Much like Margaret Thatcher’s tearful tumble from Downing Street, the haggard, hoarse Tony Blair who materialised after Chilcot must have given even his enemies pause. The glib, youthful Nineties spin-master now recalled Scrooge’s reproachful future ghost, a man mutely begging to be shriven. The last person he’d choose for such confession, though, would surely be George Galloway, whose presence as presenter may handicap this film’s reception. If any politician is even more toxic than Blair, it’s Gorgeous George. Still, this crowd-funded documentary is a lively, well-researched investigation of a life of growing greed and moral blindness.
Galloway can’t resist grandstanding on-screen, and he’s helped assemble a motley list of interviewees, from recently rehabilitated Tory minister David Davis to Noam Chomsky. Footage of Nelson Mandela blaming Britain’s Prime Minister for his part in “plunging the world into a holocaust” with Iraq’s invasion is, though, a witness it’s hard to shake off. The mood music to equally rare footage in Britain of victims of the bone-eating white phosphorus and depleted uranium spread by that war is clumsy. The images alone strip away the childish boasts of “shock and awe”.
The killing the film is most fascinated by is, however, financial. The intensifying corruption of “revolving door” politics in Britain, where future corporate employment influences policy, is laid at Blair’s door. Finally, we see him in the last decade, bestriding the world stage as Middle East peace envoy. “It does have the flavour,” journalist Matthew Norman suggests, “of a satirical gesture.” The biggest blot on his post-Iraq reputation is his highly-paid PR work for Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, a final fall from the brief grace of Labour’s “moral” foreign policy. Nazarbayev is, Blair reassured us, a strong man, “prepared to take the measures that are necessary in the modern world”. He could be describing himself in New Labour. What Rosebud did he lose along the way to such a pass?
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