Michael Cockerell: Blair and his legacy

Michael Cockerell talked to the PM's closest allies to build a picture of what he really wants to be remembered for

Published: 06 March 2007

One thing that struck me from the very first day that I filmed Tony Blair as Prime Minister was his abiding concern about his place in history. There were often public clues to this. For instance, when he went to Belfast on the eve of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, he famously said: "This is not the time for sound bites - I feel the hand of history on my shoulder." Some time later a leaked email from his polling adviser Philip (now Lord) Gould was headed: Getting the Right Place in History and Not the Wrong One."

And Lance Price, who worked as Alastair Campbell's deputy for most of the first term, told me: "It seems ridiculous now, looking back, but even then, in the early years of the Blair government we were talking about legacy issues and legacy items. I can remember a discussion with David Miliband - now in the Cabinet, who was then head of the policy unit at No 10 - talking about what symbols we could have that would be part of Tony Blair's legacy, and one of those was to be the Millennium Dome."

So, 10 years on, what is Blair's legacy and what will be his place in history? For my TV series I have spent much of the last year talking to those who have worked most closely with him. I asked each of them what they thought history would make of Tony Blair.

John Prescott, for 10 years Blair's loyal Deputy Prime Minister, says: "I think Tony Blair, as the leader who led us into three election victories, is unprecedented and I think history will treat him well."

Matthew Taylor, who was Blair's senior strategy adviser inside No 10 for three years until last December, says: "The reality is that a number of factors conspire to mean that Tony Blair won't leave office in the sort of positive way that he arguably should do. I think Iraq is part of that. I think the cash-for-honours allegations are part of that. But there's no question in my mind that Britain is a more confident and a better, stronger, country now than it was 10 years ago - and that's ultimately, isn't it, how he'll be judged."

Not so, says the former development secretary Clare Short. "I think Tony's place in history is Iraq and the deceit and the desperate mess and it's sad. It's going to be a very bad place in history."

Unsurprisingly, Peter Mandelson, who admitted he had twice been on the receiving end of Tony Blair's "steeliness" when forced to resign from the Cabinet, had a very different take. "I think Tony Blair will go down in history as a formidable politician and prime minister: as the most successful election winner that we've known in British politics.

"And as the man who has taken the party and the country in a modern social democratic direction - and I don't see that direction being seriously contested, either from the right or the left now. And Tony Blair's success will be in making it permanent - not just a fleeting 10-year moment in British history and politics."

Sir Max Hastings, who as editor of the Evening Standard advised his readers to vote Labour in 1997 and would see Blair regularly in his early years, has a much bleaker verdict. "I think that in many ways history will judge Tony Blair's premiership as a tragedy, because if he was a man of no substance, if he was a fool, if he was an inadequate - as John Major was - then you shrug your shoulders and you say, 'So what?' But Blair was and is a man of the highest gifts whose premiership started with the highest hopes and many of us are not ashamed to admit that we shared those hopes and we shared those expectations.

"And yet it all foundered for two reasons: one, the failure to deliver on the rhetoric on domestic issues. And second, the reality that there will only be one legacy - Iraq. It's impossible for it to be anything else."

Blair's first two cabinet secretaries, Lord (Robin) Butler and Lord (Richard) Wilson had an unparalleled view of the Prime Minister in daily action. But discretion is like the calcium in the bones of the Sir Humphreys - even after they've left office. Butler's answer to the question how history will judge Tony Blair was in perfect Mandarin: "That will be for history to decide." After attempting to shelter behind the same formulation, Lord Wilson was more forthcoming: some of the early constitutional changes - like devolution to Scotland and Wales, and the abolition of hereditary peers - would be "of lasting importance", he said. "And perhaps above all the creation of himself and his own interpretation of the role as Prime Minister will be something that people will analyse with endless interest". Meaning what? "I'm not going to say anymore."

Jack Straw, former foreign secretary, and now Leader of the House of Commons, was more forthcoming. "Oh, history will make a lot of Tony Blair. If he'd only done one thing in the last 10 years, and it was the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, he would have earned his place in history.

"But he did much more than that and I think history will say he was a great prime minister, an extraordinary leader - controversial, but overall a force for good. Just think how the country is in a different place, in its head, today compared to 10 years ago. And we'd had a whole post-war period of being in relative decline, and us thinking that we were always going to be slipping back. He's turned that round. That's not a bad legacy for him."

Robert Harris, author and political columnist, is a close friend of Peter Mandelson and a former intimate of Tony Blair. He struck a poignant note. "I do think his time in office is a tragedy; because Blair was of my generation and this was our shot, if you like. I won't say that we've messed it up, but that it perhaps hasn't lived up to all the expectations of that rosy-fingered dawn of 1 May 1997."

Lord (Philip) Gould, the focus-group king and private pollster to the Prime Minister, has no such reservations. "I'm confident that history will see Tony Blair as one of the huge prime ministers of our time, because of his extraordinary strength and capacity to change the weather. He will always stand out as one of the great and most interesting politicians that we've ever had. But the debate on him will never close."

Ken Livingstone, once Blair's bête rouge, but who now has a close working relationship with the Prime Minister, came up with one of the most interesting answers of all to my question: "The biggest critic of Tony Blair's administration in terms of retrospectives will be Tony Blair himself. Only he knows what he wanted to achieve, and he, more than anyone else, is able to judge what he did against what he hoped. And I suspect Tony Blair will be his harshest critic, much more than you're going to be."

The final part of Michael Cockerell's series, Blair: the Inside Story is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm.