The Big Read: What’s eating Tony Blair?
ON a December morning in 2014, a four-car convoy of black SUVs swept out of the polished, limestone arches of the American Colony Hotel, in East Jerusalem, and drove south. Skirting the walls of the old city, it passed Mount Zion and its small, ancient church, where King David lies buried and where Jesus was said to have hosted the Last Supper.
Leaving the old city behind, the convoy hit smooth asphalt, passed tower blocks and an art cinema, overtook Israelis travelling to work in turquoise buses, and broke out into the terraces of cypress and olive on Jerusalem’s outskirts. In 15 minutes, it had reached a security checkpoint in front of a towering, concrete security wall and was waved through — into Bethlehem, the West Bank, and, soon, another world.
On this, the Palestinian side, the roads were potholed and the wall was covered in graffiti and in murals by British street artist, Banksy. The housing was old and squat, and the cafés and stores empty or boarded-up. From the surrounding hills, in every direction, shiny, white fingers of walled, Israeli housing spilled down towards the city like concrete lava. Cut off from the outside world by the wall, Palestinians wandered the streets just for something to do.
At 61, Tony Blair was trimmer than when he was in power, more sharply dressed and with shorter, greyer hair. He seemed more at ease: tie-less, tanned, a gold chain visible under his shirt.
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His focus for the day was tourism. Since he took the job of Representative of the Office of the Quartet, on the day he stepped down as British prime minister, in June, 2007, Blair had been routinely described as a “Middle East peace envoy”.
In reality, the US Secretary of State mediated political negotiations while the mandate of the Quartet — an abridged version of the international community, comprising the US, the EU, the UN and Russia — was more restricted, but more pragmatic: building up the Palestinian economy.
The divisions in Israel, which required Palestinians to waste hours a day at checkpoints, meant Israelis earned an average 10 times as much as their neighbours over the wall. Even without the politics, that disparity all but guaranteed more conflict. And with historic sites like Bethlehem, Jericho and the Dead Sea, plus Roman, Persian and Ottoman ruins — and even Banksy’s murals — the best hope for a thriving Palestinian economy was tourism.
The lifelessness that confronted Blair, in what should have been the pre-Christmas high season, illustrated that the political process was moribund.
In the summer, Israel had fought a war with the Palestinians in Gaza, the narrow and dismembered strip on the Mediterranean. As the bullets flew and peace evaporated, the tourists vanished. Still, the economy was Blair’s mandate and that meant tourism, so his convoy was soon pulling up outside the Palestinian tourism-and-antiquities ministry.
Tourist minister Rula Ma’ay’a’s third-floor office was cramped and cheaply furnished. On the walls were ancient tourist posters depicting Palestine in the 1930s, before the creation of Israel in 1948. Once, the posters had been advertisements. Now, they assumed a more weighty purpose: artefacts of a diminished identity and a disappearing homeland.
Gamely, Blair tried to stick to his mission. “We’re working on a package for Christmas tourism,” he said. “What do you want the Israelis to do?”
The minister regarded him. “What do we want them to do?” she repeated.
Blair realised his mistake. “Well, apart from the obvious . . . ” he began.
“What we want,” said the minister, “is for them to leave Palestine and give us our independence back. They promise and promise, and you try to help, but we get nothing from them.”
“It has been promised for a long time,” Blair said.
“The Israelis want everything for themselves,” said the minister. “They do not want to give us anything. I used to say they gave us peanuts. But they do not give us peanuts now. They give nothing.”
“We are working to try to change things,” Blair said.
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“I think you should push more,” said the minister.
Blair, momentarily defeated, sighed.
“It’s tough,” he told the minister. “It’s really tough.” Then, he inhaled, raised his eyebrows, opened his arms in a wide shrug and made a fish mouth, clamping his bottom lip over his top one, an expression members of his staff call his ‘shit-happens-move-on’ face.
“How can we help?” he asked.
Last month, reports appeared in the British press that, after making little progress, Blair had been asked to retire as Quartet Representative. His office countered that Blair was frustrated by the narrowness of his role and was himself proposing a bigger one: more political, more regional, though still appointed rather than elected.
