How politicians are remembered by history
There were many reports in the press of Tony Blair, in his final months in office, working on his legacy. The theory I advanced here has, I think, been borne out by events.
The next five years will be the most important of Tony Blair’s premiership. I wish I could tell you that this insight came to me while watching Newsnight, or reading the Economist or something. But I am afraid it occurred to me while watching the magician Derren Brown perform a trick with a briefcase.
For some time now I’ve found it useful to think of successful politicians as people who tell tales. Yes, yes, I know you do too, but I don’t mean it in that way. I mean that the best way for a politician to describe what they stand for is for them to relate their ideas in the form of a story.
Bill Clinton and his advisers, for instance, brilliantly wove together his return from political defeat and recovery from scandals into a story in which he was the repentant but triumphant hero, the Comeback Kid. Margaret Thatcher is thought of as an ideologue, but was really a narrative genius. Hers was the tale of a doughty underdog who rises from suburbia to smite the pessimistic establishment and save a once great but now declining nation.
One of my criticisms of Gordon Brown is that he lacks a real story, that his speeches are full of statistics and abstract ideas rather than narrative accounts of his own task and the nation’s future. He genuinely believes, bless him, that he can draw a picture of what he stands for and win over voters by revealing a surprise plan for a written constitution or whatever.
There is, however, a problem with seeing politicians as people who tell stories. A narrative has a beginning, a middle and an end. A political life just keeps going. Take Disraeli, for instance. The commonly accepted idea that Disraeli was the ultimate one-nation Conservative, a Tory populist, is at odds with much of the story of his career. It is a myth that grew up after his death and proved incredibly powerful. Whatever Disraeli did, whatever he was, it is as a one-nation Tory that he is remembered. And the Disraeli myth remains an important part of Tory debate.
Which is where Derren Brown comes in. Have you ever watched him? I hope you have. He is simply fabulous. And he’s produced a book, Tricks of the Mind, which is as good as he is. This book explains how magic tricks work. Not how each one is done, you understand, he couldn’t do that or he’d be crossed off Ali Bongo’s Christmas card list. No, what he does is to set out the way tricks achieve their effect, the way they leave you feeling a sense of awe and bewilderment.
And the parallels with politics struck me immediately. Brown’s central point is that ‘magic isn’t about fakes and switches and dropping coins in your lap. It’s about entering into a relationship with a person whereby you can lead him, economically and deftly, to experience an event as magical.’
Magic, he says, ‘exists only in the head of the spectator; and though your skills may have led him there, it is not the same as those skills’. He also provides an interesting account of what goes on in the head of the spectator. The more obvious it is to them that they must have been fooled, the more inclined they are to emphasise the wizardry of the magician. As they tell tales to their friends they exaggerate what they have seen, overrule any objections, try their hardest to infect others with their enthusiasm. It’s a process you can see in politics any day of the week.
Now, the difference between magic tricks and stories is that stories end, but magic tricks don’t. As Brown puts it: ‘It is an interesting maxim in conjuring that much of the magic happens after the trick is over.’ Brown builds up the tension as his trick reaches a climax, and then, as the audience is relaxing and its concentration wanes, he carries out the final part of his trick and works hard on how the audience will remember the experience.
Seen as a story, the Blair years are over. Seen as a magic trick, the most important moment for the Prime Minister is at hand. It is now, as the tension goes, as our concentration wanes, that he can begin to shape how we remember the whole experience.
This may not be welcome news for Mr Blair or his wife. They probably think it is time to relax, go and make some money and pay off all those mortgages. But his premiership isn’t finished. It’ll never be finished. What he does now, what he says now, will be critical. If he chooses to quit public life altogether, and allows himself to be seen as simply a moneymaking, holiday-taking machine, it’ll not just be the retired Blair that will be damaged, it’ll be the reputation of his entire period in government.
Yet even if he is inclined to take this advice, and keep trying to shape our view of the sort of prime minister he has been, one problem still stands in his way. I’m not sure that, even now, Tony Blair has worked out for himself what sort of prime minister he has been.
Three quite different, incompatible accounts pop up in his speeches and interviews. There is Blair the Labour leader, the loyal servant of his party, the man who finished his conference speech with the extraordinary promise to his party that ‘whatever you do, I’m always with you. Head and heart.’
Then there is Blair the creator of New Labour and the third way, the man who believes in big-tent politics, who thinks that with goodwill everyone can agree, who believes that the contradictions between, say, equality and efficiency can be swept aside.
And finally there is the battle-hardened Blair, tempered by Iraq and disappointment. This Blair told the Today programme that he thought he had been too eager to please in his early days and that sometimes it seemed as if you can’t please any of the people any of the time. This Blair seeks something bolder than New Labour and stands apart from the party he’s led. It’s hard to see this Blair being with Labour ‘whatever you do’.
Tony Blair is not the only one who will shape our memory of his period in office, of course. He’ll be called a fraud and a war criminal and all sorts. He’ll have a tough fight arguing that it wasn’t all just a colossal waste of promise.
But if he doesn’t know who he is, what are the rest of us supposed to make of him?
There have been times in his political life when it seemed as if no one could pull off a magic trick like Tony Blair. The question of whether he is a true political wizard or just a kid with a conjuring set is about to be answered.