LONDON, 4 October 2003 — Hugely influenced by the glitzy promotional techniques patented by Bill Clinton’s Democrats, Tony Blair and New Labour have pushed the marketing of British politics to an unprecedented extreme. At the outset, Blair was promoted like some dazzling new product, as the political brand to eclipse all others. Nothing was left to chance, special care being taken to sell Blair to Britain’s disaffected youth, to project him as a pop icon, with interviews in fashion magazines and much emphasis on his taste for rock music.

Once elected as prime minister, Blair went to the length of inviting pop celebrities to his official London residence, 10 Downing Street: The message was that, in addition to being a capable leader, Tony Blair was a cool guy. It must be said that Blair’s efforts to make an impact on Britain’s youth bore no obvious fruit. Only now — and perhaps not in the manner he could have wished — is Blair making the breakthrough on this score that previously eluded him. Contemptuously amended to “Bliar”, his name has become the logo of a T-shirt that is being merchandised with the sly slogan: “Ready to wear in less than 45 minutes” (the time which, as Blair implausibly insisted, it was going to take Saddam Hussein to deploy weapons of mass destruction against Britain.) Sales of the product have been brisk. In the eyes of British youth, Blair is at last attaining the status of an iconic brand — by lending his increasingly despised and uncool name to a cheap fashion accessory.

The very existence of the “Bliar” T-shirt is an indictment of how far Tony Blair has failed in his much-vaunted ambition to restore faith in politics. Opinion polls indicate that a large section of the British electorate would like Blair to resign, and the US magazine Newsweek, which hailed the coming to power of New Labour, is now anticipating the end of the Blair era. Formerly the Labour Party’s greatest asset, the one Labour politician who could appeal at least as much to conservative opinion as to the Labour Party’s traditional supporters, Tony Blair is rapidly becoming its greatest liability. It was telling that when, two weeks ago, a byelection was held in the Labour-held seat of Brent in northwest London — which the party lost to the Liberal Democrats — Blair himself took no part in the campaign. It was striking, too, that the prime minister stayed away from last week’s UN gathering of world leaders. A diminished figure at home, he is now — in the wake of the failure to find Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of WMDs — a diminished figure abroad as well.

Not that you could have guessed any of this from this week’s annual Labour Party conference where Blair received a protracted standing ovation even before he began speaking. But then, the conference has become little more than an exercise in news management, an elaborately staged media event, which, with its leader-worship and self-abasing displays of party loyalty, recalls the political rallies of the old Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe.

The reality is that for all the dutiful applause the prime minister drew for a speech in which he insisted he made the right decision about Iraq, there is great disquiet about the issue of the war among the Labour Party’s rank and file, as among the British public as a whole. Nor is that issue about to slip from the British public agenda, with grim news issuing from Iraq every day, with increasing signs that US public opinion is turning against the country’s occupation by the so-called coalition, and with the verdict of the Hutton inquiry into the death of the former British weapons inspector David Kelly expected within a matter of weeks. Whatever the inquiry’s outcome, the evidence presented to it has already entrenched the widespread perception of a leader who bamboozled his party and his country into fighting an unnecessary, and possibly illegal, war.

As a warmonger, Tony Blair represents a new and strange phenomenon in the history of the Labour Party, and perhaps this is why many among his own party have been slow to face up to the mounting evidence of their leader’s insatiable appetite for conflict. A new book, “Blair’s Wars”, by the London political journalist John Kampfner, documents just how insatiable that appetite has been, detailing the five occasions on which Blair has committed his country to military action in the space of six years: Apart from two interventions in Iraq, Britain under Blair has by this stage taken part in fighting in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Based on interviews galore with politicians and civil servants, Kampfner’s soberly written book definitively exposes Blair’s case for toppling Saddam Hussein as so much hype and imposture. His key revelation is that Blair agreed with US President George Bush about attacking Iraq as early as April 2002. Thereafter his whole effort was to build up a sense of national alarm, to convince his party and the British people in general that the danger posed by Iraq was so “clear and present” that Britain had no alternative but to join the United States in declaring a pre-emptive war.

The point of Kampfner’s title is that it was from Blair himself, not from his party or the British people, that the urge sprang to become involved in five successive wars. The prime minister who has made so much of his democratic credentials emerges from Kampfner’s book as a maniacal control freak, an obsessive centralizer, who — perhaps encouraged by his extensive exposure to Bill Clinton and George Bush — has developed an increasingly presidential style, bypassing collective Cabinet discussion and concentrating more and more power into his own hands. At an early stage, he set about circumventing the Foreign Office, appointing his own foreign policy adviser; and as soon as he could, he replaced his first foreign secretary, the independent-minded Robin Cook, with the less troublesome Jack Straw, a politician who, according to Kampfner, suppressed his own misgivings about endorsing British participation in what was essentially Washington’s war.

What seems clearer than ever from Kampfner’s account is that Blair nurses an overweening sense of himself as the great persuader, a politician with a special gift for reconciling warring parties. The British leader who played no small part in enabling the United States to reduce Iraq to chaos figures in his own eyes as an incomparable peacemaker. The charitable view is that, however intoxicated he may be by his own messianic fervor, Blair’s basic intentions at least are benign. But there is one disclosure in Kampfner’s book which suggests a less flattering explanation for his compulsive bellicosity. As an aspirant young Labour politician striving to get elected in the aftermath of the Falkland’s War of 1981, the young Tony Blair was greatly impressed by how popular victory in that war had made Britain’s then Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was a lesson that he perhaps learned rather too well.

Now, even among those hitherto loyal to Blair, there is a growing unease, a sense that he constitutes an alien presence in the Labour Party. The truth is that many on the British left have turned a blind eye to Blair’s vicious and reactionary politics simply because he has been an election-winner who has given power to a party that for nearly twenty years suffered defeat after election defeat. But there has been a terrible price to pay for the Labour Party’s electoral triumphs under Blair: The betrayal of much that the party once stood for. It has been said that Tony Blair entered into a Faustian pact with George Bush. It can equally be said that the Labour Party has entered into a Faustian pact with Tony Blair — and sacrificed its soul.