Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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allowing himself just the hint of a comment on this or that when it really

seems to matter.’ He consistently argued after the 1997 meltdown that

the Conservatives had to reconnect with and appeal again to ‘mainstream

voters’. Elections could not be won from the right if the centre were lost.

He regretted not having taken on the right-wing and violently Eurosceptic

groups in the party more forcefully when he was prime minister. He

warned Hague that moving further to the right spelled ‘ruin’, though his

advice was not heeded. He went along with the party line against joining

the single currency but argued that giving in to those Tories, including

Thatcher, who wanted to renegotiate the UK’s membership of the EU or

walk away from it altogether would be ‘madness’ and condemn the party

to long-term opposition. Hague ‘may have to make changes that will affront

previous generations of Conservatives’, he argued in 1999, ‘and as he does

so his predecessors must look on with tolerance and offer him the support

he needs.’ It took three successive election defeats and a lengthy period in

opposition before the party ﬁnally learned the necessary political lessons.

When Thatcher came out in support of Iain Duncan Smith’s bid for the

Tory leadership in 2001, Major made known his backing for Ken Clarke,

attacking Duncan Smith – a thorn in his government’s side over Europe

– as divisive and disloyal. At the same time he hit out at the ‘immense

damage’ he said Thatcher was doing to the party, pointing out the poor

economic legacy he had inherited from her as prime minister, and con-

demning her for inciting backbench rebels like Duncan Smith in the 1990s.

He did little publicly to support him during his tenure of the leadership

but, in 2003, Major said MPs plotting to oust the hapless Duncan Smith as

leader were damaging the party, though – after a vote of conﬁdence forced

him out – admitted the party was right to replace him. Major was a member

of the advisory panel of former leaders and senior ﬁgures (also including

Ken Clarke, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith) – dubbed the ‘council

of elders’ – that Michael Howard set up when he assumed the leadership to

demonstrate party unity.

In 2005 Major was sorry to see Ken Clarke knocked out of the Tory leader-

ship race, saying he would have made ‘a very ﬁne leader’ and prime minister.

While not disclosing his actual choice, he made enough comments about

the need for a ‘one nation’ and ‘centrist’ appeal to suggest he was sup-

porting David Cameron who became an MP only in 2001 just as Major

was leaving the Commons, rather than David Davis. He said the right-wing

of the party had had far too much inﬂuence, and described himself as

increasingly comfortable by the day with the party and the new direction

in which it was headed. Cameron was making the party more attractive

and electable, he believed, and he urged him not to water down his beliefs

to appease the Tory right. The right were ‘still singing songs from the 1980s’

and were out of date and out of touch, Major told Sky News in 2006;

Cameron needed to ‘push the right wing away’ in the same way that Tony

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Blair had dealt with the Labour left a decade earlier. Criticism from the

likes of Lord (Norman) Tebbit, Major argued, helped to show the electorate

the party really was changing. Cameron, he admitted, might be a little

to the right of his own position and a bit more ‘hawkish’ than he was, but

he did not have to agree with everything he did to be a strong supporter of

him. Noting that Cameron was better at handling the media than he had

been and was ‘a very attractive political package’, Major said in 2007 ‘I talk

to him and see him, I don’t impose myself on him.’

Major played the good party man by regularly turning his guns on

Labour, in the process defending his own record and achievements. He

has been a strong critic of New Labour’s obsession with spin – calling it

‘the pornography of politics’ – attacking the manipulation of government

information, the politicisation of the civil service and the undermining

of parliament. He accepted the hereditary principle was dead but called for

a more independent and more powerful, but not elected, upper chamber

to strengthen checks on the executive. Devolution to Scotland, introduced

for short-term Labour Party advantage, had brought with it political, con-

stitutional and ﬁnancial anomalies and problems, he insisted, and put the

future of the UK itself in danger. Labour was more ‘sleazy’ than the Tories

had been during his premiership, he claimed, arguing the problem under

Blair was ‘institutional’ and not just a matter of individual MPs’ behaviour

and was closer to the prime minister himself.

