Broken Vows: Tony Blair – the tragedy of power
TOM BOWER

Tom Bower – previous books No Angel: the secret life of Bernie Ecclestone and Sweet Revenge: the intimate life of Simon Cowell – is not celebrated as a hagiographer, but even by his standards this relentless assault on his latest subject makes for depressing, and somewhat exhausting, reading.

Bower presents Blair as a leader who promised much but delivered little. His greatest skill was his ability to win power; his greatest weakness was that he was unsure what to do with it. He was the master salesman of Third Way politics but ill-prepared for governing and with little interest in the minutiae of policy. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who would studiously read her nightly red box, Blair’s would be routinely left untouched. Obsessed with targets, grand pledges and sound bites, the New Labour project is characterised by Bower as incoherent and often shambolic, led by a man good at presentation but naive when it came to implementation. Modernisation was Blair’s mantra but it was modernisation without any meaning.