Not Having The Courage

Et tu? You have to read to the end, but the only old Blairite who can bear to say anything about this, John Rentoul, writes:

Tony Blair’s post-prime ministerial career is different. Other prime ministers often stayed in parliament, usually the House of Lords (although Ted Heath stayed in the Commons for 27 years). Most of them engaged in charitable work. Some of them acquired a few directorships.

One, Alec Douglas-Home, continued to wield power in government, serving as foreign secretary in Heath’s government. But none has sought to create a power structure for themselves, independent of government, in the way that Blair has done with his Institute for Global Change.

Attention has focused on it recently, because the institute organised a “Future of Britain” conference last month, at which Blair appeared to anoint Keir Starmer a worthy successor. Blair said that the resources of his institute would be at the disposal of the Labour Party as it prepares for government, and indeed in government if elected.

That is no more than what he has always said: that the work of his institute is available to any governments and oppositions around the world that want to take it up. But it is given more force not just because it is a slow news day in August, but because Labour does increasingly seem likely to form the next government, and the ties of ideology and personnel suggest that Blair’s institute will be influential. Indeed, it is widely assumed that, if Starmer does move into No 10, large numbers of the staff of Blair’s institute will follow him.

After a long period in which “Blair rage” obliterated the former prime minister’s reputation, and his activities since leaving office were characterised as simply making money from dictators, The Man is back and is generally considered to have useful things to say.

Brexit was a large part of his rehabilitation, as he could make the Remainer case more persuasively than anyone, and continued to do so even as much of the losing side in the referendum lost its way in the People’s Vote campaign for another one.

At the same time, Blair’s institute built its reputation for high quality, timely policy work – mostly unideological (“what matters is what works”) although with some familiar themes such as an optimistic enthusiasm for technology, and some familiar policies such as identity databases.

The institute scored a stunning success during the pandemic with its call for “first doses to many” of the Covid-19 vaccine, which helped accelerate supply and coverage. It does a lot of valuable work on climate change – to which Blair drew attention when he said in an interview with Andrew Marr that net zero was more about what other countries did than Britain’s contribution.

So it is not surprising that there is a new wave of interest in Blair and all his works. What is he up to? Does his institute do good or bad? Who funds it? In answering this last question, The Times has looked up the institute’s accounts and noted that Larry Ellison, the US tech billionaire, has given large sums since 2018. Ellison is one of several big donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Blavatnik Family Foundation (which also funds the school of government at Oxford university) and the US Agency for International Development.

Ellison is interesting, though, because he bought the electronic health records company Cerner last year for $30bn. Ellison’s ambition is for it to provide digital health records for every American – and indeed for the citizens of every country in the world. This intersects with Blair’s policy obsessions; his institute has been working on setting up digital ID systems, particularly for vaccine records, in Rwanda, Ghana and Senegal.

As Tom McTague says, in a profile of Blair’s institute for UnHerd, some of its work in developing countries has been criticised, because the institute has become a “McKinsey for world leaders” — a global management consultancy that advises prime ministers and presidents, “based on personal relationships with Blair himself”. This raises questions of transparency and accountability.

McTague quotes an advertisement for a job with the institute in eastern Europe to “lead a TBI team embedded in country at the highest level of government”, expected to “suggest and convince your counterpart” at prime ministerial or presidential level. He asks: “What would be the reaction if this was the other way round: if, say, the Clinton Foundation advertised for a team of people to be embedded in the British government or simply to ‘suggest and convince’ the British prime minister to follow their advice?”

All the same, there seems to be demand for the institute’s services. It is huge. It had a turnover of $81m in 2021, and now employs 800 people around the world.

I never thought that Blair was interested in money for himself. He has always been interested in power, and he needs to raise the money to make use of his networks and his political skills. He has more than enough money for himself, with his house in London, his house in the country and his prime-ministerial lifestyle. His son Euan, whose apprenticeships company Multiverse was valued at $1.7bn last year, has even more. Blair senior does not draw a salary from the institute: all the money it raises is ploughed back into advisory work for governments around the world and policy work in the UK.

So what motivates him, at the age of 70, to work so hard, as if he still had a country – or a world – to run? McTague writes: “The more I studied him, the more I wondered whether his biggest frailty of all is simply the desire to remain relevant – the frailty that JD Salinger once described as, ‘not having the courage to be an absolute nobody’.”