After Gordon Brown took

over in 2007, Major condemned his government’s proposals to hold terror-

ism suspects for 42 days without charge and warned against ‘an intrusive

state with authoritarian tendencies’. As the economic crisis hit, he said he

felt some ‘human sympathy’ for the embattled Brown but was quick to

accuse Labour of economic mismanagement and of squandering the golden

economic legacy the Conservatives had left them in 1997. He weighed in

too with nonpartisan elder statesman-type interventions, arguing in 2008–09

for external auditing of MPs expenses, for a reduction in the number of

ministers and for more outside talent to be brought into government, and

for a better deal for injured servicemen.

In November 2009 there was speculation that Major might return to

front-line politics if the Conservatives won the next election. Giving evid-

ence to the Commons Public Administration select committee, he referred

to his post-1997 career as a ‘sabbatical’ and, asked about going to the House

of Lords, replied: ‘I have never ruled that out’. The Daily Mail reported

that Tory leader David Cameron admired Major, and carried a story that

Major might resume his political career, perhaps by being offered a non-

departmental brief in a future Conservative government, with a coordinating

role. He would add strength and ballast to a Tory frontbench team light on

government experience after a long period spent in opposition.

There are

obvious historical precedents for former Conservative prime ministers

returning to ofﬁce in such a way.

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Major seemed to have made the transition from Number 10 to post-

prime ministerial life successfully. He cares about his legacy and about how

history will judge him, and has regrets about what he was not able to

achieve and about his mistakes and missed opportunities when in power.

But he has been forward-looking, unbitter and not dwelt too long upon the

past, and he has found many new activities to throw himself into and gain

satisfaction and reward from. His personal popularity has been high and he

has retained his famed decency and ‘ordinariness’. He has not been a div-

isive ﬁgure and has not evoked in his own party the sort of hostility his two

Tory predecessors generated in their post-premierships. He has been able to

command an audience and respect for his views. He has not hankered after

a return to Number 10, making it clear he did not wish to do it again, and

has got on with his life in a constructive fashion.

Tony Blair (left ofﬁce 27 June 2007)

Tony Blair was the most successful Labour prime minister when he stepped

down in 2007, having won three successive general elections (two with

landslide majorities) and clocked up 10 years and 56 days in Number 10.

He had become prime minister in 1997 just days before his 44th birthday,

and was only 54 when he left ofﬁce, as was John Major.

The voters had returned Blair to ofﬁce in 2005, with a majority reduced

to 66 seats. His personal approval rating had, however, plummeted: he had

last had a positive (+2) net satisfaction rating in April 2003 compared with

+12 in January 2002 and +60 when he was ﬁrst elected in 1997. When Blair

left ofﬁce, 60 per cent of voters said they were dissatisﬁed with the way he

was doing his job, with only 33 per cent saying they were satisﬁed, a net

rating of -27, the same as John Major’s at the end of his premiership, but

not as bad as Mrs Thatcher’s -46 at the end of her time in ofﬁce.

The two premiers in the previous century who had quit of their own

accord (Baldwin and Wilson) had been older and physically and mentally

in less good shape than Blair. There had been much wear and tear from his

decade in ofﬁce, but his only signiﬁcant health problem had been a rela-

tively minor heart scare, an irregular heart beat, in 2003 that had been

ﬁxed in an operation the following year. Twenty-four of Blair’s predecessors

in Number 10 had ﬁrst become prime minister at an older age than he was

when he left ofﬁce.

