This chapter is a transcript of an interview that the editors of the book undertook with Tony Blair to gain his views about how leaders should be judged, the challenges they face, and whether the statecraft approach is a useful framework for assessing them. Tony Blair argues that successful leadership requires setting a clear vision for the future of the country and galvanising support for this vision. Such leadership has become increasingly difficult in the new media age. However, he argues that strong leadership – which speaks to the country as a whole and not just a party – is respected and desired by the electorate. Tony Blair goes on to reflect on the challenges he faced, and considers how successful he was in statecraft terms.
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TOBY JAMES: By what criteria do you think we should evaluate recent party leaders in Britain?
TONY BLAIR: I think that the most important criteria is that you have a clear vision for the country and where it goes, and are prepared to locate that vision of the country in an understanding of how the future is going to work. So, for a country like Britain, in terms of domestic policy – how does it maximise its advantages? How does it engage in the process of reform that all countries are having to go through as the role of government changes – as you have to re-direct public spending, reforming your public services and welfare – or a challenge that is as simple as: how do you use technology in the delivery of more effective government?
So, one part of it is that domestic agenda, which is all about reform, modernisation and change. The other is: what is your country’s place in the world today? How does it maximise its influence? Without engaging in criticism of the recent leadership, it is hard to see where Britain fits today in the world that is developing – and that is a significant challenge.
TOBY JAMES: In the book that we are working on, we are using a statecraft approach. This ultimately assesses leaders in terms of whether they win elections and achieve a degree of competence in office, or at least move their party in that direction, because if party leaders do not achieve that, then they might not be party leader for very long. Is that a fair test of a leader?
TONY BLAIR: It is an important test of a leader that you are sufficiently politically competent and astute so that you are in a position in which you can lead. If you lose the election, then no one is going to end up asking that question about you particularly.
I do think that the single biggest challenge of leadership today is handling change – how, in a fast-changing world with a slow-changing government, you manage to create the right capabilities in government to effect change for your people. That is why what we were doing – particularly in our second five years, actually – as a government around education, health care, criminal justice reform, welfare – all of those – was also an essential part of leadership.
Of course, you have to win elections, you have to be competent, you have to manage your party, but for me the issue is: do you understand the modern world and can you lead your country in it?
TOBY JAMES: Does the need to win elections force leaders into trade-offs between achieving those bigger visions and staying in office?
TONY BLAIR: Well, I think that there will always be something in politics about being sufficiently competent in the business of politics so that you are able to win, and that will involve compromises, trade-offs and so on. But I don’t think that is what defines leadership. What defines leadership is the ability to set a clear direction and to follow it – overcoming those obstacles. For me, the thing about leadership is that you may need to engage in compromises, but those compromises should be tactical. You should never be compromising the big strategic objectives of your government. Otherwise, why are you there?
My theory of politics today is that leadership is very, very difficult because of the noise – the wall of noise (conventional media, multiplied by social media) – and leaders often find it difficult to work out how they lead because there are so many pressures on them not to take difficult decisions to push their country forward. But my theory is that the public in fact understands that is what leadership is about – and wants it.
I can’t think of many cases today where strong leaders have lost elections. You might point to Greece and say that the guy in Greece took some difficult decisions… I don’t know. But, on the whole, if political leaders show a clear sense of direction and purpose, then the public is more likely to reward than not. Even, by the way, if they don’t necessarily agree with the details of the actual decisions.
There is also another phenomenon, which is very different to the past – parties have become more partisan at the same time as the public has become less partisan. You see this in the US; you see this in the UK. One test is, therefore: are leaders prepared to get above their party? They have got to lead them and they have got to be with them and so on, but, in the end, the people don’t want a party leader, they want a leader of the country.
That is why Europe has been such a problem for the leaders of the Conservative Party – they have not taken on this anti-Europeanism and defeated it. If they did, I think they would find themselves in a stronger position. I think that, for the next American presidential election, whichever candidate shows that they are not just representing their party – but are, in a very well-defined way, reaching out for the country’s interest as a whole – will win.
