Blair may leave office as early as June, and a fin de régime pall suffuses the place on this chill February evening. He disappears upstairs to change. Downstairs, his study fills with harried aides weighed down by satchels and carryalls and, poignantly, the scuffed, iconic “red box” in which British government ministers carry their overnight paperwork. “The end is nigh,” says one of the visitors in mock-apocalyptic tones. There’s some nervous laughter. Then Lily Burton, wife of Blair’s longtime local political agent, adds quietly, “It does feel that way, doesn’t it?”
It does. And Blair looks the part. Gone are the bright eyes and portcullis smile. His hair is graying and receding, his face etched by the rigors of five wars and a decade in power. Gone, too, is the naiveté of the early years, when his opponents called him, not implausibly, “Bambi.” At 53, Blair is still fit and trim. But more than any Western leader other than George W. Bush, his reputation has been “shredded by Iraq,” in the words of a senior Bush administration official who would only speak anonymously about a foreign leader. Perhaps even more so than Bush: Blair transformed the Labour Party into a juggernaut and oversaw a 10-year renaissance in Britain. He had further to fall than the American president.
Perhaps that’s why he’s digging in his heels now. Over the past two months, Blair allowed NEWSWEEK extraordinary access to himself and his top aides. The Downing Street agenda was clear: to help rescue Blair’s legacy from the grip of Iraq. But as he crisscrossed the world from Baghdad to Davos, the picture that emerged was of a leader defiant to the point of denial. Again and again, he repeated the central point of his argument: that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror, and that the war on terror is “a battle of values and for progress.” When confronted by the charge that Iraq has been an abject failure, he says dismissively, “You waste your time and energy in that kind of negativity.” As the evening at Myrobella progresses from tea to ale to a Northern Labour man’s requisite meal of fish and chips, flashes of Bambi reappear. Of his 26 percent approval rating, Blair says, “Provided you think you’re right, you can get through it.”
The echoes of Bush are not accidental. At least since September 11, the two men have been even closer than most people realize. They still speak at least once every couple of weeks. “They are completely comfortable with one another; they practically finish each other’s sentences,” says the senior administration official. If anything, the bond has grown tighter as the two leaders have each become more isolated. In December, just after the Iraq Study Group report dropped like a bomb on Bush’s desk, Blair was quick to stand by his side. On the flight from London to Washington, a tracksuited Blair toughened up the speech he’d deliver at a joint press conference the next day: he thanked the embattled Bush for “the clarity of your vision.”
That sort of sycophancy enrages critics who see the prime minister as Bush’s “poodle.” But Blair’s aides, who asked for anonymity in order to discuss confidential meetings, insist their man was helping to set the agenda in Washington. Privately, Blair encouraged Bush to use the intelligence British troops in Basra had collected on Iranian-made weapons in order to confront Tehran. (Their foreign-policy teams had been discussing such a “pushback” strategy since the summer war in Lebanon.) “We tried to fashion a more coherent and tougher policy based on the Iran that we were seeing, which was a more regionally assertive Iran,” says one of the Blair advisers.
Blair led on Iraq as well. To understand the prime minister, one of his closest friends has often said, you have to understand three things: that he’s a lawyer, an interventionist and a not-so-closet cleric. An Anglican who attends Roman Catholic services with his Catholic wife and children, Blair does not wear his faith on his sleeve. But it has fired his belief in humanitarian intervention since he was elected in 1997. “He’s very Manichaean about it. It’s cowboys versus Indians,” says another Blair adviser, who also did not want to speak on the record about his boss. The prime minister came to Iraq after having led Britain into a series of successful military adventures–the 1998 “Desert Fox” bombing of Iraq, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan. When he backed Bush’s plan to take on Saddam, Blair was if anything the “truer believer,” says Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to Washington from 1997 until just before the war. The invasion satisfied Blair’s criteria for using military power–to stop the killing of innocents.
That moral high ground is pretty much all he has anymore. Soon after his Washington visit, Blair embarked on a whistle-stop tour of the Middle East, traveling to five countries in as many days. The trip was reminiscent of his globe-trotting in the aftermath of 9/11, when he rallied support for America and reaffirmed Britain as its indispensable ally. But on the half-empty 747 that Downing Street had chartered, the traveling press despaired because their editors were so uninterested in the trip. (“Can you keep the word ‘Blair’ out of your lead?” one scribbler was told by his news desk.) One day the prime minister’s official spokesman gathered the journalists to declare, “This is not a day for announcements.” Translation: no news.
The stopover in Basra–Blair’s traditional Christmas visit with British soldiers–was the most telling. The number of British troops in Iraq has declined from a high of 46,000 during the invasion to about 7,000 now. Downing Street has indicated that depending on conditions, as many as half of those could be gone by the summer, with more to follow as the year wears on. Yet Blair’s relationship with the armed forces is rocky. Among other retired officers, Gen. Lord Guthrie, a former chief of Defense Staff, recently blasted the prime minister for exposing troops to “completely unacceptable risks” because Britain’s military capacity has been overstretched by operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Blair’s reception at Basra Air Station was cool. He signed a Challenger II tank with a felt-tip marker (“Good luck!”), shook hands and gave a less-than-rousing speech. When he finished, barely half the soldiers gathered around him clapped. “We jumped for joy!” after hearing of Blair’s impending arrival, a woman soldier said sarcastically.
If anything, his growing isolation seems to be fueling something of a martyr complex. Blair and his innermost circle have been dragged into a nasty campaign-finance scandal–the cash-for-peerages affair in which donors allegedly gave big loans to the Labour Party (and indeed the Conservative opposition) in exchange for seats in the House of Lords. Blair has been questioned twice, though not as a suspect. (The police say he will not be questioned again.) “I am not going to beg for my character in front of anyone,” he recently snapped to a reporter who asked him about the imbroglio. More privately, he has ruefully reflected on the parallels to former president Bill Clinton’s last years in office, when he was hobbled by the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
For Blair, who at the time declared Clinton was “someone I could trust,” the thought is actually galvanizing. Rather than focusing on his mundane domestic accomplishments–reducing class sizes in schools, reforming the National Health Service–he’s thinking bigger and bigger. Giving the closing address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Blair issued a ringing call to action on climate change. The night before, he was feted at a small, private wine-and-canapé reception hosted by Bono. The U2 frontman had taken issue with Blair on the war, but Blair knew he was among people who understood that he was fighting the good fight on other issues, like African debt: Bill and Melinda Gates, Rupert Murdoch, members of the Kennedy-Shriver clan, Paul Wolfowitz. “I divide people into two groups,” Blair told them. “The optimists and the cynics.” He didn’t have to tell them which group he, and they, belonged to. History will judge how naive that optimism may be.
