Andrew McKie: Blair created a Britain where pandering to passing fashions is more important than competence

I should be used to this – it sometimes happens on a Saturday morning, when Paul Gambaccini casually mentions that a song on Pick of the Pops comes from “the chart this week 42 years ago”, and I can remember buying the single in Shawlands Arcade. Still, it doesn’t seem possible that it’s been 25 years since that morning, when the Royal Festival Hall was full of ecstatic Labour supporters and the blast of Professor Brian Cox’s band endlessly proclaiming that “Things Can Only Get Better”, and Sir Tony (as he then wasn’t) declaring portentously: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?”

Younger readers, most of whom seem to take it as an article of faith that Sir Tony is a war criminal, much worse than Hitler and very nearly as bad as Mrs Thatcher, may find it difficult to believe just how popular he was at that moment. They must consider the unthinking, indeed deranged, adoration in which the Left holds Jeremy Corbyn; Tony Blair was as popular as that, but with everybody. Well, almost everybody, if they didn’t work, as I then did, as a leader writer on The Daily Telegraph.

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But he was. You might as well have weighed the Labour majority, and he won another two elections almost as handsomely – easily the best record of any leader of his party (Harold Wilson technically won four elections, but one was hung, and produced a coalition, and two had very narrow majorities; only in 1966 did he get a huge vote). In fact, Tony Blair’s now the only living leader of the Labour party who has ever won any general election at all.

Yet when he popped up at the weekend with a campaign video endorsing Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, you got the distinct impression that quite a lot of his own party were shuffling in the opposite direction. In part, that’s because many of them of still deluded enough to be fans of Mr Corbyn who, in contrast to Sir Tony’s three thumping majorities, delivered the worst result of any leader in the party’s history.

Most of it, however, is due to the sense that Blair’s legacy is comprehensively tarnished by the Iraq War, which was fairly unpopular even at the time. Now that everybody knows we went in to it under false pretences, and it was incredibly badly mishandled, it’s almost universally unpopular and so, as its chief architect and advocate, is he. The whole business, naturally, isn’t quite as clear-cut as that – and there’s not much to object to in having got rid of Saddam Hussein – but the issue has almost completely obscured the rest of Sir Tony’s record.

That would seem even odder if it were not for the awkward fact that, when you look at that record, it’s not, in policy terms, all that remarkable. People who approve of New Labour politically which, remember, was at one time the vast majority of the whole country, whether in the party or not, can point to a few obvious achievements: the minimum wage, peace in Northern Ireland (though the process started under John Major), and the introduction of devolution (a double-edged sword for Labour, as it turned out).

The rest of it, though it initially looks good on paper, was largely a matter of sticking to a general economic course that the Tories had already set – which did produce more than a decade of growth – and spending more money on public services, especially health and education, which, whether you think it’s a desirable thing or not, isn’t in itself any sort of reform or innovation.

The greatest shame, for those of us who were sceptical of “The Third Way” from the start, but were trying to see some kind of silver lining, is that the Blair government failed to do some of the things that – on the Nixon in China principle – would have been much easier for Labour than the Conservatives: reform of the NHS; restructuring of pensions and welfare; planning for long-term care and the housing shortage. All of those have been impending problems for decades, but nothing much was done about them.

Indeed, in his attitude towards the EU (which one suspects he always planned to become President of), Sir Tony made matters worse, and laid the foundations for growing Euroscepticism. Had he placed limits on, or at least graduated the timescale of, the influx of Eastern European workers from accession states, it’s much less likely the issue would have become so divisive. But we should be grateful, I suppose, that Gordon Brown at least had the sense to stymie his plans to take us into the Euro.

The United Kingdom is clearly a completely different sort of place, post-Blair, but the transformation is not the sort of structural or economic one that took place under the Thatcher government. Instead, it’s in attitudes. Some of these, particularly more liberal positions on social issues, such as minority rights, most people will whole-heartedly endorse – as subsequent Tory governments have, in sharp distinction to their counterparts before Blair. Those would probably have happened anyway, but many did happen on his watch.

But others are more nebulous and less obviously improvements. Sir Tony famously asked to be let off on something (I had long forgotten what, but looking it up I see it was exempting Formula One from the tobacco advertising ban after getting a donation from Bernie Ecclestone) on the grounds that he was “a pretty straight sort of guy”. This is not now the consensus view, but it is the approach adopted by quite a lot of politicians, and indeed other public figures, who ask to be judged on their good intentions, rather than the often dreadful outcomes they produce, and to be excused their mistakes because, well, because of anything, really.

It’s entirely characteristic that Sir Tony’s memoirs should have been entitled A Journey. This piece of X-Factor claptrap – everything from a talent show to a political career is now a journey – sums up the shallowness of modern Britain, in which appearance, presentation and pandering to passing fashions are much more important than fuddy-duddy notions like competence, responsibility and public service. Sir Tony’s remarkable success, back in the day, at selling this package shouldn’t obscure the fact that there wasn’t much of substance under the wrapping.

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