Tony Blair - Life of a PM, The Deep State, Lee Kuan Yew, & AI's 1914 Moment

Speaker 0: Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Tony Blair, who was, of course, prime minister of the UK from 1997 to 2,007 and now leads the Tony Blair Institute, which advises dozens of governments on improving governance, reform, adding technology. My first question, I wanna go back to your time in office. And when you first got in, you had these large majorities. What are the constraints on a prime minister despite the fact that they have these large majorities? Is it your the other members of your party are fighting against you?

Is it the deep state? Like, what part what is constraining you at that point?

Speaker 1: The biggest constraint is that politics and, in particular, political leadership's probably the only walk of life in which someone is put into an immensely powerful and important position with absolutely zero qualifications or experience. I mean, I'd never had a ministerial appointment before. I my my one and only was being prime minister, which, you know, is great if you wanna start at the top, but it it's it's that that's most difficult. So you come in, and you're often you often come in as when you're running for office, you have to be the great persuader. The moment you get into

And a lot of political leaders fail because they failed to make the transition. And, you know, that those executive skills, which are about focus, prioritization, good policy, building the right team of of people who can actually help you govern, because the moment you become the government, you end up leaving aside the saying becomes less important than the doing. Whereas when you're in opposition, you're running for office, it's all about saying. Yeah. So all of these things mean that it's a much more difficult, much more focused, and, you know, it's it's suddenly, you're thrust into this co

And then, of course, you know, you you do have a situation in which the system as a system it's not that it's a con I I I'm not a believer that there's this great deep state theory. We we can talk about that, but that's not the problem with government. The problem with government is that it's not a conspiracy, either left wing or right wing. It's a conspiracy for inertia. The thing about government systems is that they always think we're permanent.

You you've come in as the elected politician. You're temporary, and, you know, we know how to do this. And if you only just let us alone, we would carry on managing the status quo in the right way. Yeah. And so that's the that's the toughest thing.

It's it's making that transition.

Speaker 0: Okay. So that that's really interesting. Now if we take you back everything you knew, let's say, in 2007, but you have the majorities and maybe the popularity you had in 1997, What fundamentally you said you have these executive skills now. What fundamentally is it that you know what a time waste what kinds of things are time wasters? So you say, I'm not gonna do these PMQs.

They're a total theatrics. I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna meet the queen or something. What what what is it the time? Is it that you're gonna be go go again against the bureaucracy and say, I think you're wrong about your inertia? What what what fundamentally changes?