You might be wondering I’m only commenting on this now. Well, my original plan was to watch this last Wednesday night but after all the political fallout of Tony Blair’s memoirs that day I was already just a bit sick of the hype and buzz around it. Instead, I watched it a couple of days ago (which is wise considering there wasn’t anything to do at all) when everything had died down.
The first thing to say is to note how different he looks. In terms of appearance the Blair of 2007 that stood down as PM amidst a sea of metaphorical ticker tape hasn’t changed much three years on but when he’s been away from the public eye for so long, save a couple of TV appearances, it really does look like a ghost has returned from the past. I was about nine years old when he was sworn into office and by the time he had left I was a young adult, so it felt like seeing a famous figure from my own childhood and adolescent phase, as weird as it sounds.
The interview was dominated by questioning of the Iraq War, rather predictably, and he still vigorously defended the decision to go to war with Iraq but, whilst his defence was actually reasonably solid, I still find it hard to have sympathy for him. As time goes on he seems far more anguished and regretful about the implications of his actions and to think that he still feels like it was a good idea does seem quite suspect to me. It’s still fresh in the memory so history cannot yet whether Blair and George W. Bush were right in their actions but one cannot help but feel that it might end up being quite damning.
The rest of the hour was spent talking about everything else, for the most part. If anything, it reminded me how captivating Blair is, regardless of whether you think he was a saint or a villain in British politics. He revealed the full extent of his fallout with Gordon Brown and was quite candid about his relationship with him. Infact, he was pretty candid about most things. He admitted that the fox hunting ban was a bloody political minefield that needn’t to have been gone down, for example. A lot of people are saying that his book is motivated by money but as he said in the interview, all royalties and payments to him go straight to charity, and I can’t think of any other reason for him to be this revealing apart from wanting to set the record straight and possibly with an eye or two on future history books that have yet to be written.
Andrew Marr was, for the most part, a good interviewer and managed to cover a wide range of topics over the duration of the interview. Maybe at times he was too pressing and asked the odd question or two that were never going to reveal anything (Blair declined to voice his opinion of the current coalition government) but fine otherwise. It was quite a watchable hour of television that, if not spectacular, was pretty insightful.
