Where will Tony Blair rank in the league table of Labour prime ministers? There have only, in fact, been five of them — Ramsay MacDonald (1924 and 1929-31), Clement Attlee (1945-51), Harold Wilson (1964-70 and 1974-76), James Callaghan (1976-79) and Blair himself (1997-2007). In terms of longevity, Blair thus clearly wins the race in a canter, his only rival being Wilson who carefully timed his own also voluntary departure — though one a good deal less drawn-out than Blair’s, to ensure that he served longer in Downing Street than any of his 20th Century predecessors apart from Churchill and Asquith. He was not, of course, in a position to anticipate Margaret Thatcher, who beat not only his own divided record of seven years and nine months in Downing Street but also that of Blair’s own continuous run of ten years and two months.
The other thing which Blair and Wilson share in common is their remarkable record in winning general elections, Wilson winning four and losing one, while Blair notches up a straight hat trick. In his early days in No. 10 Blair hated being compared to Wilson: he once said to me in tones of disbelief: “I’m told you once wrote a whole book on Harold, how could you bear to do that?” — And it is not hard to understand why. Harold Wilson, too, came to office (if scarcely immediately to power) with all the weight of the hopes of the whole of progressive Britain riding on his shoulders. But his reign ended in 1976 in disillusion and despair, with the subsequent row over the “Lavender Honors List” doing little to redeem his reputation.
Today one does not have to be unduly unkind to see Blair in much the same position, complete with his own continuing controversy over “Cash for Honors.” But, while I suspect they will eventually end up near each other in the league table of British prime ministers, there are important distinctions between the two of them. Although nothing like as academically brilliant as Wilson, Blair was probably the better politician of the two, as his electoral track record demonstrates. He rates also as every bit as good a performer. Indeed, the claim can, I think, be made that he — more than any of his predecessors — transformed British politics into a performing art. Never wholly at home in the House of Commons, he nevertheless regularly dominated Prime Minister’s Questions as well as giving some astonishingly impressive speeches in more formal circumstances (notably in the March 2003 Commons debate that immediately preceded the launch of the disastrous invasion of Iraq). Although his farewell address in his constituency of Sedgefield Thursday was a shade too schmalzy for my taste, his record of speeches at the party conference, starting with his debut as leader of the opposition in 1994 also easily surpasses that of any of his predecessors.
Where he falls substantially short of at least one of them lies in what he actually achieved. The reason why Clem Attlee will always hold the palm among Labour leaders (in which capacity he served, incidentally, for a record total of 20 years) is that he actually transformed the economic and social contours of Britain. Put alongside his achievement — the National Health Service, the Welfare State, to say nothing of the conquest of unemployment — Blair’s impact on the life of the nation cannot help seeming pretty puny. In fact, I am sometimes tempted to suspect that it was his frustration with his failure to introduce all the radical domestic changes that he would have liked which led him to prefer playing a mixture of Woodrow Wilson and William Ewart Gladstone on the world stage — with the dismal results which he Thursday sounded strikingly unrepentant about.
The other part of the charge sheet in which the outgoing prime minister is bound to find difficulty in making his case to posterity lies in what he has done to his own party. It is a mistake, no doubt, to equate him with the first Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (who went on to form a National Government and, in effect, defected to the Conservatives). But in terms of the damage each did to the cause who propelled them into Downing Street in the first place, there is not much to choose between them. Here, or so it seems to me, Blair got the relationship wrong from the start. I vividly recall one of his earlier Conference speeches in which he suddenly announced that he had deliberately “chosen” the Labour Party rather as if he had gone out of his way to confer a favor upon it. It is impossible to conceive someone such as his immediate predecessor as a Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, making that kind of utterance. He always insisted even to his own family that everything they were they owed entirely to the Labour movement and it is highly revealing of Blair that he should apparently have felt that in his case the debt operated the other way round.
No one should deny the prime minister his achievements. In Northern Ireland he stuck with what must have seemed at moments a mission impossible and brought it off. With perhaps rather less enthusiasm and dedication he has been responsible for introducing the concept of the national minimum wage to British industry, has successfully improved the status of women in employment and has presided over a solidly prosperous period in the history of the British economy. He has also consistently conducted himself with elegance, style and panache, something that we may only come to appreciate when he is gone.
But what it seems to me he has not done is to leave, for better or for worse, any permanent imprint on the sand. In the historic hall of fame where all ex-prime ministers eventually come to rest, he will be lucky, I predict, to make it out of the center-to-middling group who, while they did little positive harm, failed to do much lasting good either. History, I fear, will probably place him marginally ahead of Callaghan and Wilson but leagues behind Attlee — or for that matter — Margaret Thatcher.
