Tony Blair — Why political leaders keep failing at major change

0:00Today, 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 and 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 had these large majorities? Is it your other members, your party you're fighting against you? Is it the deep state? Like what part is constraining you at that point?

0:34The biggest constraint is the politics in a particular political leadership. 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. my one and only was being Prime Minister, which you know is great if you want to start at the top, but 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 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 failed to make the transition and And you know, those executive skills, which are about focus, prioritization, good policy, building the right team of people who can actually help you govern.

1:35Because the moment you become the government, you end up leaving aside the saying, becomes less important than they're doing. Whereas when you're in opposition, you're running for office, that's all about saying. So all of these things mean that it's a much more difficult, much more focused and you know, 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 know, 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 this is great deep state theory, where we can talk about that.

2:16But 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, your temporary. And 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 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 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 waste or so you say, I'm not gonna do these PMQ, is there a total theatrics?

3:08I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna meet the queen or something. Is it the time? Is it that you're going to be going against a bureaucracy and say, I think you're wrong about your inertia? What fundamentally changes? Well, it wouldn't be that you wouldn't do primaries to questions, because Parliament will insist on that. And you certainly wouldn't want to offend, well, it was the Queen in my time. No, but you're right. What you would do is have a much clear idea of how to give direction to the bureaucracy and how to bring in outside skilled people who can help you deliver change. And so, you know, I always split my premiership into the first five years, which in some ways were the easiest.

3:46We were doing things that were important, like a minimum wage. We did big evolution. We did the Good Friday Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland. But it was only really in the second half of my premiership that we started to reform healthcare, education, criminal justice, and those systemic reforms require that's when your skill set as a chief executive really comes into play. There's a perception that many people have that if you could get a successful CEO or a business person into office, these executive skills would actually transfer over pretty well into becoming up head of state. Is that true?

4:23And if not, what is the, what is it that they'd be lacking that that you need to be a electable leader. Yes, so this is really interesting. And I think a lot about this. The truth is, those skills would transfer to being a political leader, but they're not the only skills you need because you still got to be a political leader. And therefore, you've got to know how to manage your party. You've got to know how you frame certain things. You've got to know, frankly, as a CEO of a company, you're the person in charge, right? You can more or less lay down the law, right? Politics is more complicated than that.

4:54So when you get highly skilled CEOs come into politics, oftentimes they don't succeed, but that's not because their executive skill set is the problem, it's because they haven't developed a political skill set. Interesting. I was reading your memoir, and one thing I thought was interesting is there were a couple of times you said that you realized later on that you had more leverage or you were able to do things in retrospect that you did enjoy the time. And is that one of the things that would change? And like if you go back to 1997, you realize, actually can fire this entire team. If I think don't think they're doing a good job, I actually can cancel my meetings with ambassadors.

5:35How much of that would be? Like, did you have more levers than you realize at the time? Well, in terms of running the system, yes. You definitely with the benefit of experience, I would have given much clearer directions. I would have moved people much faster. I would have probably done, you know, because in politics, again, 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. And the, you know, accept that in exceptional circumstances, I think this is true, except in exceptional circumstances, if you're running a company, you know, you've got no one in the senior management who you don't want to be in the senior management.

6:17Right. policies isn't like that because you've got elements, 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, but they may be very good at managing your party or your government in order to get things through. And what I learned over time is the important thing is to put in to the core positions that really matter to you. You can't don't fall short on quality. And it's something, it's one of the really interesting things, you know, because I think being a political leader is the same as leading a company or a community center, or a football team.

6:59It all comes to the same thing, but you realize, it's such an obvious thing to say that it's all about the people, but it's all about the people. You know, if you get really good, strong, determined people who are prepared to, who share your vision and then they're prepared to get behind and really push, then you don't need that many of them actually to change the country, but they do need to be there. That's really interesting. So when I think about, this is not particular even to the UK, but even in Western governments, people are often frustrated that they elect somebody, they think as a change maker, things don't necessarily change that much.

