Fresh from listening to Alastair Campell’s almost no-holds barred diary on audio CD about his years in the Blair cabinet, I thought it would be interesting to get the side of his boss, “TB” about those years that re-defined British politics.
And even if the man, who led the UK for a decade and transformed the old Labour Party into the hip “New Labour”, is no longer regarded as a hero/role model for budding politicians, it’s still interesting to hear his view of world affairs that he and pal Bill Clinton helped to shape.
As one of the few, if not the only major political leader whose career spanned the heady 1990s of free-wheeling trade to the years since September 11, 2001, Tony Blair had a compelling story to tell, one that was best told in his own words.
Thanks to TB’s communication skills – a gift for oratory combined with forthrightness – the memoir is, as a reviewer put it, “luckily, not one of those leaden bricks of official reminiscence”. (Campell in his diaries was also fulsome in his praise of Blair for skillfully parrying the thrusts of opposition MPs during the weekly Prime Ministers’ Questions.) Readers will welcome the overall tone that is informal and surprisingly candid. It’s as if TB and you are having a cuppa, with him recounting the highlights of a unique life, followed by reflections on news that made the morning news events . You may not agree with his decisions, or the steps he took afterwards to implement them, but he manages to weave an engaging tale throughout 22 chapters.
His vignettes about the characters that he met on the “job” are priceless for their revealing details such as his early years as PM when he tried to get on with Queen Elizabeth, who treated him with “hauteur” (so Stephen Frear’s film The Queen was not too far off the mark after all) or George Bush, who, he thought lacked deep analytical skills, but later came to admire for his “simplicity and directness”. All in all, the book is hard to put down for the author’s ability to compose a riveting verbal mosaic that’s part history, part personal odyssey.
Margie T Logarta