His vision of a self-selected leader in the middle of the world’s most volatile region reflected views Blair had been developing for years. As he approached the end of his time as prime minister, Blair had said he was sketching out “an absolutely clear view of what I wanted to do, and why, from the moment I left office”. He would focus on three contentious areas: the Middle East peace process, religious extremism, and African governance.
“I’ve done British,” he said during one of eight interviews with Newsweek, conducted in Sierra Leone, Israel and London in November and December, 2014. “I suppose, where I think I can make most difference is a global level, working on things that had interested me as prime minister, but I was not able to devote myself to.”
Running a country as an elected democrat, he wondered how it would be to work as a non-political, unelected leader, unrestrained by events, bureaucracy, electorates, opposition or the press, able to pursue results rationally, with pragmatism and without distraction.
To fight religious extremism, he established the educational Tony Blair Faith Foundation, an independent, self-funded organisation that promoted a tolerant and inclusive vision of faith that was “about compassion and service to others, a set of values which all the large religions share”.
He also set up the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), a small team of efficiency consultants whom he dispatched to those governments in Africa (eight, at the latest count) that he judged to be interested in advancement.
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Rather than traditional aid workers, who instructed and then left, Blair believed African rulers were best-placed to know what their people wanted, but that, like any government, they could use extra training and advice on how to do that. AGI would raise “the capability of the country to implement sensible decisions for itself”.
Blair’s ambitions were instinctively large: to be “of sufficient weight and influence that they change global policy”. The Faith Foundation would create a new global consensus around tolerance, just as the greens had with the environment a generation earlier. The AGI would revolutionise aid. Blair agreed to lead the Quartet because it combined his interests in one job: fighting religious extremism and promoting good governance. Far from being dissuaded by the conflict’s intractability, to Blair the failure of conventional politics was a chance to experiment with the unorthodox. In the beginning, Blair’s ideas produced results. But the peace process continued to be a world-beating example of “bad politics”.
Blair’s father, Leo, was the illegitimate son of two travelling English actors. The caravans of a theatrical troupe touring the British regions in the 1920s was no place to raise a baby, and the couple sent Leo to a foster home. He was adopted by a Glasgow shipyard worker called James Blair, and his wife, the daughter of a butcher. Growing up in Govan, one of Britain’s most deprived neighbourhoods, Leo’s first job was as a copy boy on the communist Daily Worker. In 1948, he married Hazel Corscadden, from a Northern Irish family and the couple settled in Edinburgh. They had a son, William, in March, 1950. A second, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, arrived in May, 1953 .
In time, Leo prospered. He became a tax inspector and, after studying law at night, a barrister, a law lecturer, a member of the Conservative Party and an aspirant MP in the new family home of Durham, just over the border with England. Leo’s journey from Govan to an elevated position in the establishment crossed the entire social, economic and political spectrum of 20th-century Britain. Blair’s critics would later see precedent in Leo’s transition. Tony also graduated from doctrinaire socialism, in his adolescence, to become a lawyer, a pro-business centrist in his politics and, socially, a friend to the rich and powerful. He even called his autobiography A Journey.
But such a simplistic view was a misreading. Leo was a militant atheist and Hazel an Ulster Protestant, but Tony was an ardent Christian who converted to Roman Catholicism. It was his faith, and the Christian principles that underlay social democracy, that forever tethered Tony to the politics of the centre-Left.
If Leo’s progress guided his son, it was in ways his opponents mostly missed. What some saw as a narrative of self-serving expediency would have been, to those inside it, an inspiring story of hope and a testament to the power of pragmatism.
The lesson Tony took from his father was romantic, and heroic. The optimists in life were right. From the lowest ranks even the highest ambitions were justified. Anyone could make it. All that was needed was hard work and a little flexibility and incredible success was possible.
Blair’s spectacular political career was further validation of this sunny outlook. Defying the truism that all elected politicians fail in the end, Blair’s defeat in his first election, in 1982, was his last. In 1983, he won the seat of Sedgefield, near Durham.
