© Blair Gable/ReutersTony Blair: 'He's always been a freewheeler,' says Labour party historian Ross McKibbin.
Friend of the Murdochs, adviser to authoritarian regimes and associate of the super-rich - the former prime minister's reputation is on a downward spiral. And each new revelation manages to be more jaw-dropping than the lastIn Tony Blair's uneven but occasionally startling autobiography,
A Journey, published in 2010, there is a chapter that makes particularly interesting reading now. It covers his final, slightly besieged years as prime minister, from mid-2005 to mid-2007. "In this time," writes Blair, "I was trying to wear ... a kind of psychological armour which the arrows simply bounced off, and to achieve a kind of weightlessness that allowed me, somehow, to float above the demonic rabble tearing at my limbs. There was courage in [this behaviour] and I look back at it now with pride," he concludes. "I was ... not unafraid exactly, but near to being reckless about my own political safety."
© Fiona Hanson/Press AssociationRebekah Brooks jokes with Tony Blair, 2004.
The chapter's title is "Toughing It Out". Last week, during the phone-hacking trial of Rebekah Brooks,
an email from the former News of the World editor emerged, sent the day after the disgraced rightwing tabloid was shut down in 2011 and six days before she was arrested. To her then boss, James Murdoch, Brooks wrote: "I had an hour on the phone to Tony Blair. He said ... Keep strong ... It will pass. Tough up. He is available for you, KRM [Rupert Murdoch] and me as an unofficial adviser but needs to be between us."
As Labour leader and prime minister, one of Blair's defining characteristics was his readiness - canny or disgraceful, according to political taste - to make accommodations with powerful rightwing interest groups, not least the Murdoch press. The Brooks email, the latest in a succession of sometimes jaw-dropping revelations about Blair's behaviour since he abruptly left Westminster politics seven years ago, suggested that his ease with the left's traditional enemies had in fact deepened: into an instinctive feeling that he and they were on the same side.
With his salesman's smile and large self-belief, his ex-barrister's ability to accept and argue not necessarily compatible things, Blair has always been a slippery and restless public figure. "He's kind of a freewheeler, and always was," says the historian of the Labour party Ross McKibbin. "Being a freewheeler did him well, initially." Yet since Downing Street, Blair's "journey", already often controversial, has taken him into ever more contentious territories.
Comment: Who needs external enemies when you have such guys as your leaders.
'I dare you take my gun!' AK-47-toting Ukraine far-right leader tells officials