Cherie who? On way to top, Tony Blair's closest companion was Gordon Brown.

i love this shit to pieces!

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 2, 2010; C01



Once, there was the oddest of couples.

Then they broke up.

Tony and Gordon. Blair and Brown. The bubbly one and the gruff one.

Much happened, and is still happening, in the life of Tony Blair -- he transformed Britain's Labor Party, befriended and went to war alongside two American presidents, massaged peace plans in the Middle East, graduated to political-afterlife rock star status. But one constant in Blair's extraordinary political adventure -- a source of inspiration and irritation, harmony and discord -- remained his high-stakes dancing and dueling with Brown, eventually his successor at No. 10 Downing Street.

Blair titled his memoirs, a sprawling 700-page tome released Wednesday in the United Kingdom and Thursday in the United States, "A Journey: My Political Life." But at times the work, which he clearly wrote himself, feels more like it should have been called "Gordon and Me: A Story of Political Love and Betrayal."

As young members of Parliament, Tony and Gordon became close friends and harbored big dreams. Their conversations animated Blair, making dialogue with others seem lacking.

"When others were present, we felt the pace and power diminish, until, a bit like lovers desperate to get to lovemaking but disturbed by old friends dropping round, we would try to bustle them out, steering them doorwards with a hearty slap on the back," Blair writes.

In an interview at his sumptuous suite in the St. Regis Hotel, a spread large enough to swallow a Dupont Circle apartment, Blair says he remains friends with Brown and speaks with him occasionally. He did not show Brown a copy of the book, which has set London atwitter over Blair describing Brown as "strange" and as having "zero" emotional intelligence.

"It was difficult because you wanted to be true to what you thought and true to what happened, but also fair to him," Blair says. Three years removed from his resignation as prime minister, Blair is a bit grayer, but looks trim and fit in a blue suit with a white shirt and no tie. He laughs easily, poking fun of himself as a "touchy-feely" politician, making small talk about my Panama hat -- "That's an English hat, isn't it? The kind Graham Greene wore" -- and pouring out coffee and cream for me.

Blair is in town for the Middle East peace talks, but out of office he's relaxed and breezy even about that sobering subject. "I am optimistic," says Blair, the special envoy for the Quartet of peacekeeping entities: the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union. "But whether this is my character or there is any objective reality that justifies this optimism, I couldn't say." Turning more serious, he says he wouldn't rule out military intervention if Iran develops a nuclear weapons program.

Political twins

Blair rose to prominence in British politics alongside Brown, who he says was once his "political twin." The two became central figures in British politics of the past decade and a half; their alliance and eventual split erupted in headlines, gossip and angst in the years before Blair's historic 1997 victory. When they met and became the closest of political allies in the 1980s, they were just young members of Parliament, slogging along in the opposition for a Labor Party mired in also-ran status. Blair, the buoyant, optimistic neophyte; Brown, the brooding, but brilliant, party stalwart.

Brown would become the heir apparent to lead the Labor Party and someday make a run for prime minister. He could dazzle Blair with his intellect. They used to travel to New York together and stayed at the swanky Carlyle Hotel, just "to get away and think," Blair writes. It was on one of those jaunts in late 1992 that Blair tried to articulate his vision for a New Labor Party, stressing the need to improve social conditions, but also taking a tough stance on crime. Brown, in a "streak of genius," crystallized his friend's thinking into a single sentence that became Blair's catchphrase: "You mean: 'Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,' " Blair recalls Brown telling him.

" 'Yes,' I said, stunned by the brilliance of it," Blair writes. Later, "when things became difficult, then fraught, and finally dangerous, the wrench was all the harder because the intimacy had been so real."

Blair crafted his own lines for the memoirs, writing longhand, he says, without the help of a ghostwriter. Sorry, movie conspiracists, no easy parallel here with Roman Polanski's potboiler "The Ghostwriter," in which a Tony Blair-ish Pierce Brosnan enlists a ghostwriter to finish his memoirs. One wonders if a pro might have steered Blair away from TMI moments, such as his musings about stomach upsets on the road: "I am very typically British," Blair writes. "I like to have time and comfort in the loo."

In the interview, Blair says he hasn't seen "The Ghostwriter," which is based on a Robert Harris novel, nor -- surprisingly enough -- the three films in which he is portrayed so memorably by Michael Sheen: "The Queen," "The Deal" and "The Special Relationship." In the interview, Blair says he once told Harris to "find someone else to write your stuff about." On trips to America, he experiences a kind of life mistaken for art, or Blair mistaken for Sheen, dynamic. "Constantly, when I'm in the States, people say, 'Oh, I did like you in that movie.' "

In real life, the made-for-the-big-screen Blair-Brown friendship came undone in cinematic fashion. In 1994, the Labor Party's leader, John Smith, died of a heart attack. It could have been Brown's moment -- Blair had often assured him that he was the chosen one. But in his memoirs, Blair acknowledges he had been "disingenuous" with his pal.

