Just ask Tony

Unusually​ for a politician, Tony Blair is an authentic writer, in that he authentically sounds like himself. His post-prime-ministerial memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, was long, discursive, eccentric, a bit mystical, but also matey, self-confident, sometimes blunt, occasionally cheesy. It read like he’d written every word of it. The style of his new book, On Leadership (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25), has changed somewhat, as befits someone who now spends his time offering executive advice to governments around the world. The paragraphs are shorter. There are more exclamation marks. The tone is both worldly and peppy. But it’s still unmistakably him. Writing about the importance of having the right people around you, he says: ‘The “team”, however, also includes ministers, and this is a whole different bouillabaisse.’ A ghostwriter hasn’t been anywhere near that sentence.

But there is one section of the book that comes across as an outlier. The part that deals with the challenges and opportunities of the 21st-century technology revolution appears to have been composed under dictation. Blair freely admits that he has long been clueless when it comes to tech. At school he was the despair of his maths and science teachers – he describes himself as a classic arts student (good at reading people, bad at reading numbers). He never owned a mobile phone while prime minister and barely knew how to send an email. At the same time, he has become passionately interested in the implications of the digital revolution and desperate to understand them. He has done his best to educate himself about what it all means, with the help of the friends he has made at the top of the tech industry. And he is keen to share what he has learned.

The result is a chapter in which he provides his own potted history of how technology works, from Moore’s Law to Central Processing Units to ‘cloud’ computing to Large Language Models (LLM). It is clear and perfectly competent, if a little uninspiring. ‘I write,’ he says with all due modesty, ‘as a Leader and not as a tech expert might express things.’ In fact, he writes like ChatGPT asked to explain the origins of the digital revolution to primary age schoolchildren. ‘At first digital computers were vastly complicated electro-mechanical machines the size of a large room. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s the first purely electronic circuits came along. Called transistors, they transfer the resistance necessary for the current to be regulated from one end of the device to the other.’ And so on.

In some ways this is charming – he has the touching enthusiasm of the recent convert, in contrast to the ‘been there, done that’ flavour of much of the rest of his advice. But it’s also hopelessly partial. Blair’s version of the tech revolution is precisely the one that comes from inside the tech industry. It is highly deterministic: we are assured that the advance of technology is unstoppable and to try to stand in its way means being swept away by the tide of history. With AI, Blair is fully signed up to the hype about self-reinforcement and an imminent great leap forward. The latest LLM-based AI, he says, ‘has human brain-like capabilities – BUT one with an ever improving intellect … True, at present, it resembles a person with an average IQ of about 100 … but as the reinforcement loop gathers momentum AI will soon have an IQ of 150 – that’s very smart. In time, it will have one of 200. Then we’re in a new world.’

Blair’s account is relentlessly positive: he acknowledges the risks of tech gone awry (particularly when it comes to AI), but is convinced that the upside of embracing the latest industry advances vastly outweighs the downside. Above all his vision is permissive: Blair’s advice to governments – particularly of small or under-resourced nations – is to let tech companies have access to the data and other raw materials they might need to experiment with and on your public services. ‘Make your country a “sandbox” where – under supervision, of course – new innovations can be trialled.’ In the case of the UK, he believes that biometric ID cards would solve a range of problems – from security to access to services – at minimal cost. He also wants big tech companies to be given access to as much personal health data as possible so that they can start building new and better systems for the NHS and for private companies. The possible costs – of corporate capture, corruption or simple incompetence – are barely considered.

A lot of this is hard to square with the advice Blair gives elsewhere in the book, which is that Leaders (it’s always capital L, for reasons never fully explained) should avoid becoming beholden to the received wisdom, especially when it emanates from vested interests. Blair appears to have convinced himself that the most innovative tech companies are not partial commercial organisations but something like impartial research outfits – more akin to universities than cut-throat businesses. They are too new, too nimble, too relentlessly curious about what’s coming next to count as vested interests, certainly in comparison to government bureaucracies, which he believes are engineered to uphold the status quo. Blair usually wants the Leader to avoid picking a side so that he or she can remain free to select what works from what is available, public or private, cutting-edge or conventional, left or right. But in this case he knows which side he is on.