Blair’s party had not in a formal sense lost conﬁdence in him or forced

him out, in the way Thatcher had been overthrown. But he had faced con-

siderable and mounting pressure to step down, with Gordon Brown and his

supporters ﬁghting a war of attrition from an early stage and his wider pos-

ition in the parliamentary party much weakened after the Iraq war. Brown

believed they had an agreement that Blair would make way for him at

some point in the second term, expecting a 2004 handover. After the 2001

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election it was reported he thumped the table, shouting, ‘When are you

going to move off and give me a date?’ and ‘I want the job now!’ With his

frustration and resentment growing, he was demanding ‘when are you

going to f*** off?’ by 2004. Blair had never settled in his mind how long he

would serve, telling Alastair Campbell that two terms or eight years ‘was

about all you get in the modern world’ and ‘you have to know when to

go’, and in 2002 he considered announcing that he would not ﬁght the

next election. His friend Bill Clinton had advised him to go ‘when they’re

still asking for more’ and in particular ‘don’t go like Thatcher’. But his wife,

Cherie, who hated Brown, was strongly opposed to an early departure. Blair

‘wobbled’ in the spring of 2004 – demoralised, unwell, experiencing some

family worries, unpopular, facing criticism over Iraq and problems within

the Labour Party, and harassed by the Brownites – and came close to quit-

ting, but recovered his conﬁdence, zest and appetite for ofﬁce. There are

claims he would have left ofﬁce before the 2005 election had Brown played

along, either by supporting his public-sector reforms or by letting him take

the country into the Euro. Brown would not agree but equally, seemed ulti-

mately willing to wound but not kill, letting his supporters pile on the pres-

sure and destabilise Blair but ﬂinching from ﬁnally pulling the trigger

himself.

No previous British prime minister had ever pre-announced their depar-

ture in the way that Blair did when on 30 September 2004 he announced

in a TV broadcast he would ﬁght the next election and, if re-elected, serve

‘a full third term’ before stepping down before the election due in 2009

or 2010; he did not, however, specify a date for his departure. He hoped

this statement would not make him a lame duck. Though he started to lose

authority, he continued to push forward with a radical agenda. At the end,

he doubted whether he had done the right thing but felt the upheaval

could have been worse had he not signalled his intentions. The move did

not satisfy the Brownites, and their plotting continued, culminating in

the so-called ‘September coup’ in 2006, after which Blair bowed to the

inevitable and announced that that year’s party conference would be his

last, privately assuring a disbelieving Brown he would go in the summer of

2007. Pressure was put on Blair to depart in March 2007, before local,

Scottish and Welsh elections in May, but he held off announcing he would

resign until 10 May, stating he would leave ofﬁce on 27 June. Brown des-

perately wanted his endorsement, which Blair in the end gave after toying

about a possible rival, notably David Miliband, but recognising there

was no real alternative and, at some level, feeling that – despite all they

had gone though – he owed the succession to Brown and wanted him to

have it, as long as he would continue to support the New Labour pro-

ject. Brown was ‘crowned’ after he had sewn up the party and frightened

off serious rivals. The token left-wing challenger failed to secure sufﬁcient

nominations even to force a ballot.

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Seldon described Blair as leaving at ‘more or less the moment of his

choosing’. He had wanted to carry on into the third term as long as he could.

But a close aide told an interviewer in June 2007, ‘He’s been pushed out,

and it rankles.’ ‘I’m not saying I couldn’t have gone on for a couple of years

more, I could have’, Blair said. ‘But ten years is long enough.’ ‘Past a certain

point’, he mused, ‘it almost doesn’t matter whether you’re doing the right

thing or the wrong thing. People get tired and say, “Time to move on.”’

If he could have stayed on a year or so longer, he would have done so, is a

reasonable conclusion.

For some previous tenants of Number 10 leaving came as a shock and

sometimes at short notice, but Blair’s departure could be more carefully

planned. The purchase of a £3.6 million house in Connaught Square in

London in 2004 was a sign the Blairs were looking ahead to the time they

would leave Downing Street and would need somewhere to live – and

would need an income to pay a huge mortgage. At a mundane level, Cherie

Blair has said the family packing in 2007 ‘took months’, suggesting the

process started before the ofﬁcial announcement of his resignation date.