A year later, he was appointed to the opposition front bench as a finance specialist, rising to the shadow cabinet in 1987, shadow home secretary in 1992, and Labour Party leader in 1994.
After transforming the party from dour, stubborn socialism to the electable welfare capitalism of “new Labour”, he won power in 1997, then again in 2001 and 2005, a record better than any Labour leader in history. When he left politics, in 2007, it was as part of a previously agreed, if fractious, hand-over to his deputy, Gordon Brown.
Blair’s achievements in power were dramatic. His government brokered peace in Northern Ireland. He was a pioneer of aggressive and high-minded intervention overseas, sending British troops into wars of humanitarian purpose in Kosovo, in 1999, and Sierra Leone, in 2000.
He adopted the aims of aid activists, leading the campaign for banks to drop Africa’s billion-dollar foreign debt and persuading the rich world to raise foreign assistance to Africa by tens of billions more. At home, new laws wrought fundamental change and formed his legacy: devolving power to Wales and Scotland, streamlining public services, setting a new minimum wage and allowing gay civil partnerships.
Perhaps the biggest change to Britain under Blair was its character. By the time he had left power, a 20th-century country of tradition and history had become a 21st-century one of populism and materialism. Muddling-through became maxing-out. Fame became celebrity, an end in itself.
Totems of British greyness — bad food, terraced housing, tatty pubs and rain-drenched football — had been given given glamorous makeovers.
His populist rhetoric — hailing “a bright new dawn for Britain” as the sun broke on the morning of his 1997 election victory; mourning the “people’s princess”, when Diana died a few months later — found a receptive audience.
But this new, touchy-feely Britain had a taste for hysteria. Mob frenzies erupted every few months over paedophiles or immigrants or terrorists or murdered schoolgirls. The privilege of power — never explain, never apologise — was replaced by the burden of it: endless justifying and repeated public apologies.
Leading this mood of outrage and mistrust were the British press. Newspapers pilloried politicians as corrupt and out-of-touch, terrorising them for padding their expenses or not knowing the price of milk. There was little room in this narrowed public debate for the flexible, pragmatic middle path — ‘The Third Way’ — that Blair represented.
The poisonous bullying of Blair’s press aides, still smarting from Labour’s long wilderness in opposition under Margaret Thatcher, also came back to bite him.
After initially idolising him for his energy and youth, the press now hated him for his deal-making: too slick, too smiley, too clever-by-half. As Britain’s democracy turned on Blair, he felt increasingly alienated from it.
Of becoming prime minister in 1997, he wrote in A Journey: “I had started by buying the notion, and then selling the notion, that to be in touch with opinion was the definition of good leadership.”
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But a decade later, “I was ending by counting such a notion of little value and defining leadership not as knowing what people wanted and trying to satisfy them, but knowing what I thought was in their best interest and trying to do it. Pleasing all of the people all of the time was not possible; but even if it had been, it was a worthless ambition.”
That estrangement grew after he left public office. Rather than retiring quietly, the 54-year-old Blair infuriated the press by embarking on a new, prominent career, which he funded by yet more deal-making, as a commercial consultant to business and governments. He became the target of a peculiarly British pack catharsis: cynical, belligerent, thin on facts, long on bile, not unlike a lynching (or, to use Fleet Street’s own word for it, ‘a monstering’).
Today, Blair’s name is a headline swear-word and a Pavlovian trigger for many normally level-headed Brits to froth at the mouth. White, male, powerful, rich — and from a party that once disliked all those things — Blair is the focus of righteous hate speech. Many Britons consider him to be a Machiavelli with a Messiah complex, a war criminal who claims to be saving the world.
He is said to be a fixer for dictators, bankers, media barons and billionaires, a method actor who believes his lines, a globe-trotting Iago with a penny-pinching addiction to free holidays who charges a small fortune for a 45-minute speech, and more for advice, and whose speed-dial is a diabolical list of 21st-century power, fame and money.
In a presentation to Blair’s staff, a London PR firm compared his relationship with his public to a bitter divorce. Blair seduced them, deceived them, then left them for a happy and solvent new life — and they were not getting over it.
