An Ally Remembers

It is now painfully obvious that Tony Blair—the man who led Britain for a decade, who transformed the country’s dully orthodox Labour Party into dashing, moderate “New Labour,” who faced down parliamentary opponents with brio and eloquently defended the invasion of Iraq—is no longer much of a hero in his own country. Indeed, he is intensely disliked, not least for his loyalty to the “freedom agenda”—the idea that, after 9/11, Western democracies had a duty to face down tyrants like Saddam Hussein and end the threat they represented.

Americans, understandably, have less intense feelings about Mr. Blair. They may remember him most of all for articulating George W. Bush’s foreign-policy ideas—especially the logic of the Iraq war—a bit more gracefully than Mr. Bush did. It was at such moments, in speeches and joint press conferences with Mr. Bush, that Mr. Blair made his greatest impression—as a loyal American ally and gifted orator.

But the man himself, not to mention the arc of his career, is unfamiliar to most Americans. “A Journey,” his political memoir, is thus especially welcome. Luckily it is not one of those leaden bricks of official reminiscence. The tone is confiding, informal and forthright, though Mr. Blair has not given up his habit of handling certain matters in an on-the-one-hand/on-the-other sort of way.

Mr. Blair structures his book as the tale of a political journey that vaulted him at an astonishingly young age (43) to an unprecedented three consecutive terms as head of the British government. But “A Journey” is a deeply personal book, too, full of candid revelations. For all his seeming confidence and ease, Mr. Blair tells us, he desperately prepared for Prime Minister’s Questions—where he excelled each week in the House of Commons, parrying the thrusts of opposition MPs—and confides that even now, three years after his leaving office, the hairs on his neck prickle just before noon on Wednesdays, when Question Time begins. In the minutes before plunging into that arena, he says, he would gladly have exchanged an equal amount of time under Laurence Olivier’s sadistic dentist’s drill in the movie “Marathon Man.”

Mr. Blair writes movingly of his mother’s death from cancer when he was 22 and of his father’s disabling stroke a few years earlier, which devastated the family. When it comes to less profound personal details, Mr. Blair does not sink to the level of revelation achieved by his wife in her 2008 memoirs, when she described how their son Leo came to be conceived during the couple’s sleepover at Balmoral Castle, the royal residence in Scotland. But he sometimes does provide too much information—recollections of an eccentric relative’s foul smell, his encounters with a childhood bully, his unhappy experience as a schoolboy boxer. All seemed designed to elicit empathy but may cause a reader to cringe.

Still, Mr. Blair has a pleasing capacity to take us with him into privileged places, whether it’s upstairs at the White House (where, over dinner, he finds Mr. Bush “unbelievably, almost preternaturally calm” before his major speech to Congress after 9/11) or to Balmoral itself, where he must dash down long corridors to the toilet facilities, which are both remote and old-fashioned— Victorian water closets. He gives a frank account of how hard it was, in his early years as prime minister, to get on with Queen Elizabeth, who treated him with “hauteur.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Blair offers a robust defense of his role in taking Britain into the Iraq war, though he agonizes over the invasion’s violent aftermath. To this day he sees the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as the one true course for his country (and ours). More surprisingly, he notes that his close relations with the U.S., despite the war’s unpopularity, gave him increased stature with other world leaders, who assumed that he had Mr. Bush’s ear.

As for the joint U.S.-British decision to seek (in vain) United Nations approval for the Iraq invasion, Mr. Blair has no apologies. He reveals that although Vice President Dick Cheney was adamantly opposed to involving the U.N., Mr. Bush did not take much persuading. In any case, the U.N. declined to authorize the use of military force, and the invasion went ahead anyway. Clearly, for Mr. Blair, it was better to have tried multilaterally and lost than never to have tried at all.

Mr. Blair’s feelings about Mr. Bush are mixed. He calls him, backhandedly, a man with a “great intuition . . . about what he thought was right or wrong.” Mr. Bush’s intuition, moreover, “wasn’t expressed analytically or intellectually. It was just stated.” Mr. Blair confesses that, listening to the president at a press conference, he would think: “George, explain it; don’t just say it.” But over time, he says, he came “to admire the simplicity, the directness” of Mr. Bush’s approach, “finding in it strength and integrity.”

This back-and-forth quality is common in Mr. Blair’s efforts at portraiture, where criticism is often followed by a softening compliment. Even Gordon Brown, Mr. Blair’s successor as prime minister—with whom Mr. Blair often bitterly quarreled and whom he blames for the party’s recent election lost—is said to be “brilliant” and indispensable. When it comes to Bill and Hillary Clinton, though, Mr. Blair’s admiration is unalloyed. There is no doubt that he regards them as political soul mates.

Mr. Blair is perhaps proudest of his role in getting the Labour Party to shed its commitments to unilateral nuclear disarmament and the nationalization of Britain’s industries. Both positions were ardently backed in the party’s 1983 manifesto, a document that was later called, after Margaret Thatcher’s second, landslide victory, the longest suicide note in history. By fighting so hard to transform his party, whether from genuine conviction or pragmatic calculation, Mr. Blair achieved, he believes, the long-sought aim of making Labour the “natural party of governance.” “A Journey” provides a priceless glimpse into the mind of the man who devoted himself to that transformation—and who stood by America in some of its darkest recent hours.

Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.