There are claims that Blair held a private dinner with Lord Browne, then

the chief executive of BP, only a month after he had been re-elected in

2005, at which he discussed life after Downing Street. In January 2006 Bill

Clinton admitted he had discussed Blair’s future with him and had told

him there was ‘a lot of good you can do in the world’ after leaving ofﬁce.

‘There was no set formula’, was Clinton’s advice. ‘But if I were you, I’d

organise a foundation and I’d do what you found rewarding and cared pas-

sionately about when you were in ofﬁce. Life is too short, but you’re going

to have so much fun and you can really love your wife.’ In 2006 there were

reports that Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, had been sounding out

the prospects for creating a Blair School of Government, to be based at the

LSE, as a British equivalent of Harvard’s Kennedy School and to provide a

platform for Blair, but the idea fell ﬂat. A memo – leaked, to Number 10’s

embarrassment, in September 2006 – showed Blair’s inner circle planning

he should bow out like a rock star, ‘with the crowds wanting more’ while

he ‘won’t even play that last encore’, and with a grid of media appearances

and visits drawn up for a sort of farewell tour. It was claimed Blair had not

seen the document but, as Seldon points out, ‘the staged manner of his

departure bore striking similarities to the leaked paper’.

Figures close to Blair – including Jonathan Powell, Baroness Sally Morgan

(his political secretary until 2005) and Liz Lloyd (deputy chief of staff),

together with Cherie Blair – were reported as informally discussing what

was to come after Downing Street for a year or more before Blair left ofﬁce.

‘What’s next is a very discreet part of the operation’, one senior source was

quoted as saying in January 2007. ‘People in Number 10 do not think that

it is appropriate for government time to be spent discussing the prime min-

ister’s personal plans. It’s so difﬁcult to talk about it without implying that

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what we are doing now is pointless. The conversations happen in spare

time.’ Blair, it was claimed, could not himself bear to talk about life after

Number 10 – ‘I’m not saying that as the time approaches, I won’t [make

plans]’, he told an interviewer in March 2007, ‘but you have to give this job

your all.’ There was a belief a prime minister had to convince right to the

end he still mattered in government and was working at full tilt, and not

do or say anything to suggest he was easing his foot off the gas. ‘You can’t

start agreeing to do jobs when you’re still doing the job you’re doing’, is

how he put it. Blair was also said to be ‘sensitive to the charge that he

should not use his ofﬁce to plot a potentially lucrative career’.

‘The one thing I couldn’t do’, Blair said shortly before he resigned, ‘is

potter around the garden or even just concentrate on making money.’ He

had said in a radio interview at the end of 2006 the most important thing

was to ﬁnd a meaningful role and do something after leaving the premier-

ship that had ‘a real purpose to it … a real life purpose’. The idea of a Blair

Foundation was central to the plans that were developed. As part of the

work of building it Martha Greene – a businesswoman and a family friend

and adviser who had helped with the purchase of the Connaught Square

house in 2004, putting together for them a ‘business plan’ and highlighting

Tony Blair’s long-term ‘prospects’ and arranging Cherie Blair’s foreign

lecture tours – registered the domain name www.blairfoundation.org in

November 2006. ‘Clinton is our role model’, admitted a close Blair adviser.

‘He remains a huge player on the international stage. Tony is still a big

hitter and will be for years to come. We are looking closely at how Clinton

did it.’ A globe-trotting role on the international stage appealed to Blair and

offered the advantage of cutting loose from the domestic political scene.

