.

I won’t bore you with an analysis of the volume because it is just not worth it. It is an extraordinarily irrelevant and shallow autobiography. Imagine, for example, that Mrs Blair’s personal hairstylist, André, is mentioned in it, time after time, as if he is somebody that we should know a lot about. And then there is Carol Caplin, the topless model, who had become a close confidant and a style guru of Mrs Blair and her husband. And then, of course, there is Alistair Campbell, a tabloid hack, who has more influence on the Blairs than anybody else in government. And how can I not mention the periods that either start or stop. Mrs Blair is quite frank about her periods and about the complications she had had while giving birth to her children. I suspect that all these details had been included to endear her to the Sisterhood.

And then there is the contraception or rather, lack of it. A lot has been already written about her account of that fateful trip to Balmoral Castle with her husband when Mrs Blair did not take her so-called ‘contraceptive equipment’ with her for fear of the servants finding it among her toiletries while unpacking. You know, devote Catholic woman using contraception. Would not look good, would it? And so she ended up pregnant. Because how could she and her husband miss a chance of having some fun amidst all that royal splendour? I wonder if they carved out their names on the bed stand. Something like, ‘Cherie and Tony have been here and had a great time.’

What is surprising is that Tony Blair does not really come across in the book as the great communicator and an astute politician that we’ve been hearing so much about in the past. He actually comes across as a rather weak and indecisive man who is always worried that he would not be understood, even by his closest allies. But, of course, his wife is always there for him, giving him comfort and reassurance in an hour of need and saying things like, ‘You are a good man… And God knows your motives are pure, even if the consequences are not as you had hoped.’ Which sort of implies that everything he did never really worked out properly.

But strange as it may seem, I’m still grateful to Mrs Blair for bringing out her book because while she was promoting it she made one confession that helps to understand where Tony Blair is coming from. There has been a lot said about him transforming the Labour party and even moving to the right of centre on many issues. He has been called a pragmatic politician who was ready to adjust his policies so that he could actually represent the interests of the majority of people. Well, Mrs Blair came out with one very important confession that has helped to set the record straight. In a newspaper interview, while plugging her book, she said that she was a socialist and that her husband was a socialist too. Here is what she said exactly: ‘I’m probably the only person in the country who insists my husband is a socialist.’ Asked how he, Tony Blair, replies to that, she said: ‘He does his usual thing. He smiles and rolls his eyes and knows exactly what I mean.’

I must congratulate Mrs Blair on revealing the one thing about Mr Blair that most people seemed to have been overlooking. And that is that he has always been a socialist; always. Because once you understand that you will understand everything he did before and during the time as prime minister. The secret is that he had been a closeted socialist, a die-hard left winger, who only pretended to be a modern, free market oriented pragmatist. That is why all his reforms have failed and he could not deliver most of his promises.

Tony Blair is a new type of socialist. He knew all along that there was no chance that he could sell himself and his party to the nation if he had stuck to his outdated ideas openly. So he transformed himself into a pragmatic politician who was not afraid to drop some of his views and even adopt the ideas of his opponents if it helped to do the job. He did not have a name for his ideology so he came up with that meaningless title – New Labour. What did it stand for? Well, it was supposed to be attractive to everyone. It was about championing the interests of the working people but not putting any obvious pressure on the rich. It was about throwing billions at public services while allowing big business to do whatever it wanted. It was about proclaiming support for traditions and morals but actually undermining them in the name of modernisation. It was about fighting crime but not really trying too hard. It was about praising democracy and at the very same time trampling on it. And it was about stressing the importance of human rights and personal liberties while strengthening the role of Big Brother at the same time.

Socialists have one major trait that makes them very different from the political parties on the right. They are prepared to undermine and discredit the institutions of power if it allows them to stay on. Just like it happened with the House of Lords which sole purpose it had always been to prevent people like Mr Blair pushing through laws that would harm the country in the long run. As a closeted socialist, Mr Blair simply had to remove the safety net that had been protecting the British people from opportunists like himself. So he destroyed the House of Lords. He would have loved, of course, to deliver a fatal blow to the monarchy itself, but having tested the waters on several occasions he came to the conclusion that the time was not right. The mission had been passed over to the next leader to accomplish.

Tony Blair has managed to fool a lot of people by pretending to have cut his socialist roots. But thanks to his wife we now know that it has never been the case. And we should be grateful to her for that.

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