Tony Blair's JOURNEY: Been there, done that on film

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair dropped his much-ballyhooed memoir, A Journey: My Political Life four days ago in the United States. Leading up to and after the book’s pub date, Blair and talk about him permeated all media. Today’s Washington Post presented a review of what it calls Blair’s “a notably wistful memoir.” Blair even showed up today on ABC News’ This Week with Christiane Amanpour. In the media and in print, Blair does not disappoint as the charming, articulate, and passionate progressive that one remembers from over a decade’s news coverage of his life at 10 Downing Street.

As one reads the memoir, though, for which Blair reportedly received a $7 million advance, one gets a feeling of, to steal shamelessly from Yogi Berra, déjà vu all over again. In the introduction of A Journey, Blair states that, with only one chapter covering 2007 to now, the book spans the period from 1997 to 2007. Film buffs who do not want to spend $35 retail for the hardcover book can watch not only one movie, but three of them, to get the Cliffs Notes on Blair’s ascension to and occupation of the office of Prime Minister.

Blair expends a great many of the book’s 700 pages discussing his often-thorny relationship with Gordon Brown, his fellow Labour Party pol who later succeeded Blair as Prime Minister. For those who want to skip ahead, the 2003 film The Deal follows Blair and Brown as they engineer their party’s victory over the once-dominant Conservative Party – the party of Baroness Margaret Thatcher – only to have their careers diverge in polar opposite directions.

Blair devotes an entire chapter to Princess Diana, whom he called “The People’s Princess.” He had been in office mere months before her death in 1997 thrust him into the spotlight and put him at odds with a monarchy stuck behind the times. Unfortunately, for Blair, the 2006 film The Queen, for which Helen Mirren won an Oscar in the title role, beat him to it. It is nice to have the personal narrative and the back-story, but for the visually literate, the film does the job just as well.

Blair discusses his role in crises that played out on the world stage, including Northern Ireland and Kosovo. He, during this time, comes out from under the shadow of then-President Bill Clinton, his progressive mirror across the Atlantic Ocean. Particularly, Blair says that the drive to take military action against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic “put the most colossal strain on my personal relationship with Bill Clinton. It says a huge amount about him and is to his unalloyed credit that he allowed the pressure to be put on him in the way I did so. It also says a great deal about America and its preparedness, in the ultimate moment, to recognise [sic] the necessity of the moment and act.” This symbiosis between the United States and the U.K. in general and Blair and Clinton in particular played itself out on film in this year’s The Special Relationship.

It would appear then that, concerning the highlights in Blair’s career, the movies have beat the book to the punch. If, however, A Journey: My Political Life comes to a big or small screen near you, no doubt the actor Michael Sheen, who has played Blair on TV and in the movies mentioned herein, will be ready and waiting.