7:36The system feels it inertia. If this is the case, is it because they didn't have the right team around them? Because if you think of like, I don't know, 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. Is it because, well, you know, it must not have been because they didn't get the right to chief of staff, right? They can probably get the right chief of staff. You know, absolutely. And they can get really good people. And you know, one of the things you actually learn about being at the top of a government is, you know, pretty much if you pick up the phone to someone and say, I need you to come and help that they will come.

8:09I think the problems, not that, the problem is that number one, and I say this often to the leaders that I work with, because we work in roughly 40 different countries in the world today, and that's only growing. And we have teams of people that go and live and work alongside the President's team, and I kind of talk and exchange views with the President or the Prime Minister. them. And very often, the two problems are these. Number one, people confuse ambitions with policies, right? So often I will speak to Lee and I say, so what are your policies? And he'll give me a list of things. And they actually, I say to them, those aren't really policies, they're just ambitions.

8:55And ambitions and politics are very easy to have because because they're just general expressions of good intention. The problem comes with the second challenge, which is that though politics at one level is very crude, right? You're shaking hands, kissing babies, making speeches, devising slogans, attacking your opponents. Right, that's quite a crude business. When it comes to policy, it's a really intellectual business politics. And that's why people often, And if they've only got ambitions, then they haven't really undertaken the intellectual exercise to turn those into policies. And policies are hard.

9:38You know, it's hard to work out what the right policy is. If you take this, you know, AI revolution, and I think we're living through a period of mass change, right? This is the biggest technological change that's in just a revolution. For sure. For political leaders to date, to understand that, to work out what the right policy is, to access the opportunities, mitigate the risks, regulate it, this is really difficult working. So what happens a lot of the time is that people are elected on the basis they are change makers because they've articulated a general vision for change. But when you then come to, okay, what does that really mean in specific terms?

10:18That's where the hard work hasn't been done. And if you don't do that hard work and really dig deep, then what you end up with, as I say, are just their ambitions and they just remain ambitions. Okay, so now that you've brought up AI, I want to ask about this. I do a lot of episodes on AI. And to the people who are in the industry, it seems plausible, the potentially unlikely, that in the next three years you could have, You know, like a huge sort of July 1914 type moment, but for AI, there's a big crisis. Something major has happened in terms of misuse or awarding shot. Today's government's given how they function either in the West or how you see them function with the other leaders you advise.

11:01How well would they deal with this? Like, so they get this news about some AI that's escaped or some bio -up and that's been made because of AI. Would it immediately kick off a sort of a race dynamic from the West to China? Now, do they have the technical competence to deal with this? How would that shape out? Right now, definitely not. And one of the things that we do as an institute, one of the reasons I'm here, actually, in Silicon Valley, is to try and bridge the gap between what I call the change makers and the policy makers, because the policy makers, a lot of the time just fear the change makers and the change makers, a lot of the time don't want really anything to do with the policy makers because they just think they get in the way.

11:39Okay, so you don't have a dialogue, but if what you're describing, do I catch what to happen? And by the way, I think it's possible at some point it does happen. If it happened right now, I think political leaders wouldn't have the, they wouldn't, they wouldn't have a way to begin solving that problem or what it might mean. So I think this is why I keep saying to the political leaders I'm talking to today, and you know, we're likely to have change of government in the UK this year. And I am constantly saying to my own party, like party which will probably win this election, you've got to focus on this technology revolution.

12:19It's not an afterthought. It's the single biggest thing that's happening in the world today of a real -world nature that is going to change everything. Leave aside all the geopolitics and the conflicts and war and America, China or all the rest of it, this revolution is going to change everything about our society, our economy, the way we live, the way we interact with each other. And if you don't get across it, then when there is a crisis like the one your positive could happen, you're going to find you've got no idea how to deal with it. Yeah, okay, so I think COVID is maybe a good case study to analyze how these systems function.

