The Head of the International Quartet of Four towards Middle East peace, Tony BlairHow many Tony Blairs are there? After hacking my way through the 691 pages of his memoirs, I now have several voices ringing in my ears.
There is the self-deprecating charmer; there is the toe-curling sexual fantasist; there is the pragmatic, calculating, often brilliant politician.
There is the matey bloke, all slang and jokey asides, the official language of the Blair Downing Street (before being sent to Washington as ambassador, I was told 'to get up the a*** of the White House and stay there').
There is the slippery dodger of difficult questions on Iraq and Afghanistan (of which more later); there is the portentous world statesman and would- be global strategist.
Chameleon: Tony Blair adopts different voices and characters to suit his circumstances and his ultimate goal is to regain the world stage
There is the messianic evangelist, taking refuge in the moral stratosphere to avoid the slings and arrows of mere mortals down on Earth; and there is the bizarre faux-confessor to having a drink or two in the evening when the going got tough.
As is often the way, in the thousands of words already written about Blair's memoir, some of the clearest insights come from abroad.
Earlier this week, a critic writing in the New York Times reminded us that Blair in his early political years was known as the man without a shadow. The critic's conclusion, after reading A Journey, was that Blair remained 'a curiously opaque figure', still without a shadow.
It is a judgment which struck an immediate chord. I recall, years ago, watching Blair being interviewed on TV by Des O'Connor in front of a studio audience. For a moment I could not work out what was odd.
Then I realised that Blair was using Essex-style glottal stops. He was tailoring his speech to what he imagined would be more acceptable to a downmarket audience.
It was the same when he used to visit the United States. He would reposition his accent somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, the better to identify with America.
Blair emerges from his book a political chameleon. His memoirs are, of course, targeted at multiple audiences, above all in Britain and America, and he has adopted different voices to appeal to each.
'Blair emerges from his book a political chameleon. His memoirs are, of course, targeted at multiple audiences, above all in Britain and America, and he has adopted different voices to appeal to each'
For the U.S. edition, he has even written a special foreword, suffused with cloying affection for America.
But - to reproduce a phrase that Blair repeatedly and redundantly uses - 'in a very real sense' the multiple voices spring more from personality than from any sales stratagem by his publishers.
This is after all a self-portrait, wholly unembellished, so we are told, by the ghost-writer's arts.
In Washington, I remember once running into Eric Anderson, Blair's former house master at his public school, Fettes. He told me that all I needed to know about Blair was that he was an accomplished actor.
But what is wrong with that? Don't all successful politicians need a little thespian blood? Churchill and Macmillan certainly had histrionic talents, which did them no harm.
Nor should we criticise Tony Blair for publishing memoirs that are selling like hot cakes and will make a ton of money. Every prime minister since 1945 has written a memoir, sometimes spanning several volumes, sometimes to great commercial success.
To the surprise of some, John Major's autobiography was a best-seller. The multi-volumes of Churchill and Macmillan have become standard reference works.
Yes, memoirs usually seek to skew history in the writer's favour and all are self-serving to some degree. But that does not necessarily destroy their value either to the contemporary reader or future historian. They are also a mouthwatering opportunity to settle scores.
On the Richter scale of political vengeance, A Journey hits a stonking 10. Blair's demolition of Brown is shocking in its brutality, to such a degree that it destroys his argument that it was better to have kept Brown as Chancellor rather than sack him.
Books to sell: Tony Blair's memoirs have seen unprecedented amounts of publicity for the former Prime Minister
Blair can therefore claim that his book falls fair and square into the mainstream of British prime ministerial tradition. Yet there is something about A Journey, which distinguishes it fundamentally-from its predecessors.
recognition that their active careers at the top of politics are over. There is none of that in Blair's book. To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, he rages against the dying light.
The point is made by his reference to Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State to President George W. Bush. It is worth quoting the passage in full.
'[Rice] is also a classic example of the absurdity of people with experience and capacity at the highest level not having big political jobs after retirement from office.'
For Rice, read Blair. What leaps time after time from the pages is that he still wants to be a player on the world stage. This above all is what he misses since stepping down.
It explains his decision to take a second-string job in the Middle East, promoting Palestinian economic development. It is a position from which he was able to lever himself into a seat at President Obama's dinner table earlier this week when, for the umpteenth time, peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians were relaunched.
It explains why he wanted to be President of Europe, which could have given him a
'Others have noted that the book is tantamount to an advertisement for his current, largely money-spinning, activities'
glorious opportunity to strut his stuff on the international stage (at least we would have noticed him, unlike Herman Van Rompuy, the obscure Belgian politician who got the job).
Others have noted that the book is tantamount to an advertisement for his current, largely money-spinning, activities.
If he cannot be British prime minister, he can run Tony Blair Associates, offering advice on international matters for large fees; or providing mediation services, which draw on his experience from brokering the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland (a genuine achievement, though, as with the memoirs of his former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, there is more than a hint of him being seduced by the meretricious glamour of negotiating with men of violence).
Nor do I know of any prime ministerial memoir which has sought so obviously to influence the politics of the moment.
Blair wants still to be a player on the British scene. On the very eve of the election for the Labour Party leadership, Blair has made it pretty obvious that David Miliband is his choice for leader, a benediction not received with unalloyed joy by the candidate himself, who fears it could be the kiss of death. (Indeed, Blair's interference has been condemned by all the Labour candidates.)
More interestingly, at the end of his book, Blair gives his support to economic and domestic policies which are well nigh indistinguishable from those of the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition.
A job application? There are stranger things under the sun. After all, former Labour Cabinet Ministers Alan Milburn, John Hutton and Frank Field have all been co-opted into taking jobs with the Coalition.
