A Journey: My Political Life by Tony Blair

(Knopf, 700 pages, $35)

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, still has many fans on these shores, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. Even as protesters in London were forcing him to cancel book-promotion events, his new memoir secured a high perch on U.S. best-seller lists. “Long stretches of it are likely to be terra incognita to most Americans,” said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. But A Journey has at least one appealing trait: Blair actually wrote the book himself. That makes it “unique among the English-speaking world’s recent political biographies.”

The reason for the protests—and the reason many people will want to read the memoir—is that Blair helped launch the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said Peter Stothard in the London Sunday Times. Yet on this topic he offers nothing new. When Blair describes his ally, former President George W. Bush, as having been both “very smart” and of having “immense simplicity in how he saw the world,” the sentiments will be of interest “only to collectors of narrative contradiction.” A more telling disconnect gradually emerges, though. Blair’s zeal for sharing insignificant details about his private life indicates how desperately he wants to be seen as a “normal sort of guy.” But a normal guy who had a hand in creating so much destruction would apologize to those affected—even if he believed, as Blair does, that the invasion was justified.

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“The whole story is sad,” said John Lanchester in The New Yorker. Blair was a politician of immense talent, but he ended up being hustled out of office. Ironically, this was not because he’d shown an excess of hubris on the world stage, but because he ducked a critical parochial battle. A Journey makes clear that Blair long despised the man who would become his successor, Gordon Brown. Yet when he had the chance to fire Brown from his Cabinet, in 2003, he didn’t. It “was an act of cowardice,” Blair admits. The decision needlessly shortened Blair’s run as his party’s flag-bearer, and ended his chance to achieve redemption in the final chapter of his political career.