Blair Inc.: The Man behind the Mask has not been easy to research. The secrecy that surrounds his companies and employees – forced to sign long, ferocious confidentiality agreements – indicate Blair’s unwillingness to level with the public and answer the question: Who are you, Tony Blair?
It would be hard to find another organisation with such a strong culture of secrecy. Blair’s employees, friends and political allies tended to be either outraged that we were making impertinent enquiries about matters that were no concern of ours, or terrified of what might happen to them if they were known to have spoken to us.
The outraged category was headed by the former Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who wrote to one of the authors (Beckett), ‘Dear Francis, I’m afraid your mind really does work in a corkscrew way and you are simply unable to avoid insults.’
This odd sentence, which reminded us of the old schoolboy joke, ‘Stop bloody swearing’, was the opening salvo in Clarke’s alarmingly vituperative email declining to help us with this book. For, although Tony Blair is far less popular than he was, the few who still support him do so with much greater intensity than before, and become baffled and angry that people should question his activities or motives.
Yet those activities are of enormous, and legitimate, public interest. Tony Blair has deliberately stayed in public life: accepting an important and high-profile international role as Middle East envoy and unsuccessfully seeking another one, as President of the European Council; founding high-profile charities that bear his name; as well as advising governments all over the world, both publicly and privately.
We asked for help from Blair’s organisations and his friends, and made the point to them that secretiveness builds suspicion. We added, truthfully, that we were not out to write a hatchet job, but to understand how one of the century’s leading politicians, arguably one of its most successful, has conducted himself after leaving office and the nature of the influence he still wields.
Very occasionally, one encounters a public figure who is evidently affronted that any person should seek to write about them whom he has not authorised to do so, and who instructs his employees and adherents to give no assistance at all to so disrespectful a project. We have only once come across a case as extreme as Tony Blair, and that was when we sought to interview Arthur Scargill for an earlier book.
We approached Blair’s media spokespeople, many of his senior staff, many former senior members of his staff (all of whom have signed the savagely worded confidentiality agreements already mentioned – as does everyone who works for Blair, even unpaid interns) and many of his old political allies, like Clarke.
The majority refused to talk to us or tell us anything on the record – some, like Clarke, rudely and splenetically so, some, like the former Blair head of communications Matthew Doyle, with elaborate, almost wistful courtesy. Even ordinary, harmless pieces of information, often already in the public domain, were treated as though they were state secrets.
This gave us a few comical moments. We asked the press officer at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (Blair’s religious organisation, supposedly aimed at getting religious groups to work together and respect each other) – more as an icebreaker than as a serious question – where the TBFF’s office was. When she abruptly changed the subject, we suddenly became really interested in the location of the office, and eventually the acutely unhappy press officer said she was not authorised to disclose it on the telephone. She could only, she said, give us the address on the website, which is PO Box 60519, London W2 7JU.
So could we write in and ask, and be given it? This, apparently, was a matter way above her pay grade. We should write to her boss, the director of communications and strategy, Parna Taylor – and, no, it wasn’t possible to speak to Ms Taylor on the telephone.
So we emailed Ms Taylor, and the response was: ‘The address for all correspondence to TBFF is public on our website – this is the PO Box address.’
We asked Ian Linden, then TBFF director of policy – we got him on his mobile because they wouldn’t put us through at the office – and he hung up on us rather than tell us.
We asked Rupert Shortt, a former employee, who twisted and turned in abject misery and said he supposed they had to be careful about terrorists finding out the address. ‘There’s a bulletproof screen on the ground floor and all the post has to be scanned,’ he added by way of explanation.
Then we saw some letters sent to various folk by Tony Blair’s office. The heading was simply ‘The Office of Tony Blair’ – no address, no contact details at all. The ‘signature’, too, was ‘The Office of Tony Blair’ – no name, no actual signature. They were even keeping secret the name of the person writing the letter.
In the hope of some cooperation, we sent several emails to Ciaran Ward, media officer for the Office of Tony Blair – the hub round which Blair’s charities, his commercial consultancy and his work as Middle East envoy revolves. On the fourth try we got an answer. It looked quite hopeful:
Apologies for the delayed reply.
It would be great to get some more detail on the book. Specifically, what are you looking to cover in the book? What would you like to speak to Mr Blair about? What stage of the writing process are you at? What’s the timescale for publication and also, when would you need to do an interview with Mr Blair by?
The only omen of what was to come was that it arrived in an email with no contact details. Still, we gave him the information he wanted, and back came an offer of a meeting with him and his boss, the head of communications Rachel Grant.
‘We’re happy to come to you,’ he said. But we don’t have a central London office and they do, so, we asked, could we meet in their office? Apparently not. Mr Ward wrote back to offer a meeting in a coffee bar.
It occurred to us to say that we already knew where their office was, so they might as well let us come to it, but things seemed to be going so well that we thought better of it.
It was a friendly discussion. They said, sorry the TBFF press office seemed unhelpful, we’ve got nothing to hide, why don’t you put everything through us in future? We said, fine, and, by the way, what is the address of the TBFF? And they looked at each other, and Mr Ward said, ‘I think it’s been in The Sunday Times,’ and Ms Grant said, ‘All right, then,’ and Mr Ward said, ‘Well, it’s in Marble Arch,’ though he avoided giving the exact address. (It’s 1 Great Cumberland Place, London W1H 7AL, and it’s the last building on the right as you come towards Marble Arch, since you ask.)