World stage: Hillary Clinton speaks with Tony Blair as leaders gathered to speak about Middle East peace talks in Washington
But the chapters which most interested me were those which described events at which I had been present as British ambassador to the United States. These were the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and the preparations for war in Iraq.
At this point it would be right to make a few declarations of interest. I voted for Blair in 1997. Though I was not a political appointee, Blair sent me to Washington.
I saw, and admired, Blair at the height of his powers, encapsulated in three terrific speeches: to Sinn Fein-supporting Senators and Congressmen in 1998 (which shifted the balance of argument in our direction when the Northern Ireland peace process hung in the balance); to businessmen in Chicago in 1999 (making the case for intervention in Kosovo); and at College Station, Texas, in April 2002 (when, for the first time in public, Blair extolled the virtues of regime change).
In 2005, three years after retiring, I wrote a memoir myself called D.C. Confidential, which largely recorded my time in Washington. It created a terrific fuss because of some criticisms of Blair and teasing of John Prescott and Jack Straw (to which the Cabinet Secretary raised no objection before publication).
Blair's account of these years displays plenty of sins of commission and omission. Take the Crawford summit, when in April 2002 Tony Blair stayed two nights with George and Laura Bush at their ranch in Texas.
'At this point it would be right to make a few declarations of interest. I voted for Blair in 1997. Though I was not a political appointee, Blair sent me to Washington'
During the visit, there were long periods when Blair and Bush were alone together without any advisers. For example, on the first night the No 10 and White House teams, along with Yours Truly, had dinner together at a TexMex restaurant in the nearby town of Waco.
Many years later, the Chilcot Inquiry asked me about the Crawford summit. I replied that, because I had not been at the talks, to this day I was not entirely clear what 'degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch' (the reference to blood was an allusion to Blair's belief that Britain owed a 'blood debt' to the U.S. from World War II).
But I noted to the Inquiry that, in his speech the next day at College Station, Blair referred approvingly to regime change for the first time ever in my hearing in public.
In his book, Blair reacts strangely to my statement to Chilcot. He transforms my words into an assertion that he had pledged 'in blood' to support America and that he had signed up for regime change.
This, says Blair, was a myth; and I wouldn't know anyway because I was not present at the meeting - just what I had myself admitted!
Heaven knows why Blair should have misrepresented my words in this way, because his book offers little enlightenment on what actually transpired at Bush's ranch.
I suspect that my remarks to Chilcot touched a sensitive nerve, because, contrary to what he says in his memoir, his references to regime change were not, to quote Blair, 'entirely consistent with my other public pronouncements'.
In his excellent book The End Of The Party, about the last years of New Labour - an objective and fair-minded antidote to the bias of the Blair and Mandelson memoirs - the journalist Andrew Rawnsley records that Blair never satisfactorily briefed his advisers on the meeting with Bush.
No greater shadow hangs over Tony Blair's legacy than the one cast by Iraq, about which he is utterly unrepentant. It is only to be expected that he would try to rewrite history.
Special relationship: Tony Blair and George W. Bush spent long periods alone together before the Gulf War
But some things just don't wash. He says that there was no expectation of 9/11. But the Bush administration was harshly criticised for failing to heed warnings in 2001 of a great terrorist attack.
Blair takes credit for persuading Bush to go down the UN path at their meeting at Camp David in September 2002. But the decision in principle had already been taken by the President the previous month. He claims we could not have foreseen the carnage and violence that Al Qaeda and Iran would wreak in Iraq after Saddam's fall.
But what he cannot bring himself to admit is that by not focusing intensively on restoring the country's electricity supply and basic law and order from the start - by not preparing properly for the aftermath - the coalition forces created conditions ripe for Al Qaeda and the Iranians to exploit.
It is inexplicable that at their meeting in Washington at the end of January 2003, Blair appeared to agree with Bush that there was little likelihood of civil war in Iraq.
I searched his memoirs in vain for some explanation, given the warnings he had received from the Foreign Office and others. Blair never ceases to refer to the importance of a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians as an essential precursor to action against Saddam Hussein.
But as the drums of war begin to beat ever more loudly, he appears to let the matter drop - heaven forfend that it might become a real condition for our joining the U.S. in Iraq.
Blair's memoir bequeaths to us a monstrous ideological construct in which the War on Terror (a phrase apparently still alive and well in the Blair thesaurus) must be pursued to the bitter end, whatever the cost in blood and treasure, so that 'Western' values will prevail over those of militant Islam.
'It is as if the more he is criticised, the more Blair feels it necessary to cloak himself in the ideological purity of his perception of the world's future'
It is as if the more he is criticised, the more Blair feels it necessary to cloak himself in the ideological purity of his perception of the world's future.
This is a vision which is incapable of seeing that our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved a recruiting sergeant for the very terrorism that threatens us, at home and abroad.
It is a vision which cannot see that in Afghanistan we are fighting a predominantly old-fashioned Pashtun insurgency, while Al Qaeda moves its operations to Somalia, Yemen and the Maghreb countries of North Africa.
Most monstrously of all, it is a vision that blames a 'sagging of the will' on the British and American people for setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. 'We want our battles short and successful,' says Blair disapprovingly in his memoirs.
When I read that, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. We have been fighting in Afghanistan for almost ten years, the longest sustained conflict since the Napoleonic Wars at the start of the 19th century. At least we had then a recognisable and attainable political goal.
Some years ago in Washington, the late Guardian journalist, Hugo Young, put to me the question: was Tony Blair profound or profoundly shallow?
Young was not quite sure, but tended to the latter view. If he had read A Journey, he would have hardened this judgment.
