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 programme. The promise to maintain public spending at Tory levels 
 during the first two years of government was indicative of a wider 
 lack of nerve. In foreign affairs, Blair's dismal record of policies 
 that flew directly in the face of Britain's wider interests ranks with 
 those of Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden, although he sometimes 
 seems to fancy himself in the mantle of William Gladstone, the great 
 nineteenth-century liberal imperialist. As the Iraq Occupation has 
 degenerated into ever-deeper violence and chaos, `Iraq' joins `Munich' 
 and `Suez' in the lexicon of British foreign policy disasters. 
  
 Blair's pre-election statement that he would retire in the course of 
 the current parliament, probably in 2007, has led many writers to 
 prepare his political obituary, attempting to explain how a politician 
 so widely welcomed as a new broom in 1997 had become so unpopular, and 
 such a liability to his party, by 2005. Blair's many biographers have 
 pored over his life's choices to reveal the figure of a grey and 
 essentially conventional lawyer, with little aptitude for management, 
 poor inter-personal skills and deep ignorance of the outside world, 
 who frequently evokes religious faith as a substitute for rational 
 thought. This is one of his two most unusual characteristics. Blair is 
 not an ordinarily religious man; he is by many accounts a `religious 
 nut', a `New Ager', a man who obeys his own inner voices and takes 
 scant notice of religious authority. He had to be rebuked by the 
 principal Catholic archbishop for taking Catholic communion when 
 nominally a Protestant, and cautioned by the chief Protestant 
 archbishop against moving too close to Rome. He consistently ignored 
 the warnings against the invasion of Iraq made by the Pope and the 
 Anglican archbishop, both of whom were outspokenly hostile to the 
 eventual war. 
  
 As an overtly religious prime minister, Blair has been at odds with 
 the larger part of his country which, like most of Europe, has become 
 increasingly secular in recent years. His religious fervour--he was, 
 unusually, confirmed in the Anglican communion as an adult, when a 
 student at Oxford--is a relatively unfamiliar phenomenon in 
 contemporary Britain. Indeed Blair, who has apparently read through 
 the Koran three times, sometimes seems more at home with the Muslim 
 revival experienced by part of the British electorate than with the 
 secular style of the Church of England. Blair does not like to be 
 bracketed with right-wing religious fundamentalists in the United 
 States, but like many of them he is a genuine `friend of Israel', a 
 country that he visited twice before becoming prime minister. His 
 knowledge of and support for Israel has long been guided by Lord Levy, 
 a millionaire in the music business who became Blair's tennis partner, 
 the Labour Party's chief fundraiser and, for a while, the prime 
 minister's eyes and ears in the Middle East. 
  
 Blair's second unusual characteristic is his ability as an actor. Both 
 at Fettes, the Scottish private school he attended in the 1960s, and 
 at St John's College, Oxford, where he was a mediocre law student, he 
 was an accomplished thespian, appearing in the classics, in comedy 
 revues, and fronting a band. His capacity to act and to put on an act, 
 to perform his lines, and to diverge from a script when circumstances 
 demand, has become the hallmark of his career as a politician, 
 unequalled since Harold Macmillan, Britain's last great showman prime 
 minister. 
  
 What remains a mystery even today, and is not adequately explained in 
 any of the Blair biographies, is how the Labour Party allowed a 
 maverick right-winger to become their leader, a man who became a close 
 intimate and political ally not only of a neo-conservative Republican 
 like George W. Bush, but also of Josi Marma Aznar of Spain and Silvio 
 Berlusconi of Italy--European right-wingers of a definably unpleasant 
 slant. Blair is no Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour traitor of the 1930s 
 who was seduced by the rich and famous. He is, and clearly always has 
 been, a deep-dyed Tory, far further to the right than recent 
 Conservative leaders like John Major or William Hague, who, as One 
 Nation Tories, appear benign by comparison. So why did the Labour 
 Party fall for Blair? Partly, of course, because of his surface charm 
 and verbal felicity. In an indifferent field he made his way swiftly 
 to the front, before anyone had had the time to penetrate beneath the 
 veneer of competence and ideological neutrality. With the 
 defenestration of the useless Neil Kinnock, the death of the dreary 
 John Smith, and the lack of killer instinct in the gloomy Gordon 
 Brown, the bland figure of Blair, youthful and glib, was seen as the 
 only class act available. 
  
 His swift rise to the top was an indictment of the Labour Party's 
 recruiting capacity over the previous thirty years. Tony Blair might 
 have been no great shakes, as some people recognized at the time, but 
 he was all there was. The intelligent and the ambitious in Britain had 
 abandoned the attempt to work their way up through the major political 
 parties as long ago as the 1960s. Many of them had chosen instead the 
 loucher, and more immediately remunerative, worlds of commerce, 
 culture and the media. An honourable career in government service, as 
 an elected politician or ill-paid bureaucrat, had little appeal for 
 the British elite in the late 20th century. The electorate has taken 
 note of this defection. 
  
 The Labour Party that chose Tony Blair as its leader in 1994, and the 
 New Labour Party that first presented itself to the voters in 1997, 
 was already a pale shadow of the historic Labour Party of Clement 
 Attlee and Harold Wilson. The progressive institution in which 
 middle-class intellectuals once rubbed shoulders with the working 
 class, in government and in local party organizations, was a thing of 
 the past. The members of Blair's cabinet could hardly scrape up a 
 first class degree between them, while the decimated ranks of labour 
 itself were scarcely represented. New Labour was a bourgeois party 
 that had shed its working-class trappings and lost its intellectual 
 edge. Its task now was to represent the aspirational middle class 
 constructed during the Thatcher years, picking up the relay of 
 Thatcherism while giving neoliberal policies a more human face. Some 
 Labour Party supporters might have perceived Blair as a cuckoo in the 
 nest, but most people saw that he could talk the talk and walk the 
 walk--and do so better than most. 
  
 Like other prime ministers before him, Blair soon found it relatively 
 easy to posture on the world stage. A structural problem has long 
 existed in the British system of government, which means that 
 ministers in charge of home affairs are encouraged to get on with 
 their individual tasks, leaving the prime minister with few 
 opportunities to influence the domestic agenda. Many prime ministers, 
 who are also titled First Lord of the Treasury, seek to intervene in 
 economic affairs, usurping the role of the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer; but this was not possible in Blair's case. Gordon Brown, 
 his more knowledgeable and experienced rival, blocked his way. 
  
 Blair's only chance to star was to take charge of foreign affairs, run 
 first by Robin Cook and later by Jack Straw. Cook was much put upon by 
 Blair's coterie of foreign advisers, but he had no friends in cabinet 
 to complain to. He was dropped as foreign secretary in 2001 because, 
  
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