Blair was up to something. He’d always been up to something. Lied about Iraq. Probably lied about everything. Always seemed to make out himself. Insufferable, slippery, greedy, shameless, sun-tanned.
On December 4, 2014, Blair wrote an essay in The New York Times headlined: ‘Is democracy dead?’ He said democracy was “not in good shape”. US politics was deadlocked in partisanship. European politicians were not returning growth. The democratic Arab Spring had been outmanoeuvred by the old regimes. Democracy was failing, and, worse, the challenges before it — extremism, financial crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea — were rising. Blair had sharpened his ideas about leadership and the failings of democracy. Democracy, he now concluded, faced an “efficacy challenge”. “Slow, bureaucratic and weak,” it was too often “failing its citizens” and “failing to deliver”.
The price was grave, and apparent. Without action by democratic governments, volatility and uncertainty would spread. Public fear and disillusionment were stoking the return of the far Right in Europe and the United States.
“Suddenly, to some, Putinism — the cult of the strong leader who goes in the direction he pleases, seemingly contemptuous of opposition — has its appeal,” wrote Blair. “If we truly believe in democracy, the time has come to improve it.” Every few years, democracy was about the people’s vote. But, most of the time, it was about their elected representatives harnessing the machinery of government to effect change on their behalf. Being a cipher for popular opinion was dismissed by Blair as “governing by Twitter”. Leaders had to lead.
That wasn’t happening. Centrist democrats were lost in the chaos and instability of the times. That left space for “quack remedies” — “emotionally attractive, but practically foolish or even dangerous debate around immigration... [which] are being peddled by extreme versions of Left and Right”.
Then, there was the press. Blair saw a slim divide between journalist and internet troll. He said it was “never pleasant” to be attacked, but that whatever beatings he took, democracy was taking a worse one.
Blair said the way the press charted economic decline, or international crises or terrorism, with methodical sensationalism, then woke up to depress their readers afresh the next day, bordered on masochism.
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The British media was relinquishing its primary function: the mediation of information. His December Middle East trip was a case in point. While Blair was in Jerusalem working on the peace process, he was making headlines at home for smiling weirdly on his Christmas card. “I try not to think about that too much,” he said. “It just does my head in.”
This was not constructive criticism, said Blair. It was a “wall of noise” that was crippling democracy. “This is a shocking thing to say,” said Blair, “but in modern politics, if you are spending 30% to 40% of your time on your real, core priorities, I think you’re lucky. I can think of political leaders and systems who are lucky if they get 5%.”
Agendas were packed, crises came thick and fast, and yet leaders were spending all their time “communicating”. The core functions of government were being forgotten, Blair said. All but gone was any time to consider “the big questions”. “You know,” said Blair. “Where are we going? What are we trying to do here? What’s it all about?” Blair viewed the resulting paralysis with disdain. “The wheels are spinning and the vehicle is moving,” but the result was often just “driving round in circles”.
Blair said that many veteran leaders agreed “the whole business of government . . . has just got to change radically to be effective”. If politics as usual wasn’t working, then the pragmatist’s response had to be to search for answers outside it.
“Democracy is a way of deciding the decision-makers, but it is not a substitute for making the decision,” he wrote in the Guardian in 2013. “Democratic government doesn’t, on its own, mean effective government. Efficacy is the challenge.”
In Egypt, this March, Blair praised the military regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which has restored stability, but at a price of torturing and killing opponents and imprisoning journalists. “Yes, democracy is important, but democracy is not on its own sufficient,” said Blair. “You also need efficacy. You need effective government taking effective decisions. I don’t think you have to be authoritarian. But you have to be direct.”
Blair took much of his inspiration from business: “You can be a great communicator, which gets you the job,” he told a mining conference in South Africa in February, 2015, “but once in power, you’re a CEO and need to run a business”. After all, said Blair, business was pragmatism. It was efficiency-obsessed, executive-led and constantly innovating.
Businesses dreamt up products, tested them with audiences, then made, marketed and distributed them as efficiently as possible. Blair proposed governments should do the same with policy.
