Tony Blair shares his leadership tips and almost admits the Iraq War was a mistake

Blair has written a book that tries to get you from being a leader, a placeholder, to being a Leader, someone who makes a difference. It is a manual of lessons that he would have liked to have been given when he took office. It is designed to help leaders escape the feeling of powerlessness that many have, and to actually achieve something.

Few political leaders engender quite as much admiration and vitriol as Tony Blair. Clearly one of the most talented communicators of his generation, he was Obama before Obama. Like Obama, Blair came to power on a wave of hope and without any experience of executive office. Unlike Obama, who never really got beyond governing by vibes, Blair took governing and delivery of policy outcomes seriously.

In many ways, his governments were successful, not least on Northern Ireland, to which he devoted considerable energy. But he was also successful on many metrics in big items such as health and education.

Since he left office in 2007, Blair has been at the forefront of helping leaders achieve their goals — and this book is a product of that experience.

Much of his advice can be summarised by his alliterative four Ps: priorities, policy, people and performance management.

For priorities, he can see that governments only have the bandwidth to do a small number of things, and so trying to do everything will lead to nothing being done. An effective leader will pick a handful of achievable aims to focus on.

That means carving out your day for work. He advises political leaders to avoid going to ceremonies or anything that has much protocol. You can’t avoid it all; that would be a political mistake. Rishi Sunak’s early departure from the D-Day commemorations hardly cost him the election, but it did not help. If Blair were there, he would have made sure that the world leaders got some work done behind the pomp and pageantry.

For policy, he wants leaders to avoid popular solutions that won’t work. This is a problem that bedevils democracies. Leaders should start with the problem that they are actually trying to solve, get facts about it that might point to the real cause and then identify solutions that might work, not ones that will be easy to sell. But avoiding tough decisions weakens the leader in the long run.

Blair advises leaders to pick the best people. Easy to say. But when the leader is stuck with a civil service that rewards caution, it’s sometimes hard to find the best people. That’s where he brings in performance management. People respond to incentives, and if mistakes are heavily punished, you’ll get caution. If a leader can’t change the system, they should at least know its strengths and weaknesses, and put the system to work accordingly.

Clearly, Blair was one of the most talented communicators of his generation, he was Obama before Obama

His main argument is about delivery. He rightly sees the problem of falling faith in democracy as related to a failure to deliver. If my generation saw big economic gains from democratic politics, the next has seen economic crisis, falling real wages and a dysfunctional housing market. If democratic states cannot deliver housing, people might question the utility of democratic institutions.

He advocates measuring progress. In his government, one of the ways he delivered was through targets. But targets fall foul of Goodhart’s law — if a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Blair’s crime-reduction targets often ended up with police forces gaming the statistics to make themselves look good. The targets had no impact on crime — just the statistics.

On Leadership sometimes reads like a business book that you might see in airports. That’s what it is. Blair evokes the leader (CEO, university president, whoever) who has just heard about the next big thing, and she’s sold on it. There’s a lot of talk about quick wins and strategic communication — the stuff you see in business books. There’s a chapter on decision-making — lots of good advice that should be obvious, but as anyone who has sat in on a badly chaired meeting knows, sadly it is not.

Blair’s big idea is tech. He is a tech optimist. Actually, he’s more a tech evangelist. A too-large chunk of the book gives an overview of tech changes in the last century, which he admits in the most amusing passage that he does not fully understand. No matter. He’s all in. For Tony Blair, AI is the future, and any capital-L Leader should get in on the ground floor.

He is not too concerned with the possible downsides of new tech advances. It doesn’t seem to have bothered him that crypto looks like a scam with no real societal benefit.

What he fails to push for in a leader is judgment. The difference between a leader and an evangelist is that the leader is judicious.

Even the most judicious leader makes mistakes. Easy decisions are made down the food chain. Political leaders are left with all those 50/50 decisions pushed up because the choice is not obvious. They make more and more consequential decisions than the rest of us. Learning from mistakes, admitting them, is surely what true leadership is about.

His position on the second Iraq War, choosing to side with the US, was one of the most disastrous policy decisions in recent history. On no metric can it be regarded as anything other than a failure. It cost about two trillion dollars (no, I’ve no idea either, but it’s a lot). Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives and thousands of western soldiers did, not to mind the PTSD that countless more will have suffered. After almost a decade of occupation there was still no stable government in Baghdad, nevermind one that looked like a functioning democracy, with Isis taking over large swathes of territory. The Middle East is now less stable than it was in 2003. And the UK, the US and rest of the world is under a greater threat from Islamic terrorism than it was back then.

Perhaps because he’s never admitted it was a mistake, few of his detractors are willing to forgive Blair. Many believe that he was dishonest in taking that position — knowing that the evidence against Saddam Hussein was ‘sexed up’. I’m inclined to think that he acted in good faith.

If a leader cannot admit they made a mistake, they cannot correct them, and end up spending too much time defending the indefensible. In On Leadership, Blair comes closer than ever before to admitting Iraq was a mistake: he admits making a “fundamental miscalculation” about how easily the country could transition from dictatorship to democracy. Anger about the war is “perfectly genuine and understandable”. But it’s not quite a mea culpa.

This is the sort of book any leader or aspiring leader, political or otherwise, will benefit from reading. It’s punchy, full of good advice and, coming from someone who has been there and seen it all, they might be more likely to listen.

Politics: On Leadership by Tony Blair

Hutchinson Heinemann, 368 pages, hardcover €30, e-book £12.99