A "tortuous series of parlays" were set in motion as the men jockeyed for power and Blair "consciously exerted every last impulse of charm and affection, not just persuading but wooing."

They met secretly in friends' houses, hashing out their political futures. "We were like a couple who loved each other, arguing whose career should come first," Blair writes. In the interview, Blair laughs out loud about his choice of metaphor. "There's not some great story in that one, no!" he says, thoroughly enjoying himself. Now, he's playing along: "That's why it was a problem!" he says, laughing again.

Blair, who chides himself in the book for digressions, goes off on a doozy about a former girlfriend, whose family home provided refuge for one of the dealmaking talks. "You know the first person you ever fall in love with; you know that incredible outpouring of desire, the overwhelming sense of something unique, inexpressible, inexplicable and even at points incomprehensible, but so thrilling, uplifting, your heart pumping and soaring?"

At another meeting, Brown excused himself to use the bathroom, only to get stuck inside for 15 minutes, which he spent trying to call someone to rescue him. When he finally reached Blair, he got a tongue-in-cheek ultimatum: "Withdraw from the contest or I'm leaving you in there," Blair says.

Even after ascending to No. 10 Downing Street, Blair ignored the advice of his closest aides and kept Brown close -- "consciously and deliberately" allowing him to be "out there as a big beast" -- naming him to the second-ranking government post, chancellor of the exchequer.

He was a different kind of leader, one who would admit his predominant post-election emotion was "fear," affecting informality by asking people to call him Tony and his wife Cherie. Once, Cherie tried that with Princess Anne, who responded that she preferred to address her as "Mrs. Blair."

"At one level, it was stunningly rude and discordant in our democratic age," Blair writes, but he quickly pivots and adds, "at another, it shows an admirable determination not to be concordant with our democratic age but to tell that to clear off as well." Yet Blair, who praises his wife for her work on behalf of England, writes, "Cherie didn't always help herself . . . she had this incredible instinct for offending the powerful." It's a trait she maintains, Blair says, "still as she always is -- which is a very plain-spoken Liverpool girl, which is one of the reasons I love her."

There's not a great deal about Cherie in the memoirs, though; their matrimonial match gets an infinitesimal fraction of the space given to Blair's professional match with Brown. Asked about this, Blair -- quick and sure-footed on most subjects -- pauses, searching for the right words. "Well, it's a political book, I guess, about politics. . . . Should there be more of her?"

The Clinton connection

Four months after Blair took office, Princess Diana was killed in a car accident. He felt an affinity for her -- "We were both in our ways manipulative," but he perceived "a wildness in her emotions." He writes that "of course, I was as big a sucker for a beautiful princess as the next man; but I was wary too." And he thought her relationship with Dodi Fayed "was a problem."

Blair snipes at the queen's slow response to the death, saying her reticence "was all very by the book, but it took no account of the fact that the people couldn't give a damn about 'the book,' actually disliked 'the book,' in fact, thought 'the book' had in part produced the chain of events that led to Diana's death."

As he settled into office, Blair found other kindred spirits besides Brown. He bonded with President Bill Clinton, a political doppelganger who embodied the same "Third Way" progressive politics. Blair happened to be at the White House when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Before a joint press appearance, Rahm Emanuel -- President Obama's chief of staff who was then a top Clinton adviser -- told Blair, " 'Don't [expletive] it up,' " Blair writes.

Later that day, Blair was bustled into a small office to talk with Clinton and his wife, Hillary. "I didn't quite know what to say as the three of us sat there together," Blair writes. "Hillary just explained calmly and forcefully: This wasn't going to drive him out. . . . She was angry and hurt in equal amounts and large amounts -- that was clear -- but no way was she going to allow it to destroy what she, as well as he, had built."

Blair and Clinton went to war in Kosovo together, toppling the Milosevic regime, but it was not the war or the alliance with an American president that would come to define and ultimately undo Blair's hold on power.

Blair first visited with George W. Bush at Camp David in February 2001. He and Clinton had agreed on so much, while he and Bush agreed on so little.

On his last visit, he and Clinton had sat in the sunshine debating how the center-left could stay in power, "exactly the kind of stimulating, intellectual, conceptual conversation that Bill loved, and as ever I would learn constantly, adding my own analysis and always surprised and encouraged by how our thinking converged.

"This was not George at all. . . . George had immense simplicity in how he saw the world. Right or wrong, it led to decisive leadership." The two men came to like each other, so comfortable in each other's presence that, years later at a G-8 summit, Bush turned to Blair during a statement by one of the leaders in attendance and said, "Who is that guy?"

"He is the prime minister of Belgium," Blair replied.

When Bush grumbled that Belgium is not part of the G-8, Blair explained that the man was the president of Europe. " 'You got the Belgians running Europe?' He shook his head, now aghast at our stupidity," Blair writes. (Summits provide all sorts of hilarity for Blair, who recalls some guests trying to get "matey" with the Queen of England. "Now let me tell you something: you don't get matey with the Queen." He recalls a dinner with the queen when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi mercilessly teased French President Jacques Chirac for dissing English and Finnish cooking. Blair took no offense, but the Finnish prime minister later told Blair "solemnly" that it was a big deal in Finland. "I thought, blimey, get a life," Blair writes.)

