Tony Blair: recommendation

Transcript context

…I was reading your memoir. There were a couple of times where you said that you realized later on that you had more leverage. In retrospect, you were able to do things that you didn't do at the time. Is that one of the things that would change if you went back to 1997? Would you realize, "I actually can fire this entire team if I don't think they're doing a good job. I actually can cancel my meetings with ambassadors." Did you have more leverage than you realized at the time? In terms of running the system, yes. Definitely with the benefit of experience, I would have given much clearer directions. I would have moved people much faster. Again, in politics this is where it's different from running a company. In a company, by and large, you can put the people in the places you want them. Except in exceptional circumstances, this is true. If you're running a company, you've got no one in the senior management who you don't want to be in the senior management. Politics isn't like that because you've got political elements you may have to pacify. There may be people that you don’t particularly want because they’re not particularly good at being ministers. However, they may be very good at managing your party or your government in order to get things through. What I learned over time is that the important thing is to put quality people into the core positions that really matter to you. Don't fall short on quality. It's one of the really interesting things. Being a political leader is the same as leading a company, or a community center, or a football team. It all comes to the same thing. It's such an obvious thing to say that it's all about the people. But it's all about the people. You get really good, strong, determined people who share your vision and are prepared to get behind and really push. You actually don't need that many of them to change your country. But they do need to be there. That's really interesting. This isn’t particular to the UK but even in Western governments, people are often frustrated by this. They elect somebody they think is a change maker, but things don't necessarily change that much. The system feels an inertia. If this is the case, is it because they didn't have the right team around them? If you think of Obama or Trump or Biden, at the very top I assume they can recruit top people. To the extent that they weren't able to exact the change they wanted, it wasn’t because they didn't get the right chief of staff, right? They can probably get the right chief of staff.…

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