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letter from london: The British scene.

The Ghost and Mr. BlairIs Robert Harris' new novel a portrait of Tony Blair?

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2007, at 7:24 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

On the first occasion, when Mandelson was quite simply in the wrong (over an undeclared loan), Harris stood up for his friend a little half-heartedly, saying he had been "a bloody fool," but the second time, in January 2001, he recognized and denounced a real injustice, as some others did also. Mandelson was framed up over a charge of intervening to secure British citizenship for a friendly Indian billionaire, though he was later cleared, simply because Alastair Campbell, Blair's unspeakable spin doctor, wanted to placate the media. There is a hilarious passage in Campbell's gruesome recently published diaries when he is "appalled at Robert Harris going on TV effectively saying I had pushed [Mandelson] out." This comes after several pages in which Campbell has described doing precisely that.

If Blair could behave like that to one of his closest friends, Harris reflected, what was he capable of doing to the rest of us? Some months later, shortly before the 2001 election, he began a column with the memorable words, "There is something truly loathsome about the modern Labour party," and he elaborated on this, from Blair's emetic speech launching the campaign in front of an audience of unfortunate schoolgirls ("I want not just to win your vote, but to win your heart and mind") to Campbell himself.

You might think that would have been the parting of the ways, especially since Harris saw from the start how Blair was taking us into a needless and disastrous war, and "in a way that casts doubt on both his judgement and his honesty." Still, as Harris has observed, politicians are less thin-skinned than journalists, and the two couples—Tony and Cherie, and Robert and Gill—had an informal supper at 10 Downing Street as late as November 2003. (That is private information.) But they meet no longer.

So, is The Ghost a portrait drawn from life? Harris elegantly if implausibly borrows Evelyn Waugh's prefatory note to Brideshead Revisited (another suspected novel with a key): "I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they," and he has repeated this claim in successive interviews. But denial is the flavor of the moment. That call inviting Harris to lunch with Blair in 1992 was made by Anji Hunter. She has often seen Harris since and attended his book launches. And when Harris gave a large and enjoyable lunch party for his 50^th birthday last March, she was—unless my eyes entirely deceived me—there, too.

Her "I've not heard …" is pure New Labor. You have a restive populace unenthusiastic about invading a distant country that represents no clear and present danger? Campbell concocts a preposterous "dossier" of alleged intelligence about noxious weaponry cobbled together from the Internet. You are asked an awkward question about a new book? You say quite baldly, "I've not heard of Robert Harris or any of his books."

Having read The Ghost, I can understand the author's plea that "I don't want it to be thought that all I've done is written an extended profile of Tony and Cherie." Of course the book is more than that, and I tried to accept the author's denials—right up until the moment Lang complains bitterly that everyone thinks he's an actor, which is, of course, the old charge against Blair. Then a former ally turned nemesis says, "Name me one decision that Adam Lang took as Prime Minister that wasn't in the interest of the United States of America." He goes on to list the offending decisions, from a war fought "against the advice of just about every senior commander in our armed forces and all of our ambassadors who know the region" (and without "any kind of quid pro quo from the White House") to "collusion in illegal kidnapping, torture imprisonment and even murder of our own citizens."

That's what some of us have been saying lengthily and wearily with a feeling that no one was listening, and there's all the more reason for saying it again in gripping fictional guise. Whether or not The Ghost is a roman à clef, it's surely a roman à thèse: not only a page-turning thriller but a real political novel that eloquently echoes a sad and sour disenchantment.

Speaking on a BBC TV documentary last summer, Harris said: "I do think his time in office is a tragedy; because Blair was of my generation and this was our shot, if you like. I won't say that we've messed it up, but that it perhaps hasn't lived up to all the expectations of that rosy-fingered dawn of 1 May 1997." Those words might even have stood as the epigraph to his latest book, novel or not.