In the invasion of Iraq, Blair was Bush's staunchest ally, a stance that was deeply unpopular in Britain. Blair "sounded almost messianic" about going to war," says George Foulkes, a war supporter and former second-ranking official in Britain's Department for International Development. The oft-repeated yarn about Blair praying with Bush about the Iraq war decision is simply not true, Blair says in the interview; in fact, he says, he's never prayed one-on-one with another world leader. But once, before becoming prime minister, a woman from the Salvation Army came to his office and, "to the absolute horror and consternation" of his staff ("not a very God-fearing" group), insisted that they all drop to their knees and pray together, Blair says. "They were horrified and I loved it."

Many Britons have clamored for a Blair apology or some expression of regret, but they get none in the book, which contains an exhaustive recounting of the same essential points he's been making for years to justify his decision -- on legal grounds because of Saddam Hussein's violation of U.N. sanctions and on moral grounds because of human rights abuses.

Blair, who writes of his pain at the loss of human life, acknowledges a host of mistakes, though. He "misunderstood the depth of the challenge"; the "costs, implications and challenges were greater than any of us could have grasped"; "we had not counted on the deep grip this extremism could exercise on the imagination"; and "we failed to foresee the nature of what would follow once Saddam was gone. . . . We did not anticipate the role of al-Qaeda or Iran."

"So: could we have had more troops sooner? Done more to build Iraqi forces faster? Make more effort to reach out to Sunni groups earlier? No doubt there were failings in all these areas."

The fallout from the Iraq war created an opening for Blair's old friend, Gordon Brown, and left an indelible mark on Blair's legacy. Stop the War Coalition, a group headed by Labor Party stalwart Tony Benn, recently urged Britons to boycott a Blair book signing because he is "a war criminal" and has "no right to be treated like a celebrity." Many students complained when Blair signed on to teach a course on faith and globalization at Yale University, said his co-teacher, Miroslav Volf, a professor in the divinity school. "I had a student come to me -- she was appalled," said Volf, who is teaching a course with Blair for the third year in a row and is authoring a book with him about faith and globalization. " 'What's next?' she said. 'Are you going to teach a class with Milosevic?' "

After the 2005 British elections, when Labor lost seats in Parliament, pressure began to grow on Blair to resign. Blair accuses Brown and his supporters of engineering "a coup." A flurry of officials resigned and "round robin" letters were issued by prominent party members calling for his resignation.

Blair tried to stay on, even pressing new policy initiatives. But he irked Brown. "He would say, 'You're doing this for your legacy, but not my interests.' "

Brown, Blair concluded, "is a strange guy . . . analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero."

Again, the old friends found themselves negotiating their political futures. They sat on the terrace of No. 10 Downing Street for what Blair describes as a conversation filled with threats and played out on two levels: spoken and unspoken.

Brown, Blair says, denied involvement in the letters calling for resignation. "Spoken (him): I know nothing of the details and have had no part in them. Unspoken: You have left me with no choice, I just don't trust you to go."

Blair wanted to stay in office until the next party conference. "Spoken (me): I will make it clear that this conference will be my last. Unspoken: Push me too hard and I will finger you for the coup."

Faring well

In those days, Blair could find some solace in a glass. "Stiff whiskey or G&T before dinner, couple of glasses of wine or even half a bottle with it," he writes of his daily routine. "So not excessively excessive . . . but I was aware it had become a prop." (He was simply trying to make a point about the dangers of overindulgence, Blair says in the interview, not confessing a drinking problem. This Lent, though, he gave up drinking at Cherie's urging, he confides. "It was interesting.")

In a memo Blair cites in his memoir, a Blair aide predicted that Brown would be "a weak -- if extended -- interlude between" Blair and Conservative Party leader David Cameron. Indeed, Brown became prime minister in June 2007 and was gone by May 2010 when Cameron ascended after a disastrous election for the Labor Party. Blair blames the loss on Brown's failure to embrace New Labor concepts.

By then, Blair was already well established as a jet-setting peacemaker, a religious foundation founder (working in an arena he says he's always had more passion for than politics), a highly paid speaker and international celebrity with a post-premiership mix of personal wealth and philanthropy not unlike the post-presidency mojo of his old friend, Bill Clinton. Critics pooh-pooh all the money Blair makes, but it's a jab that Blair tried to address in his memoirs by writing that "stories of me being dazzled by the wealthy are always ludicrously exaggerated." He also donated his book proceeds, reportedly in excess of $7 million, to the British Legion. In the interview, Blair declines to say how much he earns, but adds that "I'm very well paid for what I do."

His other old friend, Gordon Brown, retreated to Scotland to write about the economy -- presumably for much, much less money. Brown's last book, "The Change We Choose: Speeches 2007-2009," wallowed this week at 230,000 or so on Amazon U.K.'s bestseller list. Blair's memoir was No. 1.