In fact, Sedgefield might have been the perfect platform for Blair, and recalling this helps underline the ideas he once stood for—ideas that led to reforms that, in most minds, have long since been eclipsed by Iraq. When he started out, the Labour Party, like the British coal industry (which employed over a million miners in 1920 but today supports less than 6,000), was fading fast. For Blair and his allies, the key to survival was obvious. As one Sedgefield colleague, Phil Wilson, reminisced in a political pamphlet a few years ago, “Blair would continuously say to me: ‘If we can change Sedgefield, we can change the Labour Party; if we can change the Labour Party, we can change the government, and if we can change the government, we can change the country.’”
And that’s just about what Blair accomplished. John Burton, a onetime phys-ed teacher who has run Blair’s constituency office since 1983, remembers the initial incongruity of Blair’s candidacy. The then-30-year-old political novice was an habitué of North London’s Chablis-and-brie chattering-class salons. “He was the last person in the world that we should pick up here,” Burton recalls, laughing. “We’d always had a trade union MP, a miners’ MP.” But Blair offered a way to rescue Labour from its far left, which still dominated the party back then. “We were doing everything to create a Labour government,” Burton told NEWSWEEK, “and these idiots down in Liverpool and London were never going to be accepted by the vast majority of people out there, and we thought, well, what the hell have you got to do?”
Selecting Tony Blair was part of the answer. It’s easy to forget these days that the Labour Party, not Iraq, was Blair’s first big battleground; the prime minister fought long and hard to craft New Labour from the ruins of an old socialist party with deep roots in the coalfields and the shipyards of northeast England. The modernization of the party between 1983 and 1994, when Blair was elected to the party leadership, was “jungle warfare,” as one of Blair’s fellow reformers put it, pitting die-hard pro-nationalization “old Labour” socialists against Blair’s band of reformers.
In Sedgefield in those early days, Blair saw firsthand the kind of deprivation he would not have known about as a boarding-school student in Edinburgh or a London lawyer. Blair and his modernizers, who control the party today, embraced the Conservative Party’s radical economic reforms of the 1980s, but they sought also to build on them with an ambitious and costly program of far-ranging public-service reforms across health, education and welfare. The Tories’ drive to defeat “old Labour” in 1979 was successful because, as their effective campaign slogan had it, “Labour Isn’t Working.” Determined to bury the past, the rebranded Labour Party strived to be Thatcherism with a heart, though its propagandists never phrased it so baldly.
Blair’s goal all along was to raise Britain out of its post-empire doldrums and make the country “comfortable with the 21st century,” as he has said. From bringing peace to Northern Ireland to securing London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics—not to mention his unprecedented achievement of leading the Labour Party to three consecutive general-election victories—his record is an enviable one: the longest period of economic growth in modern British history; a drop in spending on unemployment benefits; a sensible tuition scheme that should put British universities on a better financial footing; shorter hospital wait times; tens of thousands more police officers, nurses, doctors and teachers; a tripling of spending on scientific research and a raft of measures to combat climate change. Along the way, Sedgefield became a better place. Under the Labour governments of the 1970s, double-digit unemployment was common in rust-belt areas like Blair’s constituency. Today Sedgefield’s unemployment rate is 2.3 percent.
Unfortunately for Blair, the 21st century also brought the war in Iraq, which for many Britons has overshadowed his accomplishments. He’s not unaware of this. In May he returned to Sedgefield—“where my political journey began and where it is fitting it should end”—to announce the date of his resignation as prime minister. The “vision” that he came to power with, he said in his farewell speech there, “is painted in the colors of the rainbow.” The “reality” that he confronts as he steps down “is sketched in the duller tones of black, white and grey,” he added. “But I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.”
Will history come to see it that way? John Burton is sitting in his boss’s office at Myrobella, the prime minister’s Sedgefield residence, surrounded by Christmas cards, photos and other memorabilia from the Blair years. Tinged with sadness, Burton’s answer is a clichéd “Time will tell.” It may be a cop out—but it’s true too.