“There should be no shock about this,” he said. “In a world in which you think of every other walk of life and the changes that have come about in it, it would be odd if government didn’t have the same necessity to change.” But bureaucracies don’t go out of business, so they don’t feel the need to change. So, they should be made to understand that saving democracy demands it, and take their lead from those for whom change is survival.
Blair wasn’t proposing that the world be run like a corporation. He was saying that inside a democracy it was executive power that delivered results. His own method in power had been to study an issue, canvass a wide spectrum of opinion, listen to the press and hold a public referendum; then, note the debate, thank its participants, come to his own conclusions, and lead.
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“It wasn’t that I didn’t have doubt or hesitation or uncertainty,” he said. “You can’t be sure. But I’m for taking that big decision. It’s less to do with certainty than a big solution to a big problem.”
Blair was saying there was a time for talk and a time for action — and that a leader’s duty was to stay the course. “I decided, a long time ago, that it’s about whether I’m doing the right thing or the wrong thing,” he said. “If it’s the right thing I’m doing, if I’m doing what I think is right, then I should be doing it even though people disagreed, even if I am being attacked for it. If you always worry about why there is so much static, if you live your life by that, you end up not doing very much.”
Six weeks after his December visit to the Middle East, Blair was in Davos, Switzerland, for the 45th World Economic Forum. He was speaking on a panel entitled: ‘Religion, a pretext for conflict?’ Blair argued that modern extremism was a perversion of religion. When the audience was asked for questions, Henning Zierock, a German socialist, countered, to a smattering of applause: “I think you have great responsibility for the conflicts we have now.”
On his way out of the venue, Blair was barracked by British reporters. “If you are invited to the International Criminal Court, will you attend?” asked one. Another asked him about the Iraq inquiry’s decision to delay publication of its findings until after a British general election in May. “Did you cause the delay?” asked the reporter. “Do voters have a right to know the contents of the report before an election?”
The questions reflected beliefs common among Blair’s opponents: that because he invaded one part of the Middle East, he was disqualified to be making peace in another; that he must be punished for his mistakes in Iraq; and that if he wasn’t, it was because of a corrupt insider deal.
These suspicions dovetailed with other dark mutterings: that Blair consulted for the banks and corporations that have misruled the world; and that he has parlayed his contacts and inside knowledge into lucrative favours and deals that have made him one of the extremely wealthy.
At its most diabolical, the allegation was that Blair used the office of prime minister as a stepping-stone to a life among the über-elite. His was, so the talk went, the ultimate sell-out.
In response, Blair claimed the obsession with “honesty and transparency” — his own, or other politicians’ — was misplaced. Most politicians were decent and hard-working, he said. In his own case, the attacks on him came “from people with whom I continue to have a profound political disagreement” about how to approach the Middle East, but who tried “to dress it up as something else — conflicts of interest and that type of thing”.
It did seem unlikely that if Blair were a secret Zionist, as his detractors said, that he would have attracted 50 young, bright, serious and worldly Palestinians and Israelis to his office in Jerusalem, many of whom took a pay cut to work for him. It seemed just as unfeasible that if he were only out for himself he would be repeatedly trusted by foreign authorities — Palestine and Israel, and Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea-Conakry — to intervene in their gravest national crises.
Asked, at his offices in Nablus, if he thought that the invasion of Iraq made Blair an unsuitable envoy to Palestine, Palestinian deputy prime minister, Mohammad Mustafa, seemed perplexed and a little insulted at the conflation. “We do not focus on what he did in Iraq,” he said. “We focus on his mandate to help us in Palestine in the present, and I think he has been doing his best.”
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The accusation that Blair became rich after leaving office was more reasonable. Blair’s office in Jerusalem was funded by those it represents. But to pay for the Faith Foundation and the Africa Governance Initiative, Blair set up two commercial ventures: Windrush, the more successful, with a £13.6m turnover in 2013, marketed Blair as a consultant and speechmaker to governments; Firerush did the same for business. Blair estimated that he spent three-quarters of his time on his public service work and the remainder on his commercial work. He said the latter paid for the former: “I couldn’t do what I do unless I was also able to generate income.”
