How Tony Blair Found His Groove

By J.F.O. McAllister/Gleneagles

When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed. When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm." There were echoes of Winston Churchill when a grim-faced Tony Blair spoke from Downing Street last Thursday to express outrage and determination in the face of the dreaded attack on London that he had long warned was inevitable.

Blair's detractors condemn him as addicted to packaging and spin, and it's true he's slick at the arts of modern political communication. But they miss how naturally resolve comes to him. His performance last week was that of a man in full, an act of deftly judged juggling between directing his government's response to the bombings and trying to make sure the G-8 meeting of world leaders he was chairing at Gleneagles, a bucolic resort in Scotland, came to the ambitious conclusion on relieving African poverty that he has been straining to achieve for a year. After the bombings, he plowed through several press conferences, as well as emergency meetings of a Cabinet committee and eleventh-hour bargaining sessions at Gleneagles from which he secured an agreement to double aid to Africa by 2010. He did it all without putting a foot wrong--on three hours' sleep. That kind of mastery under extreme strain cannot be faked; it shows an almost ferocious resilience at his core.

Now, in the wake of the bombings, what use will he make of it? An aide, who was more exhausted than his boss, said, "We haven't begun to think about what comes next"--although a controversial bill to require sophisticated ID cards will probably get a terrorism-inspired lease on life. But Blair's final term has been transformed. When he won re-election two months ago--his parliamentary majority was cut from 161 to 67, mostly because of anger over how he oversold the war in Iraq--there was much talk of his becoming a lame duck whose power would quickly drain to his heir apparent, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

That prediction now seems almost comical. The derailing of the European Union constitution by the no votes in France and the Netherlands saved Blair from waging a campaign to ratify it in Britain that he almost certainly would have lost. Blair has managed to turn the ensuing chaos in the E.U. to his advantage, arguing forcefully to Europeans over the heads of their leaders that Britain's lower-regulation, higher-growth model shows a way out of the problems that have made them so dyspeptic. The selection of London last week to host the 2012 Olympics provided Blair with another long-odds win. (Blair was so nervous about the result that he took a walk rather than watch the announcement on TV.) And by focusing the G-8 on Africa and coordinating his goals closely with those of campaigners like Bono and Bob Geldof, Blair has burnished the progressive credentials that his blood brotherhood with George W. Bush over Iraq had obscured.

So far there is no sign Blair will pay a political price for the bombings. A remarkably phlegmatic British public blames al-Qaeda and not his war in Iraq--although future terrorist attacks linked to the insurgency there could change that. After the Olympics win, Blair reportedly joked he would stay PM until 2012 (which Brown would not find funny). Of course, what the political gods give, they can take away. Churchill was thrown out of office just as Britain won the war he had brilliantly led. But a U.S. official who saw Blair and Bush go off for an hour's walk together last Thursday on the grounds of Gleneagles thought he understood why they wanted to. "These guys don't really have peers," he said. "There is almost no one who can really share the pressures of staying at the top."