On Leadership: why Tony Blair's new book has divided critics

Tony Blair at the Future Of Britain Conference, July 2024

Blair is 'truly myopic' when it comes to the threat of AI

(Image credit: Getty Images/Dan Kitwood/Staff)

published 6 September 2024

Tony Blair remains one of the UK's most divisive former prime ministers, and his latest book "Tony Blair on Leadership", his first since 2010's "A Journey", will continue to divide his harshest critics and most ardent supporters.

Written for those in your life that want to run a country, it is a "fascinating treatise on leadership", said former SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon in The Guardian. Blair has created something of a "handbook", a "practical guide to good governance". His advice is "sound", indeed "I found myself nodding along repeatedly" and wishing it had been available to me before I "entered high office".

However, much of his counselling lies under the "easier said than done" category and Blair fails to deal with the "myriad factors" that "conspire to throw a leader off course". He reveals himself to be "truly myopic" when it comes to the threat of AI and is something of a "fanboy when it comes to the Elon Musks of this world".

As for the subject that tainted Blair's time in government, the Iraq war, or "one of the most disastrous policy decisions in recent history", according to Eoin O'Malley in The Irish Independent, Blair goes further than ever before. He admits making a "fundamental miscalculation" about how easily the country could transition from "dictatorship to democracy" and concludes that people's anger is "understandable". Not quite a "mea culpa" but a change in tack, perhaps.

Has he mellowed in older age? Well, he writes like a "fortune cookie", said Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. In tough negotiations, leaders would do well, Blair suggests, to remember that "honey is better than vinegar unless you're tossing lettuce leaves for a salad". Indeed.

He throws in a few capped up phrases, too, to underline that something important is coming up, said Isabel Hardman on the i news site. "NEW TECHNOLOGY", for example. And he is keen on a motivational mantra such as the enthusiastic "Go to it!".

He seems to be more sympathetic to the plight of dictators and plutocrats these days, too. So much so, said Stanley in The Telegraph, that some will see this tome as evidence that Blair has become "dangerously amoral". He does plead the cause of those "reasonable and open-minded" leaders of non-democratic countries who don't hate democracy but instead call into question "its ability to take decisions and implement them". After all, what about China’s eradication of poverty? And Saudi Arabia's moves to reform? The book starts to feel "troublingly applicable to Kim Jong-Un".

On an equally controversial subject we are told that Boris and his staff got too hard a time over Partygate, which was "inevitable" because they were, in Blair's words, "mandated to work together".