20 years since Tony Blair became Labour leader

Right from the start, Mr Blair was a brilliant communicator, who said precisely what he knew people wanted to hear.

He promised to ‘lift the spirit of the nation’. He said it was wrong that we were spending ‘billions of pounds keeping able-bodied people idle’, and wrong that we were ‘wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on bureaucrats and accountants in the NHS’.

He promised to crack down on drugs and crime, to give all children the educational chances they deserved, and to get rid of the ‘quango state’.

Of course, talk is cheap. But when he became Prime Minister three years later, Tony Blair had probably the best inheritance of any new government in the 20th century.

Not only was the economy buoyant, but the Thatcher governments of the Eighties had taken most of the difficult decisions for him. There was no need to confront the unions, the IRA or the Soviet Union — all had effectively been beaten.

What an opportunity! What an historic chance to prepare Britain for the competitive global marketplace of the 21st century: to reform our welfare and education systems, to revive our manufacturing base, to rebuild our infrastructure, to reinvigorate our democracy!

Tony Blair poses with wife Cherie and children (left to right) Nicky, Kathryn and Euan outside 10 Downing Street after Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 General Election. When he became Prime Minister, Blair had probably the best inheritance of any new government in the 20th century

The new administration could, for instance, have invested heavily in apprenticeships, which would have slashed welfare bills and reinvigorated manufacturing industry in declining areas such as the West Midlands and the North-East.Instead, Mr Blair merely shifted hundreds of thousands of people on to disability benefit, costing the taxpayer a staggering £7 billion a year by the time he left office in 2007.

And instead of rebalancing our economy away from the South-East, Mr Blair bet the house on the City of London, leaving us with a wretchedly lopsided economy that was all too vulnerable to the global financial crisis that struck a few months after his retirement.

Looking back, in fact, the real story of the Blair years was one of shattering disappointment.

Mr Blair’s first term, as even he admitted in his execrable memoir A Journey, was sacrificed to the pursuit of short-term headlines. His second was consumed in the disastrous blunder of invading Iraq; his third was cut short by the endless feuding with his former comrade Gordon Brown.

One by one, the promises made in that first speech in 1994 were systematically broken. Far from being cut, for example, NHS bureaucracy ballooned as Whitehall imposed a new regime of rigid targets. Between 1999 and 2009, the number of NHS managers increased by an amazing 82 per cent.

As for scrapping the quango state, forget it. In ten years under Tony Blair, there was a 41 per cent increase in the number of quangos, which by then cost the taxpayer £124 billion a year.

Mr Blair’s first term, as even he admitted in his execrable memoir A Journey, was sacrificed to the pursuit of short-term headlines. His second was consumed in the disastrous blunder of invading Iraq; his third was cut short by the endless feuding with his former comrade Gordon Brown

But the deeper roots of this failure went back to the New Labour culture that Mr Blair established immediately upon becoming leader in 1994.

Right from the start, he and his henchmen, notably the bullying Alastair Campbell, encouraged a culture of shameless mendacity and obsessive control-freakery.

In power, these tendencies became exaggerated. Cabinet government gave way to sofa government and television showmanship took precedence over parliamentary democracy.

The economy, buoyed by the unsustainable expansion of personal credit, was still booming, while the Tories were having something of a mid-life crisis, so Mr Blair coasted to victory in election after election. All the time, however, spin and sleaze were eating away at the pillars of British public life.

The fact that Mr Blair himself was largely responsible is surely not in doubt. Today, some of his former admirers believe that he literally went mad. The former Labour Foreign Secretary, Lord Owen (an ex-doctor), has diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder, while the novelist Robert Harris, who used to play tennis with Blair, believes that he suffers from a ‘messiah complex’.

My own view is rather different. I don’t think Mr Blair went mad. I think he remains what he always was: a narcissistic, preening showman, the lead singer of a college rock band who modelled himself on Mick Jagger, craved the approval of the crowd and came to believe his own publicity.

He belongs, I think, to a long and dishonourable political tradition: the posturing populist who puts his own interests before those of the nation, like those great mountebanks Benjamin Disraeli and David Lloyd George — both of whom, like Mr Blair, built well-deserved reputations for egotism and avarice.

The tragedy, though, is that Tony Blair did much more damage. Many of the ills of contemporary Britain, not least the parlous state of British manufacturing and our over-dependence on the casino capitalism of the City of London, can be laid directly at his door.

And that is before you even begin to contemplate the festering sores of Iraq and Afghanistan, which did terrible damage to our reputation abroad.

Mr Blair shakes hands with former U.S. President George W. Bush in the Rose Garden of the White House in April 2004 after meeting in the Oval Office to discuss the war in Iraq

Of course you cannot blame Mr Blair alone for the current state of Iraq, divided, bomb-scarred and, thanks to the advance of Islamic militancy, lurching towards  cataclysmic partition.

But because of his reckless folly in invading without bothering to lay the foundations for the future, he bears a considerable share of the responsibility, and any decent man would surely hang his head in  sorrow and repentance.

Perhaps above all, though, Mr Blair dealt a terrible blow to the reputation of politics itself.

Of course, there had been plenty of dissembling, evasive, even mendacious politicians before, but never had there been one so determined to bend the truth to his own ends.

Even during the late Nineties, when Mr Blair was accused of twisting his policies after getting a big donation from the Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone, there was a sense of growing public disquiet about his honesty — or lack of it.

But the war in Iraq was a disaster for the image of public life in this country.

Millions of people, horrified by the allegations that the government had ‘sexed up’ an intelligence dossier on the case for war, concluded that government ministers — indeed, all politicians — were inherently untrustworthy.

Source: the Dailymail