Blair Inc.

It started with a silly statement last December. “I have a lot of energy. I feel extremely fit. There’s no way I’m going to retire and play golf. You look at someone like Henry (Kissinger). He’s 91 and he’s still going strong. I love that. Or (Israel’s) Shimon Peres! These are my role models.”

Yes, Tony Blair rounded off 2014 with a call to arms. As the time he spends outside 10 Downing Street grows as controversial as the time he’d spent in it, Tony means to fight back. And fighting back, for the winningest Labour leader in history, means a lot of spin: warm interviews via Vanity Fair, working the lecture circuit, and massaging the egos of the rich and influential.

Which is why, by Mr Blair’s standards, the Kissinger comparison was clumsy: a man who waged wars that murdered hundreds of thousands shouldn’t aspire to become another gent who waged wars that murdered hundreds of thousands. But December was just the beginning.

Then came February, and John Prescott with it. Back when the British press swooned over Tony’s every word, Prescott was thought Blair’s adorable sidekick. An Old Labour, pro-union heavy, Deputy PM Prescott made the perfect working class foil to Tony’s upstart ways. Even when he smacked a farmer in the face for pelting him with an egg — as farmers are wont to do — Prescott’s opinion polls actually rose.



Now out of office, Prescott still wasn’t pulling any punches. “I was with Tony Blair on Iraq. We were wrong,” he said at a fundraiser last month. “They told us it wasn’t regime change. It was … Now Tony, unfortunately is still in to that. I mean the way he’s going now, he now wants to invade everywhere.”

Invoking the sword and scimitar of yore, Prescott continued, “He should put a white coat on with a red cross and let’s start the bloody crusades again.”

But Prescott wasn’t the only Brutus to Tony’s Caesar; by the time March rolled around, more misery was in store for the man who once walked on water in Whitehall. Maligned abroad, Tony thought to rebuild at home — with a six-figure donation to 106 Labour candidates heading into the polls in May. To which Dundee East candidate Lesley Brennan went on to tweet, “Received donation from Tony Blair. Instinct was not to accept. Discussed with team. Dundee East is not accepting of £1,000.” Overjoyed, the Scottish National Party jeered at the other Labourites to do the same: “It proves that this was bad money.”

Which brings us to the root of the matter: bad, bad, bad money. Bucking the trend wherein British premiers leave office poorer than they come in, there is, of course, nothing wrong with the former PM building his fortune as a private citizen.

Not that he owes up to any fortune at all, “I’m not worth 100 million, a half of it, a third of it, a quarter of it or a fifth of it or really a fraction,” he giggled.

The trouble is, Mr Blair’s smelt blood, and he just can’t stay away from it: it’s hard being an elder statesman when you run a global consultancy that primps and preens the image of despots in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The resume of Tony Blair and Associates (TBA), an outfit set up in 2007, stands testament: last August, Tony was caught advising Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev how best to soap the blood off his hands after a massacre of 14 unarmed civilians.

Wrote Tony on his own pretty notepaper, “Dear Mr President, here is a suggestion for a paragraph to include in the Cambridge speech … Dealing with (the massacre) in the way I suggest, is the best way for the Western media.”

But isn’t bringing these monsters in from the cold part of TBA’s grand plan? Unfortunately, Kazakhstan’s political freedoms have deteriorated during Blair’s consultancy, with clampdowns on freedom of the press as well as civil liberties. “We could not have asked for a better adviser,” beamed an unnamed Kazakh official.

It only followed, then, that when Guinea’s president, Alpha Conde, did the same thing in 2013 — slaughtering unarmed protesters again — Tony saved the day again with a ‘four-page communication strategy’.

These are, of course, just the gentlemen who managed to hang on; Saif Qaddafi thought Blair “a personal family friend”. Now saluting Egypt’s latest junta (after attacking the elected Brotherhood), Mr Blair has signed on to assist General Sisi “on economic reform”.

And other than his role as make-up man for the world’s most unlovable characters, Mr Blair spends his time criticising Islam and calling for more war, everywhere and anywhere.

But as March runs into April, Mr Blair is stepping down from the job he’d staked his retirement on: Middle East envoy of the Quartet. Mr Blair was painted as the proverbial unicorn by Washington’s departing neocons: the man who would bring peace to the Middle East.

In his eight years there, that seems to have gone in reverse. Those on the ground blame the usual factors: commercial ties to banks in London, overtly and covertly favouring the Israelis, and a lack of interest in general. “Useless, useless, useless,” was a Palestinian official’s take on the subject.

And that’s where the problem with Tony Blair lies: he is fundamentally tragic. Which also marks him so different: the ideologues he so slavishly supported — the Bush boys; the Rumsfelds and the Cheneys — were known quantities, who had bent the world out of shape every chance they’d got since the ’70s.

Mr Blair, on the other hand, started out as hope: he lifted Labour from the pits it had been kicked into by Maggie Thatcher. He brought peace to Northern Ireland. He acted on saving Kosovo from the Serbs, the loudest voice for Nato intervening in Belgrade against active ethnic cleansing.

That he’d twist the same principle as warrior-in-chief in office — launching wars that destroyed thousands of lives — then act as a clean-up man for the most sordid regimes once out of it, is not a little nauseating.

Then again, nauseating business is what powers Tony Blair & Associates — this is a man who no longer cares he’s making the world a far worse place. It was revealed last February, 16 years after the war, that Mr Blair has also signed on to advise Serbian PM Vucic.

Mr Vucic was mass-killer Milosevic’s information minister in the ’90s. The reaction from Serbia’s politicians ran from derision to rage, calling Mr Blair a “bizarre” choice.

For once, the world could agree.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 24^th, 2015.

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