Being Fair to Tony Blair by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, authors of Fantasy Island

Having written Fantasy Island, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson have one more thing to add...

Books have beginnings and endings, in terms of their production as much as of the narrative they contain. Our book, Fantasy Island is gone now, printed, packed into crates, despatched here and there, unalterable.

For most people, that will sound a statement of the blindingly obvious. But for both of us, who started our national journalistic careers on a wire service, it goes against the grain. There is no chance now to put right anything that is wrong. The process has the finality of the little red Royal Mail van disappearing down the lane on the last posting day before Christmas - if it isn't in there now, it is too late.

So, as the air is thick with commentary on Mr Blair's 'legacy', is there anything we would have put it or taken out?

Probably not, although perhaps we could have made just one final point more in favour of the outgoing Prime Minister.

That may sound odd, on the face of it. After all, the first full chapter of Fantasy Island is devoted to making the 'maximum' case for the Tony Blair years, in terms of economic stability, public investment, principled military action abroad and a general feel-good factor.

Furthermore, our starting point has always been that the Blair years will seem for quite some time to have been a whole lot rosier through the eyes of ordinary people than one may imagine from listening to grand personages in politics and the media.

But in this instance, we mean something quite different. It is to the so-called 'wasted opportunities' of which he stands accused that we refer, all those times he allegedly ought to have used his huge Parliamentary majorities to move decisively in one direction or the other: joining the Euro, 'reforming' the welfare state, introducing proportional representation for national elections, building a new generation of nuclear power stations, re-introducing the 11-plus...and so on.

But might there not have been something rather admirable about all this opportunity-wasting? After all, none of the aforementioned propositions was anything like universally popular. It was perhaps Mr Blair's genius to manage to keep these issues alive (as far as policy wonks, MPs, journalists and senior bureaucrats were concerned) while never allowing any of them to reach the point of decision.

Imagine the first 20 minutes or so of a classy Inspector Morse-type police drama, with all the scene setting, all the clues and all the red herrings: the shifty looking man on the edge of the crowd; the red car parked outside the country pub one minute and gone the next; the telephone call from a remote phone box; the angry voices from behind an office door.

Then imagine that, as the programme draws on, it becomes ever-clearer that they were all red herrings. There has been no crime. Nor is there going to be.

That kind of programme would go down rather badly, one suspects.

By contrast, Mr Blair has been, overall, remarkably popular. You could argue that only when his foreign affairs and military ambitions caused him actually to do something did he find himself in terrible trouble.

By Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, authors of Fantasy Island, ISBN 978-1845296056

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Comments

[Bruce]

I really enjoyed the analogy - I sometimes thought Blair's reign was like Midsomer Murders as it seemed to go on forever, there were a lot of adverts, everything appeared picturesque but a lot of people died and some of the evidence was beyond logic. What wasted opportunity do you think will haunt us the most for the next ten years or are there to many to mention?

[Themis]

RE: Opportunity-wasting. Surely a lack of action can be as dangerous as a wrong action? By sitting on the fence on these issues Blair, rather than trying to be popular, may have been trying his best to not be unpopular. You sometimes get the sense that he's been thinking about his legacy far, far longer than anyone else and that he has let this govern him.