CHARLES CLARKE: Do you think that that is down to individual weaknesses and failures? I am not asking you to comment on David Cameron, but, to give the example that you just gave, would a different leader of the Conservative Party be able to take a different position on Europe? Is it down to the personal characteristics of the leader, or are there circumstances around – like the overall balance of power or the forces within your own party – that bring you back? Is it about personal qualities, or is it contextual factors that make it very difficult to get out of that situation?
TONY BLAIR: I think it is about a personal quality, but there might be contextual factors that mean you don’t succeed. You might never become the leader, or you might become the leader and fail. Contextual factors can be very powerful, obviously.
But I think that, provided you are able to navigate those two things, the point I am making is that the single most important element of leadership in today’s world is an ability to shape and change and form a country in a way that gives it a sense of what it is for the future. You can say that about virtually any country in the world today. A really important thing for a country is that it has got to know its place in the world. It is what, while I was in government, I used to call the ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ question! What are we trying to do here? For a country like Britain, what are its strengths? They are its creativity, the English language, its history – and its people are, on the whole, pretty decent, strong-minded and enterprising. So how do you then create a domestic policy agenda that allows those attributes to develop? That is why the education agenda is so important in a country like the UK.
The other question is: how do you go out and form alliances in the world that help to maximise your influence and power around the attributes that you have? This is why being anti-immigration is so crazy for a country like Britain, because if you are a creative, open-minded nation, then that is a resource. And to be isolationist in foreign policy is a disaster, because the whole point of your USP is that you are out there in the world.
My point about British politics at the moment is that the kind of, what I would call, strong centre-ground position is not reflected among the political parties as much as it is among the public. What is the role of the leader in those circumstances? It is to try to bridge that divide.
Now, maybe I was lucky. One of the things I often wonder about is what if I had been leader of the Labour Party when they spent four years in opposition. It might have been a different task! After eighteen years of opposition, all but the dumbest could work out that we were obviously doing something wrong. So the space was there for someone to say: ‘Look, I know where we are going; we are going this way.’ And it seemed to work; people were more-or-less happy to go virtually anywhere.
I still think that, in your assessment of leadership, the context – as Charles described it – in which leaders operate today makes it more difficult to take tough decisions. But, actually, the public, in my view (partly because they understand this world), are very confused and uncertain – they want that leadership.
TOBY JAMES: The statecraft theory suggests that leaders will need to achieve five tasks if they are to be successful in winning elections. One of those is developing a winning electoral strategy. You are talking about some of the challenges that leaders face in that area. Are there other challenges they face in terms of winning elections?
TONY BLAIR: Interest groups are always challenges. I think they have the challenge of spotting, too, where opinion is evolving. I think one thing that’s really interesting – which I know you deal with a bit – is looking at the Attlee government: why didn’t it deliver two terms? It is an interesting question.
CHARLES CLARKE: I was reflecting on the chapter on Attlee by Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds in this book. I didn’t realise how tight the decision to have a general election was. There did not have to be a general election in 1951. He had one because he was worried about the health of his members going through the lobbies. He was worried about some of them dying at a difficult time. The King wanted one as he was going on a foreign trip to Australia and he wanted it all sorted out before he went off. Attlee was a deep loyalist to the monarch. Thomas-Symonds therefore takes the view that, despite his general geniuses as a leader, he got some core points wrong on the managing of Toby’s constitution test, but also on the winning electoral strategy test.
I would say that – for you – you were always focused on winning the next election, as was Neil Kinnock. I would not have said John Smith was always focused on winning the next election. I think that you had an exceptional commitment to – to quote Toby’s statecraft theory – ‘developing a winning electoral strategy’. I don’t think it is at all obvious that all leaders think like that. The perception of the public is often that this is all we are about. But, actually, there is a group of the public who think that great leaders are not necessarily very good party leaders – Churchill being the great example. He did not develop a winning electoral strategy in 1945 for the Tories. He thought that he would win it automatically. And others are not ready to focus on the winning side of it – Ed Miliband being a good case in point.
