A Journey

London: Hutchinson, 2010. Fifth printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xvii, [1], 718 pages. Illustrations (most in color). Index. Signed by the author on the title page. Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. After his resignation, he was appointed Special Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, an office which he held until 2015. He was elected Member of Parliament for Sedgefield in 1983. He supported moving the party to the centre of British politics in an attempt to help it win power. He became Shadow Home Secretary in 1992. He became Leader of the Opposition on his election as Labour Party leader in 1994. He declared support for the Third Way-politics that recognized individuals as socially interdependent, advocating social justice, cohesion, the equal worth of each citizen, and equal opportunity. In 1997, the Labour Party won its largest landslide general election victory in its history. Blair became the country's youngest leader since 1812 and remains the party's longest-serving occupant of the office. Labour won two more general elections under his leadership-in 2001, in which it won another landslide victory, and in 2005, with a greatly reduced majority. He resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party in 2007. He was involved in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement. Blair oversaw British interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone which were generally perceived as successful. He was in office when the 7/7 bombings took place (2005) and introduced a range of anti-terror legislation. Derived from a Kirkus review: Long-awaited, uncommonly candid memoir by the former British prime minister. Politics isn't needed to liberate people, Blair writes; it's the other way around. Blair is a political animal to the core. There are few personal details here, in the manner of Bill Clinton's My Life (2004), Clinton being one of Blair's heroes. There are, however, plenty of personal opinions about the people with whom he has served, from his successor Gordon Brown to George W. Bush, who, the author insists, is anything but stupid-though his political intuition "wasn't expressed analytically or intellectually." Blair is famously both analytical and intellectual, and he provides a careful rationale for having bought the weapons of mass destruction canard and committed British troops to Iraq-it boils down mostly to the argument that Saddam was a bad guy and needed to go. The region got a reordering, of course, which was one of the causes of Blair's being invited to leave office by the ungrateful electorate of Britain, for which the author seems to have a touch of impatience, if not thinly veiled contempt. Blair concludes with an argument for further reordering, including the West becoming closer to China and the European Union's "adopting a common energy policy," among other things. A vividly rendered account of life in office, with plenty of beneficial pointers to aspiring politicos on either side of the Atlantic.