There is an analysis of Tony Blair’s premiership which has become commonplace in sections of the Labour party: Tony Blair got off to a great start in 1997 with, for example, the introduction of the minimum wage, devolution and the New Deal, but the second and third terms lacked a progressive focus and were overshadowed by Blair’s support for the invasion of Iraq.
Anthony Seldon’s comprehensive second volume, Blair Unbound, covering the last six years of Tony Blair’s premiership, turns this view on its head. According to Seldon, Blair only began to get to grips with issues like public service reform in the third term.
Therefore, one of the reasons for the increasing conflict between Gordon and Tony was that: ‘Blair started off being safe and became radical … As the General Election (2001) approached, Brown became less radical at the very same moment as Blair increased his radicalism.’
The other reason, of course, was that both men coveted the same job: Prime Minster. There is plenty of detail here on the TB-GB show. Much of the narrative will be familiar to observers of current affairs, and much that is genuinely new – for example the frequency with which the elected leaders of our country tell each other to f*** off – has by now been extensively serialised and reported.
However, Seldon insists that what bound the two men together was a deep and mutual love which, he concedes, was often masked: ‘Love was at the bottom of everything that went on between them. That’s why they could never pull the trigger.’
The book suffers, as contemporary history must, with being too close in time to the events it seeks to analyse. Nevertheless, the breadth and depth of the off the record interviews with the key players makes Blair Unbound the most well-sourced account of Tony Blair’s premiership so far. Compared to Seldon’s first book on the subject, the portrait that emerges of Blair in this book is a more favourable one, though less so of Brown. We will have to wait for the publication of the more alliterative Brown Unbound to get that side of the story – and that book may well be some years away.>