If there is one word that should be banned from politics at the moment, it is the word “legacy”. It’s everywhere. There’s the “legacy of the 2012 Games”, for which we should pay up and be glad, the legacy of slavery, for which we should feel pity along with pride for abolishing the trade, and, of course, the legacy of Tony Blair. You can barely mention the British prime minister’s name these days without being told what he is doing as his legacy.
There’s nothing wrong with the word itself. It simply means a bequest, what you leave to your successors and future generations. It’s just the abuse of the word to mean ownership of issues, policies and proposals that has become so tiresome. Blair can hardly stand up without announcing a new policy for which he wishes credit. Which is nothing to do with bequests to his successors and everything to do with image and labeling.
His own legacy, of course, is now fixed. It is Iraq. Blair isn’t “in denial” about it, as some would accuse him. He knows perfectly well that Iraq is what has come to define his premiership. His problem is in facing up to why he made the judgment in the first place. He doesn’t do self-examination. His Christianity is not the Anglicanism of self-doubt (hence, no doubt, his preference for the Roman Catholic Church).
What historians will see as the legacy of his administration, however, will probably not be foreign affairs so much as a decade of untrammeled economic growth. You can argue how much this is due to the chancellor’s policies, how far it was set in train by his predecessors Ken Clarke and Norman Lamont, and how far it was the product not of our own efforts but the benefit of being in the slipstream of the great US economy. But however you ascribe it, the fact is that you have to go back a century and more to find a period of such consistent and prolonged economic expansion in Britain.
It anyone had told him in 1997, admitted Blair in one of the daily “posterity” interviews he now conducts, that a Labour government would enjoy such economic success, he simply wouldn’t have believed them. Yes, indeed. But in discussing legacies, one has to ask how well this unforeseen good fortune was used for the benefit of those coming after. The odd thing about this government and Prime Minister Blair, for all his talk of radicalism and reform, is how little it has been used to change the country or its institutions.
More money has been spent on education and health, of course, and the poor have got richer, although the gap between rich and poor has widened. But compared to the generations of governments struggling with regular rounds of budget cuts, this administration has surprisingly little to show for its long term in power. It has effected nowhere near the reforms or legislative changes that marked, say, the much shorter periods in office of the Harold Wilson government or even those of Heath and Macmillan, let alone Attlee.
This has to be down to the prime minister himself. He has talked the talk of change but, when it has come to the walk, Blair has remained a cautious mover. On the recent Cockerell series for the BBC, Peter Mandelson and others commented on his ruthlessness, but it is a ruthlessness applied to getting out of political holes as he gets himself into them. It’s not a “steeliness” that has enabled him to manage Cabinet reshuffles, nor is it a determination that has ensured any follow-up to his constant taste for initiatives.
The problem, I think, is that Blair has never understood the levers of power. He loves the display, the business of “being” prime minister. He makes much of it as a lonely post of decision-making (in which case he has made some spectacularly bad calls), but not the putting into practice. In one of Cockerell’s programs, Jeremy Greenstock commented that even in Iraq, the prime minister was wont to express genuine surprise when, say, he issued an order for the establishment of a local police force and then found a few months later that it hadn’t materialized.
But, to be a successful prime minister in terms of achievement, you need to be able to a turn ideas and instincts into practice, to know how to get your colleagues to push with you and the civil service to implement whatever it is that you want. Blair never had ministerial experience before entering office, which has been one problem (enthusers of David Cameron should note). But the ultimate impression after 10 years in office is that he has been a politician for whom words are sufficient unto themselves, that to say that Basra should have a clean new police force was somehow the equivalent of making it happen. That makes him a good performer — better than good, most would say — but not a prime minister, let alone one with a “legacy”.
