by DAVID RUNCIMAN
IMAGE/Amazon
Since he left office in 2007 Tony Blair has been hawking his wares around the world, from Nigeria to Kazakhstan. What has he been selling? Himself, of course, plus his reputation, and perhaps his party’s too, somewhere down the river. But he’s also been peddling an idea: deliverology. Tom Bower gives us the pitch. He reports Blair telling Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, back in 2007: ‘I learned by bitter experience during ten years as prime minister the problems of getting the government machine to deliver what I wanted. I created a Delivery Unit, and that was a great success. It transformed everything. I want to bring that success to Africa.’ Or as he put it to President Buhari of Nigeria at a meeting last year: ‘I pioneered the skills to make government work effectively. The Delivery Unit is the leader’s weapon to make his government effective across the civil service and country.’ He offered to establish a delivery unit within Buhari’s regime, staffed by experts from Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative. At the same meeting, according to Bower, Blair asked the various aides present to leave the room so he could talk to the president alone. He told them he had a personal message to convey from David Cameron. In fact, he used the time to pursue some business on behalf of Tony Blair Associates, his commercial calling card. He wanted to sell the Nigerians Israeli drones and other military equipment for use in their fight against Islamic rebels.
If true – and Bower’s source seems to have been one of Buhari’s aides, though he provides no details – this is pretty hard to read without flinching. But the double standards at work shouldn’t distract from the bogusness of the do-gooding part of Blair’s proposition. Deliverology is itself a false prospectus. It relies on the assumption that Blair gradually mastered these skills on the job and that he was forced out just when he had got on top of the government machine. Certainly that’s what he says in his memoirs, where he insists that he only worked out how to exercise power effectively towards the end of his time in office. Now he wants to help others start out with the wisdom he had to acquire through ‘bitter experience’. But political leaders always say this: that governing starts to make sense when time is running out. That’s why it’s so hard to persuade them to move on. Obama told Marc Maron earlier this year that he was finally getting the hang of it seven years in, just when he has one foot out of the door. For democratic leaders this is the tragedy of power: they only learn how to do their jobs once the public is sick of the sight of them, or the constitution is telling them they have reached their limit. But it’s an illusion: it just seems easier because the end is in sight and they have stopped worrying about what might come next. Blair felt he was really getting things done at the point when his struggle with Gordon Brown was over. But it wasn’t because he had worked out how to deal with an obstructive rival; it was because he had ultimately been defeated by him. He was liberated by having little left to lose. Obama has been increasingly willing to assert his executive authority because he no longer feels it’s worth trying to deal with Congress. Yet if his successor starts with that attitude he (or she) will be pilloried, just as any prime minister who caves before his chancellor from the outset won’t be in charge for long. Delivery depends much more on context than it does on technique. In that respect, it’s not a transferable skill.
Hence the second problem: when Blair says he can provide Kagame with a weapon to use across the civil service and the country, it doesn’t mean what it would mean in a British context. Blair’s domestic beef was with a civil service that he felt had become entrenched and hidebound, an obstacle in the way of reform. But what about countries where the civil service barely functions, where the rule of law is at best an aspiration and leaders deploy real weapons against their own people as well as metaphorical ones? The deliverologists would say it is even more important to have clear targets and a separate machinery for achieving them when the rest of the government is corrupt and inefficient. But establishing that sort of personal remit under the leader’s authority isn’t just a matter of efficiency; it is also a question of power. Bypassing the civil service does nothing to stop power being abused; if anything, the reverse is true. Kagame’s regime is now notorious for its brutal suppression of opposition forces; murders and disappearance are routine. Kagame has also amended the constitution to allow him to run for another three terms in office, meaning he could potentially stay on until 2034. Blair says that he makes sure to raise what he calls ‘the human rights stuff’ whenever he is pushing his delivery agenda in parts of the world where democratic institutions are fragile. But he doesn’t feel he can do more than that, given that target-setting is where he can make a real difference. That’s the promise of deliverology: to carve out a space separate from the messy business of politics, where different rules apply. This too is an illusion. Carving out a separate space for government is a political act and the normal rules apply even more strongly. Otherwise who knows what former prime ministers and presidents would get up to behind closed doors?
London Review of Books for more