Sharp personal criticism of politicians, especially those portrayed by their opponents as glib, arrogant or incurious, has become a regular feature of our age. But two well-publicized political memoirs show that, despite much speculation to the contrary, the private convictions of some of our most consequential leaders have often mattered much less than the bewildering circumstances in which they made their decisions, and that many apparent contradictions and failures in the lives of public figures often arise quite naturally out of the unpredictability of crises which they are forced to deal with.
Margaret Thatcher once quipped that her greatest political legacy was the creation of New Labour and there is much in Tony Blair’s memoirs to suggest that this was not an idle boast. Determined to overhaul a party he deemed anachronistic and unelectable, one of Blair’s earliest political triumphs was the removal of socialist language in Clause Four of the party’s constitution. Guided by political instincts that were uncannily similar to those which informed President Clinton’s “triangulations” it now seems inevitable that Blair, or someone like him, had to follow the Thatcher years with promises of a “third way.” With hindsight it is also hard to imagine anyone better suited to marketing the idea that a pick’n’mix approach to left- and right-wing policies could create a stable, commonsensical centrist government. As the closing sentence of his memoir’s introduction says: “It is true that my head can sometimes think conservatively especially on economics and security; but my heart always beats progressive, and my soul is and always will be that of a rebel.”
Later on, Blair’s conservative head appears to have overwhelmed his progressive soul, with dire consequences. His susceptibility to hawks in the Bush administration and his decision to support an invasion of Iraq damned him forever in the eyes of many pundits, but the memoirs offer a far more nuanced account of this episode and they point out that British troops were also used, quite successfully, in humanitarian interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. Blair’s retelling of his government’s confusion over the intelligence on WMD in Iraq is particularly persuasive because it does not try to shirk his responsibility and focuses instead on explaining how complex and complicated the situation was, both militarily and diplomatically. He is very effective at conveying the difficulty of certain decisions – such as whether to keep pressing for a second UN resolution, given that his legal counsel had advised (albeit somewhat ambiguously) that war without one was probably legally justifiable. And his candour is doubly persuasive since elsewhere in the memoirs Blair freely admits that his first term was often long on spin and short on serious policy and that constant intrigues with the Brown faction of the Labour party consumed valuable political energy that would have been better used in running the country. Blair is also refreshingly honest about his exasperation with the peace process in Northern Ireland, his physical and mental exhaustion while in office, periodic doubts as to whether he really was the right leader and his terror — born out of a near-complete inexperience at running anything —when he first took up his appointment as prime minister.
Predictably, George W. Bush’s memoir is much less introspective, but even he concedes that the “Decider” could, and did, get it wrong. Bush admits that his remark about seeing God in Vladimir Putin’s eyes was foolish, and he even concedes that he failed to respond properly to hurricane Katrina, to anticipate the financial crisis and to think carefully enough about troop levels in Afghanistan. But despite passages that discuss personal failures, such as his struggle with alcoholism, the memoir largely sidesteps his administration’s most notorious mistakes, notably its decision to blunder into Iraq without proper intelligence, to suspend habeas corpus, to authorize torture and warrantless wiretapping and to extend executive power with little regard to longstanding constitutional constraints.
In different ways, both memoirs describe governments that faced situations that were daunting in their sheer complexity. The scale of modern government is hard for outsiders to grasp, but it is central to an understanding of why so many of us feel that little gets done in Washington, Brussels or Whitehall. A few months ago, after shadowing Barack Obama for a day, Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum noted that the US Federal Register – a compendium of the text for “new government regulations, presidential decrees, administrative orders, and proposed rules and public notices” — for that day ran to “350 pages of dense, dark type”. It is hard to imagine that anyone — politician, technocrat, scientist or philosopher — could ever manage such a torrential flow of information without occasionally making serious errors. In fact it is remarkable that President Obama manages to get so much done when one considers that in addition to this daily digest of several hundred pages of fine print, he oversees a foreign policy that must coordinate two foreign wars and a Byzantine system of international trade.
One clear lesson from the Blair and Bush memoirs is that no politician can be fairly subjected to harsh ad hominem criticism simply for making bad decisions, but both memoirs also suggest that leaders who cannot, even with hindsight, admit to their previous failures, do much more harm to their reputations than anything said by their political opponents.