What explains it? In part, this is about money. The biggest supporter of the Tony Blair Institute, which now employs almost a thousand people around the world, is Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who has donated more than $100 million to Blair’s organisation. Awo Ablo, the TBI’s executive vice president, is also a director of Oracle. Ellison is the only person in On Leadership to whom Blair refers by their first name. Elsewhere it’s Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Emmanuel Macron, but when it comes to discussing the possibility of reimagining agricultural cultivation, we are told this is the work of ‘Larry and his team’. Larry, like Tony, is all-in on the transformative potential of the technology his company is building. In September this year, he told a conference about his vision of a world monitored by his company’s latest AI surveillance systems: ‘Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.’ By those standards, Blair’s support for biometric ID cards looks almost quaint. But the source is clear.

However, some of it also seems to be Blair’s personal conviction. He has always had a weakness for holistic solutions. He likes to drill down and find the deep explanation that connects seemingly disparate problems. Silicon Valley’s snake oil, with its promise of technology as the unifying force that will bring together the needs of citizens with the imperatives of government, suits this mindset. But there are reasons for Blair to be wary. The search for the golden thread that pulls a divided world together has got him in trouble before, notably after 9/11, when his desire to join the dots between the terrorist attacks and the wider threat posed by unaccountable dictatorial regimes led him down a path to military adventurism. That didn’t end well.

On Leadership is surprisingly forthcoming about the Iraq fiasco. Blair will never admit he was wrong, but he does acknowledge that the attempt to import Western-style democracy to places with no real history of it was hubristic. He says:

This was not an example of hubris in the sense of disdain for others or a belief in the overweening capacity of Western leadership to effect change. It was a misplaced assessment that the world as it should be could be forged from the world as it is, and that democracy could be transplanted into a political body that was going to have multiple pressures to reject the organ.

By implication, Blair is reproaching himself for not having dug deep enough. But it could also be said that the mistake was to have thought there was a holistic solution to what was in fact a disconnected set of problems.

At the same time, Blair is open about his reasons for unequivocally backing the Americans once they were set on toppling Saddam Hussein: he felt Britain couldn’t afford to do anything other than hold the world’s one remaining superpower close. ‘I believed it was crucial for Britain in the long term to remain America’s closest ally, because it would serve our deep interests.’ This was hardly the primary reason Blair offered at the time for going into Iraq (it was, at best, a secondary consideration): his public pronouncements focused on WMDs, national security and the opportunity to reshape the region. So perhaps all that talk about a higher purpose was a noble lie. But it is also striking that this is very similar to the argument Blair is now making about the giant technology companies. On the one hand, they might well solve all our problems for us. But even if they don’t, who wants to be on the wrong side of that sort of power?

Alongside the bigger picture, Blair is also drawn to the quick-fix potential of new technology. One theme of On Leadership is that when in doubt, governments should look for easy wins in order to avoid getting bogged down in essential but intractable long-term projects. There is always something that can be made to work better in the short term with a bit of entrepreneurial can-do – and when things work better, people will notice. The barriers to this kind of pragmatic reform are usually ideology (it’s not the sort of thing that people like us do) and bureaucracy (it’s not the sort of thing we are in the habit of doing). Tech solutions appeal because Blair believes that technology companies are relatively unencumbered by ideology and bureaucracy. Tech people are fixers, pure and simple.

Is this true? The case Blair makes for embracing technology is as ideological as anything in the book (even though it comes straight after a chapter he has called ‘The Plague of Ideology’). He also seems curiously uninterested in how people might respond to a world of tech solutionism, taking it for granted that if there are real-world benefits then these will be appreciated for what they are. No doubt some of them will be. But being on the receiving end of more and more technological fixes is unlikely to be experienced in just the way the tech companies see it – any more than being on the receiving end of the promotion of democracy in the Middle East was experienced in just the way the Americans saw it. People providing solutions always have blind spots about the people being provided for – and those people soon notice. If anything, tech hubris puts the hubris of the early 21st-century state builders in the shade.

Blair seems insulated from this. His is very much a bird’s-eye view, from where it all looks much more appealing. That’s why his personal experience of technology matters – from avoiding it when in office (and therefore having little idea of what a massive pain so much of it can be), to learning about it now from the people who manufacture it, without ever having had to grapple with the drain it has become on so much of our time and attention. Of course, the tech revolution still has enormous power to do good in the world and the projects Blair lists in which digital technology is playing a transformative role are impressive (from personalised tutoring to seed enhancement to anti-corruption schemes). He would no doubt say that complaints about what it’s done to our attention spans are first-world problems to be set against what can be achieved by cheap mobiles and tablets in places that lack even basic infrastructure. But then he would say that. How can someone who has his tech needs taken care of for him really know what he’s talking about?