12:58And Tony Blair Institute made, I think, what were very sensible recommendations to governments, many of which went unheeded. And what I thought was especially alarming about COVID was not only that governments made these mistakes with vaccine rollout and testing and so forth, but that these mistakes were so correlated across major governments, no Western government basically got COVID, right? I mean, no government got COVID right. What is a fundamental source of that correlation? And in the way that governments are bad at dealing with crises, they seem in some correlated way bad with crises. Is it because the same people are running these governments?

13:35Is it because the apparatus is the same? Why is that? Well, first of all, to be fair to people who are in government at the time of COVID, it was a difficult thing to deal with. You know, I was saying the problem with COVID was it was plainly more serious than your average flu, but it wasn't the bribonic play. Right, so to begin with, there was one very difficult question, which is to what degree do you try and shut the place down in order to get rid of the disease, right? And you had various approaches to that. But that's one very difficult question. And most governments kind of tried to strike a middle course, right, to do restrictions, but then ease them up over time.

14:17And then you have the issue of vaccination. Now normally with drugs, you take a few years to trial a drug, right, you had to accelerate all of that. And that was done to be fair. But then you have to distribute it. And that is also a major challenge. So I think part of the problem was that that governments weren't sure where to go to for advice. They had scientific advice, they had medical advice, but then they had to balance that with the needs of their economy. And the anxiety a lot of people had that when they, that you were having a large shutdown, that they were going to be hugely disadvantaged as indeed people were.

14:59And I think one of the things that COVID did was, for the developing world, I think there's an argument for saying for the developing world that lockdowns probably did more harm than good. Right, but so it sounds like you're saying that they made the trade -off which we're describing in the wrong way where they could have gone heavier on the testing and vaccination were allowed so that the lockdowns could have been avoided and fundamentally more polis would have been saved. I still don't understand. So I mean, in some fundamental sense, the pandemic is a simpler problem to deal with than an AI crisis in a technical sense, like yes, you had to fast track the vaccines, but it's a thing we've doubled before, right?

15:37There's vaccines, you roll them out. If the government can't get that right, how worried should we be about their ability to do with AI risk? And should we then just be fundamentally averse to a government -led answer to the solution? Should we hope the private sector can solve this because the government was so bad at COVID? Well, what the private sector can do is to input into the public sector. And so, you know, So in COVID, I mean, the countries that handed vaccine, well, so much vaccine production, if the handed it to the private sector and said, run with it, right, those are the countries that did best, frankly.

16:17And I think especially with something as technically complex as AI, you are going to rely on the private sector for the facts of what is happening and to be able to establish the options about what you do. But in the end, the government or the public sector will have to decide which option to take. And the thing that makes governing difficult is I would say to people, when you decide you divide, you know, the moment you take a decision on a public policy question, there are always two ways you can go, right? With COVID, you could have decided to do what Sweden didn't let the disease run pretty much, you could have decided to do what China did, lock down completely.

17:01But then what happened with China was once you got the Omicron variant and it became obvious you weren't going to be able to keep COVID out, they didn't have the facility or the agility to go and change policy. But you know, these policy questions are hard and it's very easy with hindsight, you know, to say, yeah, you shouldn't done this, you should have done that. But I think if this happened in relation to AI, you would absolutely depend on the people who were developing AI to be able to know what decision you should take. Not necessarily how you decided, but what is the decision? Yeah. I sort of fundamentally understand the answer to, okay, so before COVID we had these bureaucracies, then we hope they function, health bureaucracies, we hope they function well, it turns out many of them didn't.

17:53We probably have equivalents in terms of AI, where we have government departments, the deal with technology and commerce and so forth. And if they're as potentially broken as we found out that much of our health bureaucracy is, what, if you were prime minister now or the next government, what would you do other than we're going to have a task for us, we're going to make sure we're making good decisions. But I'm sure when people were trying to make sure the CDC was functional and it wasn't, would you just fire everybody there and make a new department, how would you go about making sure it's really ready for the AI crisis?