We said, ‘Can we have an interview with Mr Blair?’ And they said they’d ask. We said, ‘Can we have an interview with the new director of the TBFF?’ And they said they’d ask. We said, ‘We’ve got some questions,’ and they said, ‘Put them in writing.’
They asked whether we would like two of Mr Blair’s speeches on Europe emailed to us, and we said yes, please. And, when Mr Ward sent them, lo! he’d put in his telephone numbers, both landline and mobile. We were in now, we thought.
And that’s almost the last we ever heard of them. We emailed Mr Ward half a dozen times after that, asked questions, said we hoped we’d get that interview with the chief executive of the TBFF, and there was no reply. So we phoned both the numbers we’d been given several times. Our calls were never answered and there was no voicemail.
We told our troubles to Matthew Taylor, once chief of staff to Blair in Downing Street and the partner of former TBFF chief executive Ruth Turner, and he promised to see if he could persuade his old colleagues to talk to us properly. He couldn’t.
Taylor expanded on a theory he held, which he hoped we’d explore: that, unlike the USA, Britain gives former prime ministers no role at all in the state. Former US presidents are still known as President – we still talk of President Bush and President Clinton – and they have their foundations and their libraries. Former British PMs have nothing, and that – he seemed to be saying – was why Blair has floundered, uncertain what direction to go in.
Similarly, the Conservative MP for Kensington Malcolm Rifkind told us that ‘the only official role he has is as the Representative of the Quartet. Everything else he does is as a private citizen. He has exactly the same rights as any other private citizen. If he wants to spend his time flying around the world like the Flying Dutchman, that is his sacred right. It is something we had better get used to, we have the cult of youth. Prime ministers are in their forties or fifties when they retire. You can’t expect people who have had full-time occupations to simply go into gentle retirement playing golf from forty or fifty onwards.’
It seemed a promising area for investigation, though we felt a little sceptical. Our prime ministers leave office financially secure from years of well-paid work and the very best pension arrangements, and with international reputations and bulging contacts books should they wish to work. It seems enough, and we’re not convinced they need further cosseting.
But Taylor hoped we would explore the thesis. So we tried, even though no one close to Blair was willing to offer us any evidence. It led us to the conclusion that there was some significance to the way Blair had created for himself as near a replica as he could of the life he once lived in 10 Downing Street. This idea is pursued in some detail in this book.
A few people spoke off the record, but these were always edgy, difficult conversations in which they were evidently terrified that the smallest piece of information might be traced back to them.
Some edged towards us flirtatiously, then rushed away, some disappearing suddenly and refusing to pick up the phone, others apologising profusely and lingeringly with what seemed like genuine regret, as though they would speak if they dared.
Others were less polite, though none were quite as determined to be unpleasant as our old friend Charles Clarke, who wrote to us of ‘your pleasure in a rather unpleasant and very unjournalistic reputation which you try and promote,’ adding, ‘You have a set of views (to which you’re entitled even when they’re miles off course).’
We did eventually meet the official press officers again. Towards the end of this project, there appears to have been a partial rethink. One of us went to the same coffee bar to meet Rachel Grant, who was personable and professional and dealt with some queries. Mostly, her answers were along the lines of, ‘We never give the amounts of our fees’; ‘We never give names of donors’ – but they were answers. At a late point in our researching process, the Africa Governance Initiative did also provide us with an account of its contribution to the international effort to counter the Ebola outbreak in West Africa
Meanwhile, the TBFF got a new press officer, William Neal, who didn’t seem unremittingly hostile, which was an advance. We had a civilised coffee with him, and he, too, dealt with a few queries for us. He even finally managed to get an answer to our year-old request for an interview with chief executive Charlotte Keenan. The answer was no.
So we’ve done the book the hard way.
Tony Blair is the first British prime minister in history whose life after he left power has merited a book of its own. Most people pursue second careers to do more of what they enjoy with less stress. This is not the case with Tony Blair. He struts the world stage, travelling, we understand, for a third of the year, constantly on and off private jets and in and out of splendid hotel suites. He seems confused about his goals and conflicted in his responsibilities and interests.
How comfortable can the businessman in pursuit of excessive wealth be with the Labour Party politician who once protected Thatcher’s legacy? Successful by the standards of a businessman, Blair still haunts the screens, giving his opinions on the lives of the ordinary folk who once voted for him in droves. Contradictions haunt him at every stage. He once asked a stranger at a garden party, ‘Why don’t people like me?’
How can the poor of the Middle East rationalise the international salesman, in his expensive suits, his salesman’s smile at the ready to greet a dictator or oligarch, with the ‘Representative of the Middle East Quartet’ supposed to bring investment into the Palestinian economy?
How does he answer the charge of many distinguished public figures that those he solicits for funds for the Palestinians are confused about whether he is also seeking funds for Tony Blair and his sponsors and companies?
This book will seek to answer these questions. Our conclusions are both shocking and disturbing for British public life and for the political class that Blair damages.
The story begins on 27 June 2007. That was the day Tony Blair officially resigned as prime minister, was appointed Middle East peace envoy, and set about making himself seriously rich.