There are claims the Blairs thought about buying a house in the USA,

which would help get him out of the political way in Britain and ﬁt in with

plans to go on the US lecture circuit. He had started to think about a role in

the Middle East by the end of 2006 and talked to President George W. Bush

about it. By early 2007 championing development in Africa, climate-change

and the environment, and inter-faith issues, in addition to the Middle East

and the inevitable writing of the memoirs, were all being talked about as

part of the Blair post-Number 10 portfolio. The line at that stage was he

would stand down as the MP for Sedgeﬁeld at the next election and would

not go to the House of Lords, a chamber he was said always to have des-

pised. The Lords ‘is not my scene’ Blair was reported to have once said. Nor

had he ever been a ‘House of Commons man’, showing little affection for

or interest in the institution. It was impossible to imagine him as a back-

bencher again, and he would not need the platform. He wanted what Seldon

called an ‘action role’ after Number 10, or in Jackie Ashley’s words, ‘one

more epic role’.

Blair was the ﬁrst prime minister in modern times not to issue a resign-

ation honours list after he left Number 10. He had apparently accepted that

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any such list would – for the ﬁrst time – have had to be vetted by the inde-

pendent House of Lords Appointments Commission but, recognising it

would rake up the rows and controversy over the ‘cash for honours’ affair

and police inquiry, decided to duck the issue and avoid the likely ﬂak.

History would suggest the former prime minister is unlikely to see out

the remainder of his days as plain ‘Mr Blair’. A ﬁrm monarchist who greatly

admired the Queen and was very proper in his relations with the Royal

Family, Blair would be unlikely to have any hang-ups about accepting a top

honour. There has been some speculation he could be offered the Thistle,

because of his Scottish family roots, maliciously spun by some in the media

as a way for the Palace to snub him – but he would probably prefer the Garter

in line with most of the recent former PMs. Three new Knights of the Garter

were installed in 2008, and Palace sources were reported as saying it was

‘too early’ for Blair to be appointed.

Wilson received his KG within weeks

of quitting, but Thatcher had been ﬁve years out of Downing Street before

she got hers, and both Callaghan and Major had to wait eight years. If he

does become Sir Tony Blair KG, the media reaction to Cherie becoming ‘Lady

Blair’ should be predictably cruel.

Blair became the ﬁrst prime minister since Eden in 1957 to quit the

Commons immediately on leaving Number 10, triggering a by-election. He

cited the huge challenge of the new role he was immediately taking up as

the Quartet’s Middle East envoy, representing the UN, the EU, the USA and

Russia. Spending between a week and ten days each month on it, operating

from headquarters in a luxury hotel in Jerusalem, Blair insists he could

not have carried out the Middle East role and kept his seat. It is an unpaid

role, though the UN and others fund the costs, including the staff of

13 diplomats at his disposal. Although widely seen as a pro-Israel prime

minister, Blair was strongly committed to the Middle-East peace process in

ofﬁce, pressing George W. Bush and the US to play a more active part

in seeking a solution. Some commentators suggested he was driven by a

desire to make good after the controversial Iraq war, though his closeness

to the US and that war were negative factors, compromising his standing

in the eyes of many Palestinians and Arabs. What he brings to the role is

immense self-belief, devotion to the cause and a conviction that the Israel-

Palestine issue is fundamental to peace between the West and the world of

Islam, reﬂecting his broader faith agenda; knowledge of all the key players

and of the issues involved; and experience in successful conﬂict resolution

in Northern Ireland.

Though he has shown signs of wanting to play a wider role in terms

of ‘negotiating peace’, his terms of reference are limited to helping the

Palestinians revive and develop their economy, build their institutions and

prepare for statehood, and to address their security, law and order issues.