Still, Blair acknowledged his commercial work was not altruistic. He was not paid by the Quartet, nor his foundations, but earned his money from Windrush and Firerush. Though his financial advisers refused to release a full account of his personal finances, on grounds of commercial confidentiality, his spokesman said that, together, the two companies have paid him salaries and dividends of £27m since 2007.
From his earnings, the spokesman said, Blair has given £10m to charities. The other £10m is tied up in two houses, one in central London, one in Buckinghamshire. His spokesman said the basis for stories of a Blair British property empire seemed to be homes owned by Blair’s wife, Cherie, and Blair’s four children, for which the Blairs put down surety.
Blair knew an extraordinary array of the super-rich. But even if the wilder reports of his wealth were true, he wasn’t one of them. More damaging than the money, perhaps, was that his commercial ventures worked to lower standards than his public service ones. Speaking of his Africa Governance Initiative, Blair claimed some regimes were too repressive to deal with.
“The prerequisite for us to work in a country is that we think the leadership is trying to do the right thing,” he said. “We don’t go to countries where they are not. What’s the point?”
That principle did not, apparently, apply to Windrush’s commercial contract with Kazakhstan, which has been led by the same man since 1989. A few weeks after Blair signed on as an adviser, in late 2011, the Kazakh regime shot dead 14 protesters and injured 64 in the oil town of Zhanaozen. Blair’s ideas on good leadership were unlikely to persuade many Kazakhs or human rights organisations, who contended that what the country needed was not more leadership, but less. Equally unconvinced were those who accused Blair of greed. The day before Blair’s appearance in Davos, the World Economic Forum’s head, Klaus Schwab, opened the conference by telling his audience they were there because “you are our leaders”, brought together “to improve the state of the world”.
The four-day programme would, he said, “address all the major issues on the global agenda”. Participants would first define these problems — such as global poverty, disease, war and the environment — then try to resolve them.
Schwab had made a head-start, naming “10 big global challenges” that bore a close resemblance to those identified by Blair. Third on his list was “lack of leadership”. Fifth was “weakening of representative democracy”.
Government began millennia ago, with kings and emperors. In time, their power was diluted by religious leaders, courtiers, generals, aristocrats and merchants. The past few centuries have witnessed the steady displacement of all of these by politicians: conservatives, liberals, revolutionaries and elected centrists. And, now, power is shifting again.
The World Economic Forum is our foremost example of the rise of a self-selected global elite. It is only one of thousands of new private institutes focused on public service. Many are led by individuals. Blair is one.
Others include the billionaire hedge-fund manager, George Soros, and his Open Society, which bolsters democracy by working with non-governmental activists in 100 countries. Another is the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, founded by the Sudanese telecoms billionaire of the same name to work on African governance.
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Then, there is the $350m Clinton Foundation, founded by a former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, and a former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. It works in health, education and applies a “business-oriented approach to fight climate change worldwide and to promote sustainable economic growth in Africa and Latin America”.
Biggest of the new groups is the 15-year-old, $41bn Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which takes the resources of the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, and of its second-richest, Warren Buffett, and focuses them on health, mostly in poor parts of Asia and Africa.
At Davos, Blair declared: “The way the world works today is very simple, even at the very elite level at the World Economic Forum . . . by connectivity. People across boundaries of nations and race and faith coming together, working together, being in community with each other.” And it is true that the new global leaders share several criteria. They are either immensely rich or friendly enough with the immensely rich to tap them for funds.
Ascending to this new type of leadership does not require a previous career in politics. Some are ex-politicians, like Blair and Clinton. Many more are billionaire businessmen, academics, activists, aid workers, philosophers, scientists, even artists and musicians.
The World Economic Forum is where they all gather. Every year, Schwab’s staff trawl the world of business, civil society, aid, academia and art, and pick a handful of young successes whom they anoint as a new crop of young global leaders.
This is not the death of democracy. It is a refinement of it by those winners of the human race whose success alienates them from its imperfections. The WEF cannot pass laws. What it aims to do, explicitly, is influence the debate that informs them, then guide their implementation. This it does through what it calls “public-private co-operation”. That means sharing or handing over issues previously reserved for governments to businessmen and other accomplished individuals.
