Life after the premiership of Tony Blair

Nonetheless, after 10 years in office but still only in his early 50s, Blair was not ready to retire from the world scene. On the day of his resignation in 2007, he announced that he would resign his seat in the House of Commons, and he was selected by the “Quartet”—the United States, the EU, Russia, and the United Nations—to serve as special envoy to the Middle East; he held the post until 2015.

Blair made headlines in December 2007 when he converted to Roman Catholicism (Britain has never had a Roman Catholic prime minister). Before his conversion, he had publicly maintained silence on matters of personal faith, but by 2008 he had demonstrated a deep commitment to initiatives aimed at fostering interfaith cooperation globally.

In 2010 Blair published his memoir, A Journey, in which he reasserted his support for the Iraq War and described his strained relationship with Gordon Brown.

The Chilcot Report

In July 2016 Blair’s actions in the lead-up to the Iraq War and his stewardship of Britain’s involvement in the conflict came under withering criticism with the release of the Chilcot Report, the findings of a seven-year inquiry into Britain’s role in the war (including the decision to go to war, whether troops had been adequately prepared, and planning for the war’s aftermath). The inquiry was launched in 2009 by Prime Minister Brown and led by Sir John Chilcot, a career civil servant. Evidence was provided by about 150 witnesses—including Blair, who testified twice—and some 150,000 documents, among which were communications between Blair and Bush. While the 2.6 million-word report did not provide any judgments on Blair’s legal culpability for the conduct of the war, it concluded that he had guided Britain into a military invasion of Iraq before all peaceful options for Iraqi disarmament had been exhausted.

In presenting the report, Chilcot said that the judgments about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been “presented with a certainty that was not justified.” Moreover, the inquiry found that despite explicit warnings, the Blair government had underestimated the consequences of the invasion and that its planning and preparations for postwar Iraq were “wholly inadequate.” The report also presented a picture of Blair’s overestimating his ability to influence Bush and of Blair’s willingness to take Britain to war beside the United States despite his failure to alert Bush to the difficulties posed by the war and his inability to persuade the U.S. president of the necessity of full UN Security Council approval of the invasion,

Responding to the report shortly after its release, Blair claimed that it made clear that he had not made any “secret commitment to war” with Bush and that it “should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies or deceit.” “Whether people agree or disagree with my decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein,” he added, “I took it in good faith and in what I believed to be the best interests of the country.”

Return to politics

In March 2017 Blair announced his intention to again become involved in the world of politics with the founding of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which he said was intended to function as a “new policy platform to refill the wide open space in the middle of politics.” Blair insisted that he intended neither to form a new political party nor to personally return to frontline politics, but he was critical of both “authoritarian populism” and the leftward direction in which the Labour Party had been taken by Jeremy Corbyn, who had replaced Brown’s successor, Ed Miliband, as leader. In September the new institute published a policy paper outlining steps that the British government could undertake to impose new restrictions on immigration that would not require Britain’s withdrawal from the EU (“Brexit”).

In February 2016, in an attempt to placate the vocal faction of Euroskeptics within his own party as well those voters who had turned to the anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron negotiated with the European Council on reforms to British membership in the EU. Having won what he deemed to be sufficient concessions from the council, Cameron then scheduled a national referendum for June 23, 2016, on whether Britain should withdraw from the EU. British voters shocked the world by voting in favour of exiting the EU. Cameron resigned, and the government of new Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May began negotiations with the EU (mandated to be completed by the end of March 2019) on the terms of Britain’s departure. As Parliament debated the details of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill in September 2017, Blair raised the possibility of pulling the plug on Brexit:

In the end Brexit is a distraction not a solution to the problem this country faces. If members of Parliament really believe that then their obligation is to set out solutions that deal with the actual problems people and communities have and not do Brexit which is actually going to distract us from those solutions and not do Brexit which is actually going to cause real economic and political damage.