Even if there is a Middle East settlement, he will not be the crucial ﬁgure

brokering or reaching it. The argument is that improving the ‘reality on the

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ground’ will help create the context within which a peace settlement is

possible. Blair has had some successes, including lobbying world leaders

and co-chairing a conference to secure $7 billion in pledges of donors’ aid

for projects on the West Bank. On the other hand, big problems with Israeli

checkpoints and settlements, the deteriorating situation in Gaza, and a

stalled peace process mean he has had to admit (in June 2009) that, overall,

signiﬁcant progress has still not been made. Questions have been asked

about his commitment to the role, given the many other jobs and interests

he already has and additional ones he may take on in the future. His pre-

decessor resigned in frustration, and the job has the character of a sort of

diplomatic ‘mission impossible’. Blair rushed immediately into this job

after leaving Number 10 – perhaps, some critics thought, to ease the sting

of the loss of ofﬁce and because he wanted another ‘big cause’ – but he

has found no diplomatic envoy or broker, no matter how big a celebrity

and how charismatic – has the clout, scope and inﬂuence of a head of

government.

When Blair’s local constituency agent, John Burton, put the idea of writing

books to him, it apparently ‘went down like a lead balloon’. ‘He looked

at me’, said Burton, ‘and grimaced at the thought.’ However, the urge to

tell his version of events and the need to make money inevitably won

out, and in his ﬁnal days in ofﬁce, he corresponded with Sir Martin Gilbert,

Churchill’s biographer, about ideas for his memoirs. The publishing

deal signed with Random House in October 2007 was worth a reported

£4.6 million. Some close associates questioned his ability and willingness to

apply himself to the task – ‘he is a talker not a writer’, said one – and

in February 2009 it was reported he had written only four chapters. His

problem was he did not want to undermine Gordon Brown while he was

still in ofﬁce, promising to be ‘frank but not disloyal’. He was said to

be unenthusiastic about Cherie’s decision to publish her own memoirs in

2008 (reported as making her £1 million), concerned about the possible

political fallout from accounts of the Blair-Brown feud, and for the same

reason intervening with Alastair Campbell, his former press secretary, to

tone down his diaries, published in July 2007. He has said he will not

publish his own book while Brown is still in power, but he is believed to be

hoping to have it ready before the next election, when it will appear if the

Conservatives win. Campbell has promised to publish his diaries in full one

day, and it may well be they will provide a more revealing and riveting

account of the Blair era than his master’s own tome.

In ofﬁce Blair had identiﬁed climate change and Africa (aid and develop-

ment) as big long-term issues that politicians had a moral obligation to

address, and had pushed hard on both with the Americans and the G8.

It became fairly easy for journalists to write stories about his ‘one-man

mission to save the planet’ as he continued with this agenda after leaving

Number 10. He worked with a team of international experts backed by the

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Climate Change Group to prepare a report (published in July 2009) with a

plan for big cuts in carbon emissions and investment in new technologies.

‘One thing Blair does have is fantastic contacts and access – way above

most other people you could imagine’, one environmental campaigner said.

‘It’s really helpful to get climate change into the ofﬁces of world leaders.

This is where the difference will really be made.’ ‘The experts are providing

technical knowledge and specialist insights’, Blair has explained, ‘but what

I am trying to do is guide it politically.’ He has been active as an inter-

national evangelist and advocate on the issue in meetings with leaders

as he travels around the world.

The Africa Governance Initiative forms

another strand of his and his ofﬁce’s work, with Blair himself visiting and

acting as an unpaid adviser to the Rwandan government and to the govern-

ment of Sierra Leone, and project teams dispatched to both countries, with

ambitious aims to help build governance and public-policy capacity, attract

investment and encourage economic and private-sector development, and

work on poverty reduction. Meanwhile, at home, in his own former polit-

ical backyard – the North East of England – Blair, a big sports fan, has estab-

lished a Sports Foundation, based in his old constituency home, aiming to

encourage more children to participate in sport and boost local grassroots

sport by training more coaches.

