Introduction

The more perceptive tributes to Tony Blair on his retirement stressed how Gladstonian he was. Up to a point. Like W. E. Gladstone, the towering figure of late nineteenth-century politics, Tony Blair was driven by religious conviction. Like Gladstone, he pursued a liberal interventionist foreign policy. Gladstone demanded that the Turks should be driven bag and baggage out of Bulgaria. His biggest foreign-policy disaster was the death in Khartoum in 1885 of General Gordon, who had been pursuing an (actually unauthorised) campaign against an Islamist insurgent.

Gladstone announced in 1868, when invited to take office for the first time, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’, before returning to chop down a tree at his north Wales estate. Like him, Tony Blair drew his core support from the peripheral regions of the UK – Scotland, Wales and northern England. Like Gladstone, Tony Blair carried out his mission to pacify Ireland. The last month of his premiership saw the utterly improbable sight of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness laughing out loud as they prepared to take power together in Northern Ireland (see chapter 23). Unlike Gladstone, Tony Blair had no particular empathy with northern Britain, except perhaps in Sedgefield, Co. Durham. As shown in other chapters of this book, New Labour had to conquer southern England to govern, and Tony Blair's true mission was to pacify Isleworth. Other New Labour figures – Gordon Brown, John Prescott – stood for Labour's northern English and Celtic bases.