Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader FROM THE PUBLISHER
In the spring of 2003, in the midst of the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush took special note to praise the leader who had most solidly supported him in his efforts to end the reign of Saddam Hussein. For many Americans, the contentious buildup to the war was indeed an opportunity to become acquainted with the politics and personality of a man who had already established himself as Europe's preeminent statesman. Now, in Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader, journalist Philip Stephens offers a full portrait of this charismatic and influential politician.
Philip Stephens - who has followed Blair's career for more than twenty years and has had dozens of meetings and interviews with him (including an interview especially for this book) - traces the prime minister's remarkable career from his middle-class upbringing and his discovery of religion at Oxford to his determination to bring the Labour party back into office in the face of the almost unassailable power of the Conservatives. Courage and conviction, combined with a ruthless grasp of political tradecraft (learned in part from Bill Clinton), have enabled Blair to transform the politics of his own country and project overseas a new internationalism for the twenty-first century. In Britain he has led the Labour Party to the most successful period in its one hundred-year history by refraining its ideology. Globally his politics of conviction have inspired his activism in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and the Middle East. Stephens presents a fair appraisal of Blair's strengths as well as his weaknesses - whether his overreliance on opinion polls or a sometimes exaggerated sense of his own persuasive powers - and describes the intensecontroversy surrounding the use of intelligence to bring Britain into the Iraq war.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
They are the obvious audience for Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader, a biography based on years of observation and on long interviews with its subject. There are plenty of other books about Blair, but Philip Stephens's is the first by a London political journalist specifically intended to explain him to Americans.
— Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Foreign Affairs
Stephens, a journalist and editor at the Financial Times, has covered the political career of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with a fine mix of shrewdness and admiration. This biography will not tell informed readers much that is new, but what is new is nonetheless significant. Stephens focuses, for instance, on the similarity in ideology and political techniques of Blair's New Labour and Bill Clinton's New Democrats: just as Clinton often infuriated "New Dealers," Blair sparked a "bonfire of Old Labour policies" with his "public-private partnership." Also worth noting is Stephens' insistence on Blair's complexity: a deep Christian conscience, a brilliant politician, a good family man, averse to confrontation yet capable of single-mindedness, a great "mimic and actor who could turn in an award-winning performance at scarcely a moment's notice."
The most interesting part of the book, however, is devoted to Blair's foreign policy. Stephens sees him as a pragmatic Europeanist, eager to be the hinge between the United States and the continent. He thus partnered with French President Jacques Chirac to promote a European security force but was driven by his transatlantic fervor to support Washington in Iraq, heeding Clinton's advice to make himself President George W. Bush's best friend — to "be the guy he turns to." Of course, Blair's influence over the Bush administration turned out to be very limited, but Stephens points out that Blair also believed that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was "the right thing to do." The war, Stephens asserts, "has united Tony Blair in all his different characters." The courage and eloquence that Stephens recognizes in Blair are undeniable; his limitlessself-confidence, however, has led to imprudence and embarrassment.
Library Journal
Interviews were conducted by this Financial Times editor as late as July 2003. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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