It was the 28th December 2024 (I know this because I keep a diary). I was visiting my Mum who then lived near Oswestry in Shropshire. We were spending Saturday morning in town and enjoying a coffee in Oswestry’s excellent little independent bookshop, Bookers. Mum had given me a Bookers gift card for Christmas, so when I saw this signed copy of Tony Blair’s On Leadership it seemed like the obvious thing to spend it on. I have no idea how a little bookshop on the Welsh Borders managed to get hold of a signed copy, and the Saturday-job girl behind the counter couldn’t help me.

Tony Blair was, of course, Prime Minister of the UK from 1997 to 2007. He was the last decent prime minister this country had. Since then it’s been a catastrophic parade of lightweights, clowns, and the truly unhinged. His double act, with his chancellor Gordon Brown, oversaw something of a British golden age. He was lucky. He entered government with a healthy economic inheritance bequeathed by the equally unlucky, but conscientious, John Major, and left before the financial crisis of 2008, leaving poor old Gordon Brown to pick up the pieces. Of course he’s despised by the hard-left of the Labour party for helping the Americans with their ill-fated and misguided invasion of Iraq and it’s chaotic aftermath, so while the other giant of late 20th century British politics, Margret Thatcher, is idolised by the Conservative party, Blair has few natural defenders. In 2016 Blair created the Tony Blair Institute to offer strategic advice to governments, mainly in developing countries. This book is marketed as a distillation of the advice that the institute offers to leaders.

George Osbourne apparently described this book as “the most practically useful guide to politics I have ever read.” It’s really just that. It doesn’t tell you how to get elected (or carry out a coup), but what to do when you find yourself as leader. It’s divided into seven sections. “Taking Power” describes the prerequisites of an incoming government: having a plan, having priorities, and having the right people in place to carry out the plan. He says that the executive must be powerful enough to nudge the bureaucracy in the right direction otherwise it will simply hunker down and tread water until the next lot come along. Reading it made we wonder if Blair talked to Kier Starmer (he apparently did), because it reads as list of everything that Starmer has failed to do.

I thought the point about having the right people was very relevant to our country’s predicament. We just don’t seem to be attracting top quality people into politics; Kier Starmer and his crew are a case in point, a second rate bunch better for nothing more than being middle managers in an insurance company. I hold the unpopular point of view that our politicians are paid far too little. They should have salaries equivalent to corporate leaders, with the PM on at least a million per year with a full staff. The fact that a minister is hounded out of office because she skimped on paying stamp duty is a joke. She should have had staff to handle it and lawyers available to sign-off on the transaction. I also think that democratic party elections for candidates and leaders is a mistake. Political parties are always far more extreme than their electorate, and having the membership choose the leader results in disasters like Liz “Lettice” Trust, and Jeremy Corbyn.

The “Delivery” section makes the obvious point that it’s easy to talk about making changes, but difficult to carry them out. Indeed I spend many hours with friends over coffee debating exactly how we’d sort the country out. He points out that democratic election cycles make it hard to benefit from difficult long term change. Most change is strongly resisted at first and it’s immediate impact is often negative for some people before the benefits can be seen. He suggests making some quick easy wins to “sugar the pill”.

The “Policy Lessons” section reads like a “Maslow’s hierarchy of government”. The lower levels have to be in place before there’s any point in working on the more developed country stuff. At the foundation is internal and external security. The first job of any government is to protect its people and territory from external threats and internal disorder. A country under attack can’t spend much time worrying about social spending when survival is at stake. Similarly if the country is lawless with rampant crime it’s very hard to deliver anything else for the people. Next comes the rule of law. Nowhere is completely corruption free, but without a recourse to an impartial judiciary it’s very hard for companies to operate successfully or for people to feel that they will get a fair hearing. A government also has to provide infrastructure such as roads, railways, sewage, ports, etc, although here there is scope for private investment too. Blair describes ideology as a plague. He says that incredible harm has been done to Latin America by imported western ideologies such as Marxism. He describes the insanity in the Labour party he had to fight against in order to get elected.

There’s a section on technology. Blair admits he’s never been very good at science, and struggles to understand tech, but thinks it’s very important. The chapter is weak because he makes ill informed guesses about specific technologies. It’s always a mistake for politicians to do this. Much better to have a plan for creating research institutes and directing R&D money at the right places. You never know what might come out, but allowing researchers to explore possibilities pretty much always gives good results. I find talk of AI transforming government a bit rich, when the massive opportunities for non-AI IT have not been realised. Anyone in contact with the NHS will know how paper files go missing, and one department can’t communicate with another. The technology is not fairy dust, you have to do the hard slog of implementing and deploying it.

The foreign affairs section is very good. He makes a case for consistent policy, good relationships and diplomacy. A chapter on balancing the USA against China felt a little out of date. He finished the book in 2024 before Trump’s second term. I imagine he would probably now emphasise the need for the UK to stick closely to the EU. He sees Brexit as a huge mistake (as should anyone with half a brain). There’s a section on communication. His premiership predated social media, so he never had to deal with its corrosive impact. His advice to current leaders is to simply ignore it, but I wonder how easy that is. Surely they need to engage simply because it’s many people’s main view of the world. He thinks well communicated consistent policies will win people over despite the constant mud slinging, but the difficulty is the “well communicated” bit. The final section is personal advice for a leader on how to deal with the stresses and strains of the job. It read rather like a plea to us, the general public, to give our leaders some slack.

What’s striking about the book is how technocratic it is; how much is well-known common sense. My undergraduate degree was in Development Studies, which aimed to understand why some countries are poor, and how they can improve the lives of their citizens. It’s not magic. The playbook is well known and any leader can implement it. The simple fact is that many leaders simply aren’t interested in improving the lives of their people, but rather seek power to enrich themselves, their family, clan, tribe, or ethnic group. Or they are in grip of nonsensical ideology with policies that have been proven to be counter productive. There’s no excuse for countries like North Korea, where their neighbours in the south are some of the richest people in the world. There’s no excuse for Iran, or Cuba, or pretty much all the countries in Africa. You don’t even need to be democratic, as China has conclusively proven, to massively improve your people’s lives. It’s also notable that many people in the rich world have very little idea of why they are rich. Instead of insisting on better, swifter rule of law, more efficient bureaucracies, more integration with their neighbours, more R&D, they believe that their problems are because of immigrants, gays, and trade, on the right, or “capitalism” on the left (the very thing that made them rich).

I really enjoyed this book. It’s quite something to have a guide on how to run a country by someone who’s actually done it. It’s an easy read, with short focussed chapters. Of course it’s rather superficial, there’s no detail on macroeconomic policy, the complexities of trade, or how to reform a dysfunctional bureaucracy, but as a lightweight introduction to all the main challenges of leadership, it’s excellent. Every 18 year old should read it before going out to vote for the first time. Similarly it doesn’t say much about the dark arts of politics; machiavellian strategies to outmanoeuvre opponents or how to keep your enemies close and off-balance. That’s perhaps another book.