These new leaders get results where governments have failed. Gates’ work on Aids and TB has saved millions of lives. After decades of government failure, a global campaign against malaria run by a New Jersey billionaire, Ray Chambers, has saved several million more. Partly this is due to the new leaders’ hard-nosed, results-obsessed nature. Partly it is because national governments are ill-equipped to cope with international issues like immigration and disease.
But, as with Blair’s ideas on leadership, there is an anti-democratic element. The subtext to the WEF, and the think-tanks and aid groups and foundations that are now a vast global industry, is expressly elitist: democracy is failing and they — the rich and capable, the gurus, and movers and shakers — are best-placed to help.
While their influence in the West is limited, in smaller, poorer, less functional countries their control is real. Consider the heft that comes with the $52bn spent on aid in Africa by unelected philanthropists, equivalent to the annual output of 20 of Africa’s 49 countries. How that money is spent depends much more on what is said during a panel discussion in Switzerland than on anything uttered by Africans.
More insidiously, there are questions over how closely the new elite aligns public interest with its own self-interest. Blair uses his contacts for both pro bono and commercial work. He employs an accounting department, a legal department, and a compliance department to ensure no conflict of interest.
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Still, last month The Sunday Times published a draft from Windrush proposing a consulting contract with the government of Abu Dhabi, in which a staff member had ghosted an introduction from Blair that read: “We do both business and philanthropy. All my various organisations are based on the belief that the world today basically works through connectivity. There is virtually nowhere in the world right now where we could not work or provide the necessary contacts, either politically or commercially, should we want to.”
A spokesman for Blair disavowed the proposal, saying it was a draft unseen and unapproved by Blair, and that Blair had been especially angered by the muddling of private and public. Still, at least one person on Blair’s staff had trouble telling the two apart.
These sorts of accusations loom larger the closer you get to the top. This year, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post revealed that the Clinton Foundation took €23.7m in donations from companies lobbying the State Department when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
While the Journal found no evidence of a quid pro quo, it reported that corporations like General Electric, Exxon, Microsoft and Boeing all donated to the foundation at a time when Clinton was pushing their business to countries around the world. The Foundation also took money from many of those foreign countries: $500,000 from Algeria and up to $25m each from Holland and Saudi Arabia.
The Foundation did suspend the solicitation of money from new donors while Hillary became Secretary of State, in 2009, though it continued to take money from existing ones, like Algeria, Australia, the Dominican Republic, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, and Qatar.
Moreover, after Hillary stepped down, in 2013, the Foundation immediately re-opened itself to all donors, government or business, even though Hillary was planning to run for US president in 2016.
In Clinton’s case, as in the way Bill Gates’s wealth has made him the single most influential individual in global health, or Soros’s has bought power for scores of political groups around the world, there is enough private money funding public interventions to suggest the creation of a new, privately run power structure running parallel to democracy. As Amy Davidson noted in The New Yorker, the Clinton Foundation “is not a normal charity, in its resources or its functions”.
If there are paradoxes in the Davos agenda — How did a non-governmental super-class manage to appropriate the subject of governance from government? How did the super-rich reserve inequality as a discussion for themselves? — what’s missing is a discussion on legitimacy.
In a world increasingly run by the self-anointed, do we now make our CEOs and pop stars as accountable as our politicians — in case their good fortune one day convinces them to try to change the world? Should we choose our computers or movies according to the political beliefs of the bosses who make them? Can we trust a Gates, a Soros, a Blair?
Or, do we merely have to hope we can?
In The New Yorker, Davidson noted that the public were left tending the wish that the Clintons were “exceptionally ungrateful to their donors”. The same applies to Blair.
If all the noise around him ever swayed him, it really doesn’t matter now. Blair has left politics behind. His position no longer depends on others or events or opinions. His is above and beyond, “working on whatever I have chosen”.
Blair can fight ebola, mediate in the Middle East, or do business with the tyrant of Kazakhstan. You can’t touch him.
A raising of the eyebrows, a shrug, the fish mouth, and he’s moved on.
