Tony Blair, Theresa May, Gordon Brown: the rise of the back seat drivers
The most thrilling political job in politics is prime minister. But the attractions of being a national back-seat driver are growing for the political class. If it’s clear leadership you’re after, there is as much hope of getting it from what the Russians term the “previous people” than many of those presently in charge.
So much for the years when the ousted or retreated leader left thoughts and murmurs to the speech circuit for hints of disapproval or disquiet over policy. The noisy temptations of Brexit, the pandemic and now the feverish state of UK-US relations over the cut and run from Afghanistan and implications for the future of the alliance have brought out back-seat drivers — vocal in their views of which direction the battered British motorcade should turn. And rather often, as serving politicians prevaricate or fret about internal party dynamics, they reflect more of what many of us feel than the evasive ministers paid to run the difficult stuff.
“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” as Malcolm says in Macbeth, and political Valhalla showcases the forgotten strengths of discarded leaders. Not everyone will appreciate hearing advice from a radical liberal interventionist like Tony Blair, eloquent on the chaos in Kabul and the risks for the region. But he does say in plain language what top armed forces folk and intelligence service chiefs can only bemoan quietly for fear of endangering a fragile UK-US compact with a thin-skinned and short-term President. It is indeed “imbecilic” to interpret a mandate for withdrawal as a race for the exit and the Johnson government was essentially left in the lurch by an erratic ally.
This is in essence a speech Keir Starmer could have given on American high-handedness. But the Labour leader is so hovering on any foreign policy issue that the role was handed back to its most successful electoral figure in Blair, who is also its most divisive in terms of the mission creep from intervention to the more elusive goal of nation building or exit strategy. There is plenty of blame to share out.
Most definitely, “TB” has more mileage as the back-seat driver of note than his peers, having intervened on tackling Covid and to less acclaim in support of a second referendum post-Brexit. He had competition on that from John Major — and now Theresa May is coming along nicely as an intervener, which generally boils down to blaming Boris Johnson for fresh chaos. This brings us to a tendency the new orienteers need to be wary of. We might well applaud the righteous anger, but the awkward question, “What would you have done?” lurks. May, as I remember from covering the event, was so keen on maintaining a securocrat’s closeness to the White House that she was one of the first visitors to greet Donald Trump in office. That ethical flexibility in pursuit of partnership makes it harder to hail the new outspoken version of Mayology as the real deal now.
I was not the greatest admirer of Gordon Brown’s leadership, but he has put in the hours in his afterlife on hard-knuckle subjects like infrastructure and education in developing countries, where advocacy and support can make a difference.
My modest proposal is that any former grand-fromage enjoining us to take girls’ education more seriously ditches the tendency to individual foundation- building and do much more in concert with their former political foes. A Blair-Brown-May alliance for making the best of bad times, whether on rebuilding after Covid or supporting Britain’s best efforts overseas, would command greater authority than personal clamour and score-settling. When the journey is as bumpy as it is for the democracies in 2021, our back-seat drivers deserve a hearing and the space to challenge a patchy government record. They’ll get more of one if they can agree on the map — and share the limelight.
What do you think of Blair, Brown and May’s alliance? Let us know in the comments below.