Peter Mandelson once famously said about New Labour that ‘we are

intensely relaxed about people getting ﬁlthy rich’. Critics argued that in ofﬁce

Blair was much too impressed by money and the glamour of the wealthy,

something he denied, saying ‘if I was desperate to make money I would have

done something else’. Cherie Blair seemed more anxious about money and

material security, and she was quoted as saying in 2007, ‘Now is the time for

us to go and make some money.’ Blair was soon on course to become a multi-

millionaire out of ofﬁce. Leaving parliament meant he did not have to make

details of his earnings public in the Register of Members’ Interests. There were

large outgoings to fund, with the Blairs amassing six properties, including

their £3.6 million house in Mayfair, an adjoining £800,000 house bought to

form a more secure complex, a £5.7 million small stately home in the country

near to Chequers, and a £500,000 Islington ﬂat reportedly bought for their

eldest son. In addition, Blair moved his headquarters in 2008 – employing a

total of 25 staff – to a building in Grosvenor Square, where he has a ten-year

lease costing £550,000 a year.

Signing up with the Washington Speakers Bureau Blair made more money

in his ﬁrst full week on the North American lecture circuit in October 2007

– £300,000 for four lectures – than in an entire year as prime minister. In

November 2007 he was paid a fee of £237,000 for a speech at a banquet

organised by a Chinese property company. A speech to 2000 entrepreneurs

in Barcelona in 2008 earned him a reported £240,000. By 2009 he was

being described as the world’s best-paid speaker, able to pull in more than

half a million pounds a month, and earning £400,000 for two half-hour

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speeches in the Philippines in March of that year (his topic was ‘The Leader

as a Nation Builder in a Time of Globalisation’). Some have questioned

whether his audiences get value for money. Critics of his China speech

said it sounded ‘just like the report of any Chinese county level ofﬁcial’,

containing ‘no novelty’ and ‘full of pleasantries, clichés and platitudes’.

Previous Labour prime ministers had largely avoided collecting lucrative

directorships or business appointments in the private sector. Speculation

and rumours that Blair might join BP or the board of Rupert Murdoch’s

News International corporation proved groundless. He is believed to have

turned down approaches from HSBC and Citigroup. Instead in January 2008

he joined one of Wall Street’s best-known banks, JP Morgan, with a brief to

provide political and strategic advice and participate in some client events,

reportedly earning around £2 million a year for the part-time role. Later

that month he took a second job – for at least £500,000 a year – as an adviser

to the Swiss insurance ﬁrm, Zurich, to assist it on ‘developments and trends

in the international political environment’, particularly in relation to climate

change. The Advisory Committee on Business Interests, which vets the pro-

posed jobs of former ministers, approved both appointments, stipulating

that for one year after leaving ofﬁce the former PM should not be per-

sonally involved in lobbying government ministers or ofﬁcials on behalf

of his new employers or their clients. It also said he should not ‘draw on

privileged information that was available to him as prime minister’ in his

speaking engagements.

Blair’s claim he had ‘always been interested in commerce’ was met with

some disbelief. He was by background a lawyer without any corporate experi-

ence and had left economic issues largely to Gordon Brown. He would not

be seeking contracts, close sources indicated, ‘but will exchange advice and

opinions only at very senior levels’. Critical MPs called the appointments

‘shameless’ and ‘tawdry’. ‘What does he know about banking anyway?’

protested one Labour MP. ‘What use is he to JP Morgan other than a face

and a mouth.’ That was exactly the point. JP Morgan’s chief executive said

‘there are only a handful of people in the world who have the knowledge

and relationships that he has’. What these companies are paying for are

his glamour and celebrity, international contacts, and ability to open polit-

ical doors and secure top-level access around the world, not his business

acumen.

In February 2009 ‘Tony Blair Associates’ was set up (with the approval

of the Business Interests watchdog committee) to ‘allow him to provide, in

partnership with others, strategic advice on a commercial and pro bono

basis, on political and economic trends and government reform’. The media

reported it critically as ‘the ﬁrst time a former prime minister has set up

a commercial venture with the apparent intention of cashing in on time

spent in ofﬁce’. Blair’s spokesman explained it was to organise better the

management of his time and multifarious activities. It was noted that, if

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston