Second paragraph of third chapter:

This is true of democratic leaders as well, but in a democracy it is harder to achieve results. A prime minister is not a president, let alone a prince. He cannot govern by himself, however good he is. He has no separate democratic legitimacy, and government in Britain is collective. The prime minister depends for his power on the support of the members of his party in Parliament, and at any moment they can get rid of him (although the Labour Party is notably more loyal than the Conservative Party and has never got rid of a leader in anger but always waited for them to resign even when the price of leaving them in place is disastrous electoral defeat).

This is a general memoir about the art of government under Tony Blair by Jonathan Powell, who was his chief of staff for the entire 1997-2007 period, and is now the National Security Adviser to Keir Starmer. It’s the second of three books about Powell’s time at the top, the first being about Northern Ireland and the third about war, especially Iraq, so those important subjects are downplayed here.

Powell takes one of Machiavelli’s aphorisms as the anchor point for each of the twelve chapters, but doesn’t let it constrain him; each of the chapters is a fairly disciplined musing of 18 to 36 pages on a particular aspect of governance and power. There is very little here about formal mechanisms of office, apart from the tactics of cabinet reshuffles; there is more about the architecture of Number Ten, and a lot – really a lot – about how awful Gordon Brown was. (For a redemptive take on Gordon Brown, listen to David Tennant’s podcast interview with him.)

Powell is of course defensive about the overall record of the Blair government, and writing just after the 2010 election he doesn’t see the disasters of Brexit and Boris Johnson coming down the road. This makes his admissions of error all the more interesting. One that I had completely forgotten, but that he comes back to several times, so it clearly was traumatic, was the disastrous speech made by Blair to the Women’s Institute in 2000. Part of the problem was that despite the efforts of his despairing staff, Blair was both undisciplined and micro-managing in the process of writing major speeches. Nine times or more out of ten, he got away with it, but on that day in Wembley, he didn’t.

One of the interesting chapters was on the role of spin and the media. It’s clear that no British government will ever undertake the necessary reforms of the media outlined by the Leveson Inquiry (which reported after this book was published). The major media are simply too powerful and politicians too scared of them. It would take a cross-party alliance between government and opposition, prepared to face down bullying and dirty tricks from unaccountable billionaires, and it’s just not going to happen.

One institution that Powell doesn’t have much time for is the monarchy. The Queen comes up twice, once in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, where Blair intervened to tell the clueless Royals what to do; and again when Blair and his team are invited to the royal barbecue in Balmoral – but Powell and his partner are shunted off the scene, because the Queen did not want an unmarried couple visibly present. It’s unusual and frankly refreshing to find a memoir from the top of the British government that treats the Royals with anything other than awe-struck deference. Again, this was published in 2010, with more than ten years of the Queen’s reign left to go. (One wonders what other monarchy stories Powell was persuaded to leave out.)

Anyway, this was a lot more interesting than I had expected, and I’ll look out for the other two books in the sequence. Meanwhile, you can get The New Machiavelli here.