I saw Blair’s good and bad sides, and we live with the consequences

THERE is no excuse for the bad manners shown to Tony Blair when he went to Easons in Dublin to sign copies of his memoir, A Journey.

Whatever your views on him, and mine are ambivalent, he put an extraordinary amount of time and energy into saving lives in Northern Ireland, and even though he has made a personal fortune through speechmaking around the world, he spends much of his life working unpaid to bring peace to the Middle East. In an era when Christianity and Islam are in conflict in many parts of the world, his Faith Foundation seeks to promote respect between religions and multi-faith action against global poverty.

On Monday in Philadelphia, his friend Bill Clinton awarded Blair the National Constitution Centre’s prestigious Liberty Medal for his work in promoting human rights and conflict resolution.

“Tony Blair,” he said, “believes that people of faith can be people of peace if they are willing to concede the possibility that once in a while they might be wrong — and that not every religious tenet can be turned into a political programme. For that... we are profoundly in his debt. I can tell you that he deserves this award.”

In Sierra Leone, he is a hero, credited with bringing an end to a savage civil war, as he is in Kosovo, into which he dragged a reluctant Clinton. These were two conflicts where Blair’s policy of humanitarian intervention worked.

Iraq and Afghanistan were much more ambitious, badly planned and have earned him many enemies. But whatever your views on them, it was shaming to see shoes and eggs being thrown at a guest by an anti-war protest manned mainly by members of the 32 County Sovereignty Committee — who are to the Real IRA what Sinn Féin were to the IRA — and the Stop the War Coalition who include among their troops many who justify violence in Gaza and Iraq.

Still, several hundred people did queue up to meet him and say thank you for what he achieved in Northern Ireland.

As an adviser to David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, during the peace process, I saw Blair at his best and worst. At his best, he had flair, charm, ingenuity, courage and doggedness. At his worst, he was slapdash, impatient with detail and unprincipled, willing to promise anything today for the sake of a result, without worrying too much about the consequences tomorrow.

In his book he has an amusing but telling anecdote which illustrates many aspects of his approach. “The surreal issue was the unionist desire to close down somewhere called Maryfield. At first there was confusion, since we thought that the unionsits were saying “Murrayfield” had to close, and even I winced at the prospect of demolishing the Edinburgh home of Scottish rugby that I had visited often as a teenager. But it was a measure of our now complete isolation in the negotiating cell that I neither asked why unionism might want to erase a rugby pitch, nor was unprepared to do it.”

Having finally realised that the issue was Maryfield, the British-Irish secretariat established to serve the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, Blair told his officials to raze it to the ground. “I never did find out what happened to it. Probably everyone forgot about it.”

Certainly Blair has forgotten a lot about Northern Ireland and hasn’t bothered to get a researcher to check. For example Bloody Sunday, we are told, happened in Belfast; the east-west strand of the peace negotiations were to do with relations between the Britain and Northern Ireland (no, it was relations between Britain and the Republic); Ireland didn’t join the EU in the 1980s, but in 1973; Ken Maginnis, so vital to bringing the Ulster Unionist Party to a sensible policy, does not deserve to be given the surname of Martin McGuinness. And Bertie Ahern, we learn, “was a student of history, not its prisoner”.

Even if we can agree on the latter, I don’t think even Bertie would claim to have put much of his time into studying history — or indeed, anything else. Blair loves Bertie perhaps because at the negotiating table they are soulmates — “smart, cunning in the best sense, strong and, above all, free of the shackles of history”.

Blair isn’t much of a man for history himself, which is why he so often resorts to clichés. His chapter on Northern Ireland begins with the quote from Churchill about “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone” which seems new to him but hackneyed to everyone else. He style is often amusing, but he can be blasé and dismissive about matters that others hold dear. Unionists, he explains, “had an innate and powerful tendency to think they were being had. It wasn’t always without justification, but that wasn’t the point”.

It often was the point. Blair has no embarrassment about admitting he was a believer in “creative ambiguity” — fibs and promising what he couldn’t deliver if it would get the process over a hurdle. He does however admit that a failure to get the IRA to agree that General John de Chastelain could describe the act of weapon-decommissioning he had witnessed was a catastrophe for the Ulster Unionists.

“In answer to the question ‘what was decommissioned?’, he replied, ‘well, it wasn’t a tank’ — a bit like the herald, when asked with whom the king had consummated his marriage, saying, ‘well, it wasn’t a donkey’. This did then for David Trimble, I’m afraid, and I blame myself for it.”

A throwaway line about the throwing away of a man’s career. The SDLP are casually dismissed as well, at times.

BLAIR should, but doesn’t, blame himself for giving so many incentives to the intransigents that he destroyed the middle ground, in part because of his lack of principle. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, leaders and spokesmen for an organisation killing British citizens, he came to like “greatly, probably more than I should have, if truth be told”.

And for that old bigot Ian Paisley, who also bears a great responsibility for the Troubles, he had “a soft spot”. There’s a strong sense that the decent people of the centre rather bored him. New Labour were always rather amused and attracted by the smell of the cordite and, in Paisley’s case, brimstone.

Blair has lost interest in Northern Ireland now and in any case would prefer to avoid the truth that what has happened there is power-splitting, not power-sharing.

The system of government set up under the Good Friday Agreement precludes there being any opposition to the two big sectarian parties which, despite their rhetoric, are actively hostile to reconciliation or integration.

For Sinn Féin and the DUP, maintaining tribal antagonism is in their interests, and the SDLP, the UUP and the little parties, who want to bring Catholic and Protestant together, are virtually powerless.

Blair meant well, but as so often with him he made superficial short-term decisions which produced results he hadn’t sought. We have to hope he has learned from the unintended consequences still playing out in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.