Given recent events surrounding the Epstein scandal, Tony Blair couldn’t have received worse timing for a shiny new documentary series about his life and career. Not least because one of the contributors is Peter Mandelson, who has glowing praise for his former political boss. That assumes Blair’s main aim in sitting down to be interrogated by director Michael Waldman for a three-part Channel 4 series was to win over his critics and secure his legacy.
In agreeing to The Tony Blair Story, the former prime minister presumably had in mind Waldman’s astonishing 2024 BBC series The Zelensky Story, with its deeply moving profile interview with Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife, Olena. Writing for The i Paper at the time, Waldman said that it was “the most unguarded interview I have ever done with a public figure”.
It’s unlikely that he will be feeling the same about his new interviewee. Or as Blair himself puts it, in a comment that smacks of New Labour control-freakery: “If you’re giving an interview, you must be pretty disciplined.” He then goes on to tell Waldman, “I’ve been relatively frank with you most of the time”.
So when exactly isn’t Blair being candid? When talking about his dealings with Gordon Brown (the most glaringly absent contributor to the series), or the Iraq War? That’s for him to know.
Documentary maker Michael Waldman with Blair. The first of three episodes is titled ‘Who Are You?’ (Photo: 72 Films)The opening episode is titled “Who Are You?”, as Waldman attempts to winkle open his subject’s well-protected carapace with a look at the tragedies that marked his youth: his father’s life-changing stroke, his mother’s death from cancer while Blair studied law at Oxford, and the contemporaneous suicide of his best friend, Euan (Blair’s eldest son is named after him).
How did these events make him feel, asks Waldman? “I don’t spend a lot of time psychoanalysing myself,” Blair replies. Right, okay…
Perhaps we should look to his boarding school, Fettes College in Edinburgh. The programme doesn’t refer to the recent Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry that castigated Fettes for failing to protect pupils from sexual and physical abuse, although Blair’s contemporary, Nick Ryden, describes the repeated beatings. “The school teaches you to survive,” summarises Blair. Ryden is more forthright. “It knocks a lot of emotion out of you,” he says. “It’s a bad thing to show emotion when you’re at these schools.”
That conflict is writ large on Blair’s face as he attempts to answer Waldman’s more personal questions, that famous Cheshire Cat smile feeling like a defence mechanism. It’s left to others to fill in the gaps, as the series follows Blair’s rise and fall and partial rise again as a roving freelance diplomat.
Cherie Blair comes across like a spousal driving force (Photo: 72 Films)Cherie Blair is as supportive as you might expect. But unlike Olena Zelensky, who admitted to hoping her husband wouldn’t win the Ukrainian presidential election, Cherie comes across like a spousal driving force (as an aside, she also admits that Tony has never once bought her flowers).
Other contributors range from former colleagues Alastair Campbell and Anji Hunter to erstwhile friends (the novelist Robert Harris) and less sympathetic observers like Clare Short and Jeremy Corbyn.
As a comprehensive history of this remarkably successful election winner, The Tony Blair Story works well, but as a revealing portrait of the man himself, it is undeniably frustrating.
Perhaps Blair finds introspection too painful, or he has no time to stop and think. For as he says of the lesson he learnt from the early death of his mother, “If you’ve got something to do, you had better get on and do it”. Maybe given another 20 years to mellow and fulfil whatever destiny he envisages for himself, we’ll get a more thoughtful self-analysis. I somehow doubt it, however.
‘The Tony Blair Story’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on Channel 4
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