Pat Kane: Is Giddens and the Third Way to blame for Blair? At least we're well rid of him now

The serrated, geriatric voice was odd, though, and more accurately matched the next morning’s close-up pics. His face now looks like a blasted landscape, cratered and cracked with stress and angst. Every crease of it deserved, his hardest detractors would say.

I devoted most of my Wednesday to the Iraq Inquiry report, from Chilcot’s quiet but devastating indictment to Blair’s final “I think that’s enough” at the end of the press corps’ questions. As what looked like the stooping ghost of Tony Blair desperately reshuffled his old leadership cliches, I couldn’t help winding back to the late 90s. Where was my head and heart at, as Blair and the New Labour project began its reign?

It was, I must admit, in a complicated place. Electorally, I’d disengaged from voting Labour after 1987, caught up in the first flush of Jim Sillars and Alex Salmond’s “independence in Europe” vision (now, perhaps, to be practically realised). But I did actively engage with much of the intellectual preparation for what eventually became New Labour.

Through the mid-90s, I’d been invited to a few conferences organised by the magazine Marxism Today. In drab educational institutes, the London academic left wrestled with Thatcher’s ability to appeal to the individualism and consumerism of former Labour voters. This soon became a marketing and focus-group exercise in the hands of Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould. But there were deeper roots to it.

Since university I’d been fascinated with the work of the sociologist Anthony (now Baron) Giddens. Giddens had developed the early New Labour theme of the “Third Way”, and has subsequently been a huge apologist for Blair and the project. As an undergrad, I had chucked myself at his dense 1984 book The Constitution of Society, and emerged with an idea that stuck.

Modern people were not just duped by ideology, possessing a “false consciousness” that rigorous lefties could only dispel, said Giddens. Instead, they were “reflexive”, or acutely self-aware, about the social rules that shaped their behaviour. They were able to accept them, resist them, even forge new ones but, in a subtle and pragmatic way, comfortable with adaptation and change.

Now, what kind of politics could truly speak to these complex, resourceful, “both-and” rather than “either-or” modern people?

“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” was Blair’s breakthrough slogan in his run-up to the 1997 victory – and it precisely appeals to the reflexive citizen that strides out of Giddens’ theories. “I know crime has structural and economic causes”, their logic might run. “But the criminal is also fully aware of the rules their actions break. Can’t we deal with both issues at the same time?”

You can just see the Blair arms held wide, deploying all his “pretty straight guy” charm-routine, in the early years of New Labour government. Yes, we believe in public health and education – but surely it could use some internal competition and benefit from some targets? Yes, we support people who are out of work – but surely we can demand they strain every sinew to get back into the fray?

In 2010, Giddens himself put it more bluntly: New Labour “refused to allow any issues to be ‘owned’ by the right. The task, rather, was to provide left-of-centre solutions to them.” One could easily flip that round for a large part of Cameron’s first term, in its Big Society, hug-a-hoodie mode – providing right-of-centre solutions to issues “owned” by the left. Not for nothing did Osborne and Gove often refer to Blair as their “Master”.

But where stands the Master now? And what has been the result of pitching politics to people who are presumed to be “beyond left and right”, flexible and post-ideological, marching along an implicit Third Way? The result, post-Brexit, would seem to be disaster – both for the theory, and the reality.

These capacious, balanced, “reflexive” selves (made manifest in the chillaxed demeanour of the early Blair and Cameron) seem to have split down the middle. The pieces of the old mainstream have tumbled into different parts of these islands. The big-city, campus-town, In-voting cosmopolitans on one side; the small-town, ex-industrial, Out-voting nativists on the other. (A civic nationalist Scotland, as ever, the exception).

It’s tempting to bluntly say that capitalism, and war, smashed this ideal Blairite (and Cameronite) sensibility. Perhaps it’s easy to avoid making any strenuous or uncomfortable ideological commitments, when your lifestyle floats on a boat of endless and easy credit. And when the crash comes, the economy tightens, the public services recede, and the national myth of an “all in-it-together austerity” fails to hold, a referendum becomes a way of registering your decidedly unreflexive anger.

Yet economies surge and recede and surge again: we know this about capitalism. And we know we can change the managers of this process, electorally. That shouldn’t, in itself, generate a majority English and Welsh vote to Leave the European Union – one that is considerably rooted in a massive distrust of the existing political classes.

It’s been so obvious this week, to me at least, that Blair’s Iraq War was the act that most violently frayed and then snapped that trust, for most of the UK electorate. In retrospect, what is so darkly fascinating is the mismatch between the intellectual cultures of Blairism – the armies of policy wonks dreaming up ever-more elaborate systems to “manage Britain better than the Tories ever could” – and the inner life of Tony Blair himself.

His acolytes might have wanted him to remain the ultimate Third Way pragmatist, helping Mondeo Man steer his way to a better life (and a second car). But Blair had other plans. We saw flashes of who he really is at his press conference this week.

Blair made a contemptuous distinction between “decision-makers” like himself – who might take a country to war because they were able to think ahead, to “grip” and “drill down” into the situation, as his biography constantly puts it – and mere “commentators”. In A Journey, Blair writes how when he heard about 9/11, he felt “eerily calm despite being naturally horrified at the devastation…Unchecked and unchallenged, this could threaten our way of life to its fundamentals. There was no other course; no other option; no alternative path. It was war.”

“I’ll be with you, whatever”, goes the now infamous line from a 2002 Blair-Bush memo in the Chilcot report. Some of those accursed “commentators” have been saying in the last few days that it’s exactly this style of melodramatic, buddy-buddy leadership – melodramatic, buddy-buddy, engorged with its own “decisiveness” – that we must really put behind us with this report.

Gentle Sir John Chilcot – making it perfectly clear that Britain’s participation in the Iraq War “was not the last resort” available in the circumstances, that the legal case for war “was far from satisfactory”, that the evidence for WMDs was “presented with a certainty that was not justified” – has struck a blow for sweet procedure, due diligence and collegial wisdom.

This didn’t have to be Blair’s legacy. The policy questions that the Blairites grappled with are questions that also (should) sit on Nicola Sturgeon’s desk in Bute House. How to build consensus for a good society among complex modern people, under demanding and dynamic global and technological conditions?

Well, how do we?

But as Blair returns to his lucrative client-list of “deciders” – including tyrants, plutocrats, monarchs and arms-dealers – we should look at his ravaged mask, listen to his deathly croak, recoil at his continuing arrogance, and call it as we see it. Tony Blair was dangerous. And we are well rid of him.