Tony Blair's real-time court history.
It is the morning of March 25, 2003, and Tony Blair is preparing for a press conference over breakfast with his top advisors. American forces are 60 miles from Baghdad; British artillery is pounding Basra. Pictures of civilian dead have begun to hit the airwaves, and Blair's spin whiz Alastair Campbell is urging his boss to "get out the humanitarian stuff, the UN stuff."
Then, according to Stothard: "Tony Blair tries to move his mind away from grim thoughts of bombed city streets?
"Tony Blair picks up a piece of paper from his desk. 'Do you know that 400,000 children have died in southern and central Iraq of avoidable diseases?' He starts to write on his script. 'I've been asking for these numbers for ages,' he says, with another severe look at [Private Secretary] Rycroft."
And here the tea hit the page. If you believe Blair really said this, imagine the scene's U.S. equivalent: "Dick Cheney picks up a newspaper, reads it thoughtfully, then exclaims, 'My God, Ari! Did you know that billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere each year? Get me the president!'"
More than 13 years into the most famously destructive sanctions in history, Stothard expects us to believe that Tony Blair had no knowledge of mortality numbers so ubiquitous in protest circles and U.N. reports that they have practically been drained of their meaning. And when finally confronted with the statistic, it isn't the fact of 400,000 innocent deaths that upsets the prime minister, but rather the ineptitude of Her Majesty's bureaucrats.
This pathetic stab at exonerating Blair of knowledge of the human toll of the sanctions is part of Stothard's larger effort to paint a portrait of Blair the Christian moralist and highly principled strategist. It backfires, and leaves the author wide-eyed in blackface, his hair smoking, his credibility in shards. Here this already-suspect piece of access journalism stops, spins and dies, like Pac-Man running into a ghost.
Stothard, who edits the Times Literary Supplement, spent the month of March 10 to April 9 with Tony Blair and his inner circle?"in places where writers never are" (except when they are allowed to be there). The book is a diary of Stothard's stint with Blair in London and at the various war summits, most of the time clocked during an endless string of inner-circle pow-wows at 10 Downing Street. Tony Blair scrunches up his eyebrows a lot and signs a lot of Whiskey bottles for Labourites around the Kingdom. His aides scurry about and attempt wry humor about the French. Many cold sandwiches are consumed; much BBC is watched and cursed.
The book's tedium is relieved occasionally by Stothard's honest throwaway observations, such as when Alastair Campbell tries to get Blair pepped to start jogging, telling him with a straight face, "anything Bush can do, you can do." Or the priceless image of those consummate New Europeans, the Poles, standing around at Downing Street and jabbering about "how good their special forces look in desert kit and what grade of visitor is allowed to use the Number Ten 'Ambassadors' entrance."
Stothard's prime minister?always referred to as "Tony Blair"?is a resolute, colorless figure, a religious man who likely prayed to Jesus with George Bush in private. Most important, Stothard's Tony Blair is a man who fully believes that the war against Hussein is a just one and that History?at the moment very much kicking his ass?will one day absolve him.
At the outset Stothard lays out the stakes of Blair's joining the American war on Iraq: Either Blair will be judged a "wise Winston Churchill or a rash Anthony Eden." Stothard does not point out that both men were equally cold-blooded imperialists in the Middle East. Nor does he for a moment doubt that Tony Blair really believes his own high-minded rhetoric. But as the post-war situation in Iraq (and London) festers, a pretty good argument can be made that motives no longer matter anyway. Tony Blair may in fact be a midlife reincarnation of Mother Teresa, but he staked everything on Bush's war, and unless Iraq shapes up soon or Tony Blair pulls a Houdini, these Thirty Days will go down as the biggest mistakes of his political life.