At the Center of the Storm, but Still a Mystery

By Michiko Kakutani
Published: New York Times, September 1, 2010

A JOURNEY - My Political Life
By Tony Blair
Illustrated. 700 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. US$35.

“A man without a shadow”; a “pleasant man with a pleasant family living in a pleasant North London house”; a bright, telegenic, yet elusive politician with a “smooth facade.” This is how a newspaper article in The Guardian famously described Tony Blair long before he became prime minister of Britain in 1997.


Tony Blair in Iraq, 2004.
Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Blair’s decade in office would be marked by his momentous — and divisive — decision to go to war in Iraq alongside George W. Bush, and by his remaking of the Labour Party in a more centrist, Clintonian incarnation. Yet all these years and political miles later, the man — hailed by The Observer as “one of the most electorally successful and effective party leaders of all time” — remains a curiously opaque figure. And the self-portrait that emerges from his new memoir, “A Journey: My Political Life,” is very much that of a man without a shadow.

Much of this book is fluently written, and the production as a whole seems meant to ratify Mr. Blair’s belief that he “was a big player, was a world and not just a national leader.” At the same time the book sheds little light on what drives Mr. Blair or shaped his political vision, and even less new light on how he came to take Britain to war against Iraq.

In fact, while Mr. Blair speaks of the “anguish” he feels over Iraq, many of the book’s passages on the subject are little more than a reprise of arguments he made last January during an official inquiry into the war: reiterating what he saw as the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein and defending the decision to invade despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.

More interesting is his description of his role in brokering a power-sharing agreement in Northern Ireland. Also revealing is his condescending portrait of Gordon Brown, his longtime Labour rival and successor in office, though Mr. Blair’s remarks here are a lot less incendiary than those attributed to him in his fellow Labour politician Peter Mandelson’s book “The Third Man,” in which Mr. Blair is characterized as regarding Mr. Brown as “mad, bad, dangerous and beyond hope of redemption.” Despite the soap opera aspects of the Blair-Brown family feud, American readers are unlikely to be terribly interested in this book’s many detailed discussions of Labour Party politics.
The full piece at NYT.