TONY BLAIR: With Attlee, you see, I don’t think they noticed early enough that the public was moving on from the rationing era after the war. They did not quite get that the public did not just want a continuation of the time when ‘the state must protect us’. Six years on from 1945, the public had moved on from that, frankly.
TOBY JAMES: What would you say were the biggest challenges you yourself faced in developing a winning electoral strategy during your time as leader?
TONY BLAIR: Bits of the party wanted to pull me off it, I think – probably!
Look, the tragedy of the Labour Party is that in 2010 – in my view – we could have won if we had, after 2007, taken New Labour to a new level. We drew the opposite conclusion – which was that the public had had too much of it – and it therefore needed to be dampened down. But, in fact, there was no evidence from the public that that was what they thought. It was really that the party had become a little exhausted by it all, and therefore wanted something calmer and easier.
The most difficult thing today for political leaders, certainly if you are a progressive political leader, is you have got to get to the centre ground to win – and your party wants to pull you back from that. That is a crude way of putting it.
TOBY JAMES: The second element of the statecraft model is establishing a reputation for governing competence, especially on the key issues of the day – which is, almost invariably, the economy. How central was that for you?
TONY BLAIR: It was absolutely a precondition of winning again. One of the lessons of politics is that you can’t achieve a vast amount of change unless you get at least two terms. For the Labour government of 1945, I think that people constantly under-estimated the degree to which it was actually continuing an agenda that had been developed in the war years. If it had been starting from scratch, then six years would not have been enough to see it through.
I was obsessive about the notion that we had to show in the first term; we had to establish the credibility to govern. Therefore, you have to be careful.
What you have to go on to realise is that having the credibility to manage the government at the time is not the same as changing the country. That, I certainly learned. One of the biggest things about modern democratic politics is that you run for office as the ‘great communicator’, but, once you are in government, you have to be the ‘great executor’. Now, that is a completely different skill set. One of the curious things about politics is that it is the only walk of life in the world where you are designated as competent to run a vastly complex bureaucracy on the basis that you’ve won an election. It is like appointing the next manager of Manchester United by saying: ‘We are just going to have a poll of the fans and anyone can stand’ – and then that person gets put in charge of the team. Newcastle United would probably go for that system! Suppose you just have a really passionate fan – they are now in charge of the football club? They have got to choose the team, work out the formation, choose the right training regime, and buy the players. That is an insane way of running things! But in politics, what happens is that you put people there like that. That was the first and only ministerial position I had held: Prime Minister. So, establishing your competence to govern is really important, because there will be a natural reluctance to make an inexperienced person Prime Minister.
CHARLES CLARKE: In 1991, I had a conversation with Richard Ryder, who had worked for Margaret Thatcher and then been a minister and Chief Whip, about what to do if Labour won in 1992. (He had previously suggested appointing someone like William Whitelaw as Deputy Prime Minister and chair of key Cabinet committees, and this process had allowed Thatcher to get on and do the communication, while allowing Willie to manage the process of government.) His advice to me was that Neil, if elected, should get somebody in – and his suggestion was Gerald Kaufman – to play that role in government, i.e. a progress-chaser/pusher/resolver of problems. Although I am not a great fan of John Prescott, I do think that, in that role of chair of the domestic affairs sub-committee, he often played an insufficiently regarded role in resolving certain kinds of problems in your favour.
TONY BLAIR: Absolutely. He was very important in managing the government because of the relationships with the party, yes.
TOBY JAMES: What was the biggest challenge that you faced in terms of being competent in office, but also demonstrating that competence to the public?
