No, Blair!

Just finished reading Geoffrey Wheatcroft's Yo, Blair! It didn't take long - 2 train journeys of around 45 minutes each, in fact, at about 150 small pages of rather large type.

The basic thesis of Yo, Blair! (title comes from Dubya Bush's rather Nathan Barley- like greeting to Tony accidentally broadcast on an open mike at a G8 summit) is that Tony Blair is Not A Very Nice Person. In fact, he is a unique combination of the Antichrist and Frank Spencer. (Well, almost unique - Alistair Campbell comes in for some very meaty criticism as well.)

Now, me reviewing a book saying Tony Blair is a bastard is a bit like Mohammed al Fayed reviewing David Icke's The Biggest Secret (at least, the final chapter where he says Di and Dodi were bumped off.) Geoffrey Wheatcroft doesn't need to convince me. I have probably a lower opinion of Tony Blair than any human being living in the UK, or Essex at least (note that on that species criterion I've excluded most Daily Mail readers who would otherwise be tempted to object.) So why do I feel distinctly underwhelmed by Yo, Blair!?

Basically because it's the literary equivalent of a hungry man ordering a couple of cheeseburgers at the Liverpool Street McDonalds when the delights of Brick Lane were only a ten minute walk away. Yo, Blair! is the cheapest of cheap shots. It can be read in 90 minutes and feels like it was written in about 6 hours non-stop - really, it's an extended Sunday newspaper article. Which is perhaps no surprise as Wheatcroft is primarily a journalist. But it's no excuse, as plenty of journalists manage to write much better books than this.

Wheatcroft's critique of Blair is basically four-fold:

(a) he has created the biggest foreign policy disaster for decades in Iraq, and has been completely subservient to a reactionary US administration in doing so;

(b) he has presided over an unprecedented collapse in British voters' trust of, and confidence in, their democratic institutions;

(c) his government is packed with cronies, crooks, and spineless cretins;

(d) he has no coherent ideology to speak of, which has led to an appalling mess on domestic policy.

(a) is correct but hardly new or insightful. (b) is true but cries out for a deeper analysis of the detail of what has caused the decline in trust, and how - if at all - it can be reversed. (c) is true (and good fun to read) but the line of argument degenerates here into personal attack on Blair and chums rather than hardheaded analysis. And as for (d), I think Wheatcroft is wrong. Blair does have a strong ideology - and it's wrongheaded, rooted firmly in a post-Thatcherite vision of a corporatised 'free' market economy coupled to an authoritarian state with appalling consequences for civil liberties. This is overlaid with more than a dash of Harold Wilson-style technocracy and aloofness and a messianic foreign policy vision borrowed from the US neo-conservatives. That's a mish-mash, but it's not "no ideology". Other avenues of attack on Blair, such as the mess that his long-running feud with Gordon Brown has left the government in, and his frantic layering of initiative on initiative to almost no positive effect in areas like public service reform, are pretty much ignored, despite being very important explanations of Blair's failure.

On balance the book feels lazy and opportunist, as if the author wanted to cash in on Blair's current troubles before he leaves office and he's rapidly forgotten about (just like Wilson, Thatcher, et al). The failure of Yo, Blair! to hit one of the easiest targets in history with any real power beyond Wheatcroft's frothy bile is a real shame, because done well, this could have been a book that absolutely crucified Tony Blair and cemented his legacy as probably the worst prime minister of the 20th or 21st centuries. As it is, many readers will be left wondering what all the fuss is about.