London -- At High Noon on Good Friday 1998 the prospects for a deal to end the conflict in Northern Ireland were receding. Talks chairman, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, had set midnight as the deadline for reaching agreement, that moment had come and gone and after an all night negotiating session the parties were on the verge of failure.
In the best traditions of British government stinginess, the caterers at the press enclosure had only been engaged until the deadline and had packed up and gone, meaning there was no food for the thousand or so reporters who had been up all night as well. With a couple of colleagues I went looking for a place to have lunch and a kindly policeman told us to keep it under our hats that there was a staff cafeteria in a building behind the building where the talks were breaking down.
We found the place, ate hurriedly and as we were leaving the building British Prime Minister Tony Blair was walking in with his Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam. No entourage, no security detail, just the two of them. Blair looked terrible, like a college student who had been up for 72 hours cramming for a make-or-break final: hair standing out at odd angles as if he had been pulling it in despair, face mottled and puffy from lack of sleep. He gave us the quizzical, I know these guys from somewhere I better say hi look that politicians have, only with the lack of sleep it was slightly deranged. He came over said hi, and we began to talk. It was absolutely the moment not to speak to reporters and he was about to give up the whole story about the talks being on the verge of collapse when Mowlam took him firmly by the arm and led him away.
In two decades of reporting it was the only time I have ever seen a senior politician without some kind of mask. The effort expended, the fear of failure, the clearly childlike desire to make it all come out OK was written across his face with no professional artifice. It was a poignant look and I summon the memory up whenever I'm thinking too cynically about the people we elect to high office.
As he said in his resignation statement today, Tony Blair is a product of sixties political activism and a sincere Christian faith. He really believes that high political office should be used to change the world for the better and would go to his physical limits to achieve this.
I remembered the story this week, as the Good Friday agreement finally took root with the return of devolved government to Northern Ireland, and Prime Minister Blair announced his departure. The linkage between the two events is not just down to the media management for which Blair and his team are rightly famed (and cursed by the British press who they manage with such skill). Around the time Blair was talking to us, we later learned, President Bill Clinton was on the phone with David Trimble, leader of the largest Protestant party in the talks, trying to close the deal Blair had pushed to the edge of the finish line. Clinton succeeded.
From the events of Good Friday, Tony Blair took away two lessons: he had unique powers to persuade people to make historic change and the president of the United States is the most important ally you can have in trying achieve that aim.
From that moment on, Blair would ally Britain with the U.S. to try and re-shape the post-Soviet world. In Kosovo, in West Africa, in Afghanistan the lesson of Good Friday 1998 was reinforced. Push yourself to the limit and work with the American president and you will have success in making the world better. When the presidency changed hands, it made no difference. When President George W. Bush decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Blair knew instinctively he would have to join him.
As it became clear that the Bush administration had no workable plan for the country after Saddam was removed from power, and no interest in looking to British expertise in Iraq to help find one, the Prime Minister stayed by the president's side. Why he did so is the mystery and the tragedy of his public life. His diplomats in Baghdad kept him fully briefed on the chaos and amateur folly that marked Iraq's first year. Everything Rajiv Chandrasekaran has chronicled in his book Blair knew as it was going on.
But he remained loyal to Bush. The repayment of his public loyalty was meager. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, to win support among his own backbenchers, Blair told the House of Commons that the war was not happening in isolation, that Bush was committed to a "road map" for solving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as well. A year after the invasion, with the insurgency gaining force and Blair's popularity waning Bush threw him a bone: a renewed public commitment to the "road map" for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Does anyone remember what happened next?
The final years of Blair's premiership have seen a steady ebbing away of his authority. His hold on power due as much to the disarray of Britain's opposition party, the Conservatives, as anything else. Yet Blair continued to hold fast to the lesson of Belfast on Good Friday in 1998: if he tries hard enough and gets the American president involved than any problem can be solved.
Sadly, that wasn't the right lesson. It does matter who the American president is and Tony Blair, a fundamentally good man who, as the events of this week in Northern Ireland proved was capable of achieving great things, sacrificed his time in office because he failed to understand that.