33 Tony Blair

Because Tony Blair’s mother came from Ireland, he is, strictly speaking, ‘half-Irish’. Had he, for example, been possessed of football skills at approximately the level of his apparent gift for politics, he might well have made it on to the Irish football team, perhaps ending up as captain. But Blair’s contribution to Irish politics is at a deeper level than anything to do with blood or nationhood. For a decade he came among us, persuaded us that all things were possible, and then went away, leaving us bereft.

Blair’s trick was his deceptive ordinariness, which was actually not a deception. To begin with, he had no talent for politics. Sensibly, he wanted to be a rock star, but he failed to make the grade in that calling, and discovered that politics was easier than it looked and that almost none of those involved in it were particularly good at it. He latched on to Gordon Brown, stole all his best ideas and then wiped his eye.

Most British people have no idea how much we Irish know about them, having watched them and absorbed their popular culture all our lives. Top of the Pops, Bunty, Shakespeare, Enid Blyton, John Peel, Man. U., Agatha Christie, The Hotspur, Whispering Bob Harris – all these are as much part of Irish culture as British. Out of politeness, we invariably acquiesce in their attitude of superiority, but in truth we know everything about them, whereas they know almost nothing about us except U2 and the IRA.

But we, for our part, and for perhaps understandable historical reasons, tend to overlook the profound impact our neighbours’ politics has on ours. Almost unconsciously, we follow trends set ‘across the water’, not so much in the realm of ideas and –isms as in the demeanour of the political animal. We had no equivalent of Thatcher, but nevertheless, from the mid-1980s, Irish politics took on something of her certitude. Charles Haughey (certainly no fan of the Iron Lady), adopted something of her thinking in addressing the mess that he had contributed to making of the Irish economy. We called it ‘monetarism’, a misuse of the term which for years used to drive Irish economists mad.

In the Tiger years, our aesthetic of leadership gathered what it had of inspiration almost entirely from Blair: the matey affability of Bertie and Enda seeming to arise from an unconscious desire to emulate Blair’s successful reworking of the Kennedy brand.

Blair was actually one smart bastard. Politics seemed easy to him not because he was particularly suited to it, but because it had become so predictable and banal. When he turned his attention to the situation in the north of Ireland, for example, the first thing that occurred to him was how stupid it was that nobody had ever been able to sort it out. For him it was simply a matter of flattering a few hick politicians and getting them to feel superior to one another. Within a year of moving into 10 Downing Street, he had engineered the Good Friday Agreement.

The resolution of the conflict was in large part due to the fact that a generation of men who had wasted their lives in this futile war were now prepared to act to stop the disease being passed on to their children. But the magic ingredient was Tony Blair. A born-again 1960s idealist disguised as spin doctor’s puppet, he was able to alter mindsets without frightening the horses with piety, ideology or historical baggage.

The veteran socialist Leo Abse, who later wrote a book about Blair, said that he had an innate desire to place everything in a conflict-free zone. His first instinct was his desire to anticipate objections and to appease objectors even before they spoke. His essential view of life was that all evidence of differences should be minimized. For Abse this was a defect of Blair’s but for us in Ireland, as perhaps for nobody else, these values paid off. Because of his unique psychology, Tony Blair made things happen that otherwise would not have happened.

But the only thing more banal than politics is the culture of the commentary that largely attends it, and this has grown exponentially worse in recent years because of contamination by what is sometimes called ‘citizen journalism’. When the bloggers and their literal-minded equivalents in the ‘old’ media were not spitting at Blair because of his role in the invasion of Iraq, they were dismissing him as the sultan of spin. But although he was undoubtedly a skilful politician of the media age, Blair also exhibited a deep seriousness which counterpointed his superstar image. You only have to look dispassionately at his record to know that here was a politician who used his accidental bounty of charisma to conceal a deeply serious heart, in many ways out of tempo with its time. Blair seemed instinctively to know what was necessary for survival in an age in which charismatic vacuity was prized over everything, and to guard his deeper thoughts and talents until he was able to put them to what he regarded as their proper use – even if this was to lead to an almost terminal unpopularity.

As his period of leadership rolled out, the clichés about Blair were that he was cunning and ruthless; that he was consumed with presentation over substance; that he was not ‘real’, but the product of the spells of unelected spin doctors charged, above all, with getting his government re-elected. There is a name for this syndrome: ‘politics’. Blair’s personality and methodology were problematic only for those who had failed to reflect upon the change that has occurred in modern politics since the introduction of opinion polling, which had caused the thought process of politics to become like an air-con unit, endlessly recycling the same banal ideas and periodically re-presenting them in a new way.

For Blair, there was never an issue about whether or not he should concentrate on image and presentation, only about whether he could become sufficiently adept at these dark arts to win. Pandering to ‘public opinion’ was, as he immediately intuited, the name of the game. Once he was elected, the issue was not whether he would, could or should engage in the politics of perception, but whether he could do so and manage to achieve anything worthwhile in spite of the culture of the sample poll, that elusive unit of public opinion which all modern political parties must struggle to decipher and understand.

What is interpreted as ‘public opinion’ from these surveys is not the perspective of real people, but the cybernetic response of quota-controlled samples. These deliver not so much a reflection of the views of society as of the debased unit of public opinion created by a circular process involving pseudo-moralistic hectoring on the part of the media, choreographed posturing on the part of politicians, and political correctness on the part of the polled public, resulting in a currency that is further debased with each cycle of the machine. This means that it is necessary for the modern politician to speak at all times with forked tongue: simultaneously in the language of idealism to those who make things happen in the economy and society, and in the languages of piety and sentimentality for the benefit of statistics. The challenge is maintaining the correct balance between these conflicting imperatives to allow important things to be done while still holding the stage.

The problem for the political culture he left behind is that Blair was an outsider in politics, whom the insiders immediately started to imitate. By succeeding in the ways he did, he bequeathed us an entire generation of Blair clones from within that stupid, hopeless world, who think they can achieve all the good things he did while avoiding all the pitfalls.

In the UK, David Cameron and Nick Clegg thought they could fill his shoes by wearing the right suit and a smile. In Ireland, Bertie Ahern managed to bask and share in the Blair magic for a decade while maintaining something of his own identity. Then, George Lee became so intoxicated with what you could do with a suit and a smile that he briefly gave up his good job in RTE in an attempt to save the nation.

Next, the Irish people watched in apprehension as Simon Coveny and Leo Varadkar warmed up in the wings.

What they all missed about Blair was that he wasn’t really a politician at all. He was a superior intelligence, a Man from Mars who decided to play at being a politician because he could see how stupid and hopeless it all was and how easy it might be to achieve things if you just applied common sense and reason to processes usually governed by tribalism, sanctimony and pretence. Unfortunately, his imitators, who have the suits and the smiles but not the sense or the smarts, will be with us verily unto the end of time.