Robert Harris: Tony Blair's weirder than almost anyone
The Ghost, a film based on Robert Harris’s best-selling novel, tells the story of a Blair-like prime minister accused of war crimes. Once a New Labour insider, Harris has changed, he exclusively tells HENRY FITZHERBERT
Robert Harris was once the archetypal New Labour insider, hand-picked by Tony Blair to follow him on the 1997 election campaign trail and so close to Lord Mandelson that he made the spin doctor godfather to one of his children.
While the latter relationship is still bearing up (Mandelson this week attended a gala screening of The Ghost, based on Harris’s bestseller) there is no love lost between the author and the former prime minister.
This week Harris hit the campaign trail to promote The Ghost, a compelling thriller about a Blair-like former British prime minister charged with war crimes, just as Blair was doing the same on behalf of his new best friend, Gordon Brown.
“He’s got this sort of orange perma-tan of the super-rich and there’s a slight sense of disconnection about him, which is odd for a man whose popularity owed much to being just an ordinary, aspirational guy,” Harris told me.
He’s got this sort of orange perma-tan of the super-rich
Like many former champions of Blair, the political journalist-turned-author seems genuinely bewildered by Blair’s transformation, as if the former leader has fallen victim to a body snatcher.
“People thought he wasn’t weird like most politicians but now he’s become weirder than almost anyone,” he quips brutally. “Blair is a pretty toxic brand.”
Having once enjoyed Blair’s ear and friendship of a sort, the author of Fatherland and Enigma fell out with the then prime minister over the Iraq war and civil liberties, and considers Blair’s behaviour since leaving office has done nothing to redeem him.
“The way Tony Blair walked out of the House of Commons and the doors banged shut behind him, leaving parliament and going straight into corporate life, was very dodgy. Especially as a lot of his clients are in the Middle East where he’d had such a dramatic influence and played such a role.”
Blair is thought to have made about £20million since leaving office, including substantial payments from the Kuwaiti royal family (who clearly have an interest in neighbouring Iraq) and from a South Korean oil firm, UI Energy, which has important connections in Iraqi Kurdistan.
In addition, Blair, a Middle East peace envoy, earns lucrative sums from speaking engagements and earned a £4.6million advance for his upcoming memoirs, entitled The Journey. The book’s most appreciative audience will be in America, where Blair has profited handsomely from his reputation as a staunch US ally.
Harris is discomforted by the commercialisation of the “Special Relationship”, noting that the last three British prime ministers (Blair, Major and Thatcher) “have gone off and made fortunes in America”.
The son of a printer, he explains: “It would be strange if it wasn’t in the back of a British prime minister’s mind that to be very pro-American and pro-business is, in effect, a great pension, so I do think that there’s a potential for corruption there.”
The tentacles of influence between Washington and Downing Street lie at the heart of Harris’s smart conspiracy thriller, The Ghost, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Pierce Brosnan as the Blair-like former prime minister, Adam Lang.
Harris maintains that Lang is not Blair (“the characters take on their own life and destiny”) but concedes that Brosnan took the opposite view. “He read the novel and then said that all roads led to Tony Blair.”
Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer dispatched to Lang’s US hideout to work on his memoirs. Amid sexual and political skullduggery he discovers that Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), is not all that she seems. People have compared the scheming Ruth to Cherie Blair but Harris says they are looking at the wrong political leader’s wife.
“I view the character as being based more on Hillary Clinton, who is a very formidable politician. I mean, Cherie wouldn’t get elected to dog catcher, would she?”
A THEME of the novel and the film is isolation and, in particular, the bubble-like existence of today’s governing elite, symbolised by Lang, who is “cut off from reality”. It’s become a hobby-horse for Harris who fears that, since 9/11 “politicians have become very cut-off from ordinary people in a way that titanic world figures like Lloyd George and Winston Churchill never were”.
He elaborates: “They were more integrated in society, you could have walked up to their front door. Nowadays a British prime minister is shielded by men with machine guns and they cease to live like normal people and that’s very harmful to democracy.
“We’re creating a sort of über-class of our rulers who are the only ones seriously protected from the consequences of their policies. That strikes me as wrong.”
I ask what can be done about it. “I’d like to see our leaders catch commercial flights with the rest of us and go through the same security checks that we do. I like the idea that Clement Attlee was driven to Buckingham Palace to become prime minister by his wife. They used to go on driving holidays around Ireland. I think that was a better situation.”
With Blair back in the news and his memoirs due to be published later this year, the release of The Ghost, which Harris adapted with Polanski, is certainly timely.
Does Harris know if Blair has penned his own memoir, or, like Lang and most politicians, employed a ghost?
“The rumours are that he’s written it himself although it’s hard to see how he has found the time. Maybe he dictated it into a machine while flying around the world on various private jets.”
l The Ghost is released on April 16.