TONY BLAIR: It was very different in the second and third terms to in the first term. I was very clear in the first term that it was about making sure that, having won an election as a different type of Labour Party, you governed as a different type of Labour Party. It was important to minimise any sense that the party was reverting or doing things to please itself. By the time I got the second term and the third term, I had decided that I kind of knew how things work, so I actually wanted to do something with it. I wanted to do that in the first term, too, but later I had a far clearer idea of how the machinery of government worked. I would say that the main challenge then was getting able people in charge of policies – those who could drive the thing through.
TOBY JAMES: The third element of the statecraft model is managing your own party. What were the key challenges there, and how successful do you think you were in that particular area?
TONY BLAIR: I think that we were quite successful in managing the party and I do think that John Prescott played a real part in that. As time went on, we brought more people into senior positions within the Cabinet (like Charles), who were able to have both the party and the public argument. We also made certain changes about the way that the party conference operated, which made a difference, too. I think that we were more successful at managing the party than people sometimes think.
CHARLES CLARKE: I think so, but the big case people would make against that would be your departure from office. The party divisions and concerns came back and, at the end of the day, they led to you not being able to continue – or led to your opponents being able to mobilise enough support to undermine you. That was a consequence, critics might suggest, of the failure to manage the party in important respects.
Obviously, it was far better than the Callaghan government, for example – where the party divisions were a massive issue for him. A massive issue for Neil Kinnock in his leadership was trying to get the party in the right place, which was very problematic. I certainly think you can correctly say that you overcame some – or most – of those issues by the various things you did. The question of what happened towards the end, however, is where there is criticism of you as a party leader. I would be interested to hear how you assess that criticism.
TONY BLAIR: I did rely enormously on public support for my basic position, to neutralise some party opposition. As time went on, especially post-Iraq and so on, it became more difficult, and that method of disciplining the party became less successful.
I always felt it was better – as Gordon became my main opponent – to have him within the tent.
I also think that managing the party is something you should always be doing. One of the things that happens to you after you have been in office for a long time is that you are so interested in doing what you are doing for the country, that you become a bit impatient with that side of things. But I’m afraid that you have to be eternally patient with it.
CHARLES CLARKE: And a key issue for you was the trade union relationship with the party. You said after leaving office that you wished, at some point, that you had taken it into a new setting. Taking your point about the leadership of change – at the end of the day, it just wasn’t worth the candle at the time you were there, because whether you were running the trade unions or running the country was not really an issue. But a problem not addressed at the time becomes a problem further down the line for you.
TONY BLAIR: I would agree with that. I think that, in retrospect, I would have made the change with the unions.
TOBY JAMES: The fourth statecraft task is winning the battle of ideas on the key policy issues of the day. Is that an area you feel you succeeded in? Did you change the country’s position on issues such as the economy or the NHS, for example?
TONY BLAIR: Yes, we did have a strong policy agenda that became, in my view, stronger over time. New Labour was a concept, but it took proper policy form more in the last six years than in the first three or four. We did pretty much dominate the political agenda, and some reforms have stayed. If you take things like minimum wage and some of the constitutional changes (people forget that we introduced the Mayor of London and all that) on a whole set of issues like civil partnerships – these changes were not reversed.
One of the things that I think is good about the country today is that there are not – between the main political parties, at any rate – any real rows about race or sexuality; things that, frankly, in the ’70s and ’80s were very prominent political issues. I do think that we created a new consensus around that.
I feel reasonably confident on that – although I do think that we should have deepened the support for those New Labour ideas within the party. We did as much as we could.
CHARLES CLARKE: I still think that, if you’d polled the Labour Party members in 2010, let alone 2005, in terms of their attitude to these types of things, you’d find that there was a large agreement with where we were.
TONY BLAIR: Yes, I felt that we were dominant. I always say that the thing that should worry you as a government is when you feel an idea of power coming at you. In 1979, there was such an idea. I don’t think that in any of the elections up to 1997 the Tories were really threatened by an idea. New Labour was that different idea.
