Dwarkesh Podcast
Tony Blair - Life of a PM, The Deep State, Lee Kuan Yew, & AI's 1914 Moment
26 Jun 2024
Full Episode
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Tony Blair, who was, of course, Prime Minister of the UK from 1997 to 2007, and now leads the Tony Blair Institute, which advises dozens of governments on improving governance, reform, adding technology. My first question, I want to 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 the other members of your party are fighting against you? Is it the deep state? What part is constraining you at that point?
The biggest constraint is that politics, and in particular political leadership, is 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 never had a ministerial appointment before.
My one and only was being prime minister, which is great if you want to start at the top, but it's that that's most difficult. So you come in and you often come in as, when you're running for office, you have to be the great persuader. The moment you get into office, you really have to be the great chief executive. And those two skill sets are completely different.
And a lot of political leaders fail because they've failed to make the transition. And those executive skills, which are about focus, prioritization, good policy, building the right team 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. So all of these things mean that it's a much more difficult, much more focused and it's suddenly you're thrust into this completely new environment when you come in. And that's what makes it, that's the hardest thing. And then of course, you do have a situation in which the system as a system
It's not that it's a – I'm not a believer that there's this great deep state theory. 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'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. And so that's the toughest thing. It's making that transition.
Okay, so that's really interesting. Now, if we take you back everything you knew, let's say in 2007, but you have the majorities
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