Tony's Ten Years
Updated on 15 October 2008
Reading Sky News political editor Adam Boulton's account of Tony Blair's 10 years in power feels like stepping back in time, writes Lucy Manning.
Tony's Ten Years: Memories of the Blair Administration, by Adam Boulton, 384pp, Simon & Schuster Ltd, £17.99.
Tony Blair. Remember him?
It seems like a lifetime ago that the great smiling one, was gracing the steps of No.10, when the economy was booming and the banks weren't in public hands.
So reading Adam Boulton's 'Tony's Ten Years: Memories of the Blair Administration' feels a little like stepping back in time. It takes his last hundred days in office as the theme for the book, but ranges through time, policies and scandals.
It's a comprehensive look through every aspect of Blair's years in power: from the war in Iraq to Scottish devolution, from Northern Ireland to cash for honours.
Boulton was there with the Prime Minister, reporting for Sky News and uses some of his own interviews at the time, to point up instances when Mr Blair tried to evade answering the questions posed.
In fact Boulton writes a damning portrait of the behaviour of those behind the Blair spin. "Bullying was, I suppose, one of their habitual tactics" he writes when describing the 'Prescott punch' incident, which Labour party press officials initially insisted had never happened.
Boulton describes way the Prime Minister finally departed the political scene as emblematic of his years in power. "Akin to an American President...Blair trampled on the conventions for the handover of power."
It provides a fascinating insight into Mr Blair's final weeks in power. Behind the scenes, we read of a Prime Minister on a final visit to Iraq, facing mortar attacks and losing his temper at a tetchy news conference.
While the book is comprehensive, there are no great revelations, With so many articles written and words reported (many of them by Mr Boulton himself) about Mr Blair, this account fills in some of the detail, without any big exclusives.
Some might have hoped that there would be more juicy details, especially as Mr Boulton's wife of the last 2 years is Anji Hunter. Before she married the Sky News political editor, she was Tony Blair's top aide, in at the beginning of the New Labour project.
But Boulton is keen to emphasise that his wife had nothing to do with the book. Though he can't stop himself gushing over her, writing about "her charm, beauty, intelligence, charisma and upper-middle-class Scottish background."
Adam Boulton is always an engaging journalist on screen, and that comes through in his book. If you can handle the twee paragraphs about his wife, then there is much to learn about the Blair years, and the way New Labour operated.