I didn’t feel threatened in any of the three elections I fought. I realised that I could lose, of course, but I didn’t feel that there was a potent force coming at me that I was having to work at to gravitate around. On the contrary, I felt that we were still the central gravitational pole.
TOBY JAMES: Going back to Attlee again, some of the praise that was heaped on him and his government was that they changed the contours of British politics and set positions on policy issues for decades onwards. I have sometimes heard it said that one of the successes of your governments was that David Cameron felt he had to modernise the Conservatives. Do you feel that yourself?
TONY BLAIR: Yes, I do think that there is a certain truth in that – although, to be fair, we were also very clear that we were not undoing the Thatcher changes. That was a very powerful starting point for us, actually. The election of 1997 was also an acceptance, by a large part of the public, that they wanted to always be moving on and not moving back. The Attlee government in 1945 embodied the spirit of collectivism that was there at the time. But what was interesting was that the Labour Party then found it extremely difficult to retain that spirit and keep it in tune with the modern times, and it got somewhat into a position of stasis with what that meant in policy terms.
What is interesting to me about the Attlee government is that, once they created the National Health Service and the many other really important things they did, there was not much sign that they foresaw the rise of a more aspirational working class on the back of the very collective changes they had ushered in.
TOBY JAMES: The final component of the statecraft model is constitutional reform, and there was, of course, enormous constitutional reform under your governments. What were the longer-term consequences of these for yourself as leader, and the longer-term electoral fortunes of the Labour Party?
TONY BLAIR: The constitutional reforms obviously covered a number of different areas. I did feel that we made a mistake on devolution. We should have understood that, when you change the system of government so that more power is devolved, you need to have ways of culturally keeping England, Scotland and Wales very much in sync with each other. We needed to work even stronger for a sense of UK national identity.
But I don’t accept the idea that we should never have done devolution. If we had not devolved power, then there would have been a massive demand for separation – as there was back in the ’60s and ’70s.
Elsewhere on the constitution, I think, I would have gone further on mayors – still would.
CHARLES CLARKE: One of Toby’s other areas of research is on electoral participation – how we vote – and there was a whole series of reforms on voting, some of which were tried under our office, but were not particularly successful. These include voting at the weekends, compulsory voting etc. It would be interesting to hear your reflection on this from the Labour point of view – that increasing participation would be beneficial to Labour (which I don’t necessarily think is true, by the way). Do you have any reflections on that side of things?
TONY BLAIR: One reflection I had was that I think it is odd, when the technology exists, that we don’t do voting in a far more modern and inclusive way.
CHARLES CLARKE: We tried experiments…
TONY BLAIR: Did we ever…?
CHARLES CLARKE: Yes, there were some small experiments with people voting from their phones and stuff. All very small. There is also the issue of individual rather than household electoral registration.
TONY BLAIR: Yes, I think it is really interesting to look at. I just find it very odd sometimes that it just insists things have to be done, particularly when the rest of the world is changing. I would make it as easy as possible for people to vote. ‘We all have to go to the polling booth on the Thursday because that is how it is meant to be…’ Why? In no other walk of life would it be like that.
Where I disagree with many is that I don’t think people are uninterested in politics today. I do agree that there is a lot of cynicism about our politics – and there is a whole other story about why that is – but people are not uninterested. They just lead different lives, and I don’t see why it’s not made as easy as possible to participate.
TOBY JAMES: What is missing from the statecraft framework, if anything? Are there other tasks that leaders need to achieve to win elections, or is anything else missing?
TONY BLAIR: It might be that the other factors you describe add up to this, but I am not sure they do really. But, as I said at the very beginning, leadership has to have a strong galvanising vision behind it to succeed. I do think that is very important. But I don’t think that it is just about a set of mechanical tasks. When I think about leadership, I do not just mean the business of leading – I mean leadership as opposed to drift, as opposed to followership. In terms of the success of leaders, most leaders have that. If they don’t, then they might be good managers of the status quo, but they are not really changing anything.