A Journey / Tony Blair

A Journey: my political life by Tony Blair. 700 p.

I'm not sure what compelled me to read this. I don't read many memoirs, and I've never read one by a politician. I do tend to follow British news, though--the BBC is my go-to website for world events--and Blair was recent enough that the events he was covering would be ones I remembered. So I gave it a shot.

This book ate my brain for almost 3 weeks--I felt like I wasn't making any headway, but I couldn't seem to read anything else, either. It's not that it was boring (though I'll admit my eyes glazed over in some sections, especially when discussion involved large numbers of people that I'd never heard of), but it was certainly dense. I found the chapter on Northern Ireland particularly fascinating, as he described negotiating with people who are utterly contrary to any compromise whatsoever: In the end I would say, "What about..." and then pause, just to hear [Breandan MacCionnaith] start to say "No" before I'd even explained the proposition. If I tell you [he] didn't stand out dramatically for his unreasonableness (though he did ultimately clinch gold medal), you might understand how unreasonable all parties were.

I also enjoyed this bit about his struggles with the media (in this specific example the Scottish media): Once I gave an interview on why the Parliament should have tax-raising powers, in which I said, 'If even a parish council can, why shouldn't the Scottish Parliament?'--which led to the headline 'BLAIR COMPARES PARLIAMENT TO PARISH COUNCIL,' which even by their standards was quite some misinterpretation.

Overall I was left with a desire to read a lot more about how Britain's political system works--when Blair was elected Prime Minister, it was considered his first job in "government" even though he'd been a working politician for some years; apparently "government" is a very specific term for people in specific positions in the ruling party, so MPs and the like are not "government." I'm also pretty curious about their educational system, because he talked a lot about how he wanted to reform it but I wasn't able to follow a lot of the details due to lack of knowledge. I wonder how this compares to other political autobiographies, but I'm not curious enough to try another one for some time.

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