18:27Yeah, so I think you've got to distinguish two separate things. One is making the system have the skills and the sensitivity to know the different contours of the crisis that you've got, and to be able to produce potential solutions for what you do. So we needed to rely upon the scientific community to say, this is how we think the disease is going to run. We relied on the private sectors to say, this is how we could develop vaccines. We had to rely on different agencies in order to say, well, I think you could you could concertina the trial period to get the drugs. But in the end, the decision where you lock down or you don't lock down, you can't really leave it to those people because that's not there.

19:19Yeah. It's totally. So you see what I mean? So in the end, as with AI, okay, if you look at it at the moment, so some people want to regulate AI now and regulate it on the basis that it's going to cause enormous

19:40Researchers were speaking to the culminating situation and other social decisions. So theaches that I was speaking about with Mr MediaMr Meeja. this, Kusvis Sut rewai it about

20:04technically, he was simpler you, this is how AI is going to be, this is what it can do, this is what it can't do. Okay, we are explaining the technicality to you, but ultimately what your policy is, you've got to decide that. And by the way, whichever way you decide that someone's going to attack you for it. Look, I'm incredibly grateful that I've been able to turn this podcast into an actual business. And one of the reasons why is Stripe. Stripe is how I set myself up in LLC. It's what I use to send invoices to my sponsors and get paid by them. And I'm not the only one. Millions of businesses use Stripe to accept payments and move money around the world.

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21:19And now back to Tony Blair. Okay, so let's go back to the topics we discussed with Foreign Leaders at TBI. If you were, you know, take Lee Kwan U in a position in the 1960s and the Singapore he inherited, if you were advising Lee Kwan U in the 60s with the advice you would likely give to a developing country now, would Singapore have been even more successful than it ended up? Would it have been less successful? What would the effect of your advice now have been on Singapore in the 60s? With Lee Kwan U in Singapore, I mean, it's the wrong way around. I mean, I learned so much from him. And I went to see him first back in the 1990s when I was leader of the Labour Party.

22:00And I went to see him in Singapore. And the Labour Party had been really critical of Singapore. And so the first thing he sent me when I came in the room was, why are you seeing me? You know, your party's always hated me. And so I said, I want to see you because I've watched what you do in government. I want to learn from it. So I don't think there's anything I could have told Lee Kuan Yu. But the interesting thing is that he's a fascinating leader. And this is so interesting about government. And why, what I say is that you can look upon government like don't look upon it as a branch of politics, look upon it as its own discipline, professional discipline, and you can learn lessons of what's worked and what doesn't work.

22:45And so the fascinating thing about Lik Van Uri is, He took three decisions, really three important decisions right at the beginning for Singapore. Each one of them now seems obvious. Each one at the time was deeply contested. Number one, he said everyone's going to speak English in Singapore. Now, there are lots of people who said to him at the time, no, no, no, we've been thrown out of Malaysia effectively. We're now a fledgling country, a city -state country. we need to have our own local language, you know, we need to be true to our roots and everything he said earlier. English is the language of the world and we're all going to speak English.

23:22But they, that's what happens in Singapore. Secondly, he said, we're going to get the best intellectual capital and management capital from whatever it exists in the world and we're going to bring it to Singapore. And again, people said, no, we should send on our own to feed. And you're also bringing the British. You know, we've got all these disputes with and he said, I'm going to bring in the best from wherever they are and they're going to come to Singapore. Today, Singapore exports intellectual capital. And the third thing he did was he said there's going to be no corruption. And one of the ways we're going to do that is we're going to make sure political leaders are well paid, which the Singapore leaders are the best paid in the world by factor about 10 for the next person.

24:05And there's going to be zero tolerance of corruption, zero tolerance of corruption. And those are the three decisions that were instrumental in building Singapore today. To the extent that Western governments have, you know, you could go to the UK right now or the US and fundamentally, if you had to narrow down the list of the three key priorities and what would somebody who was in power to do so? What could they do to fix that? Do Western leaders, if the Star Wars elected in the UK or whoever becomes President of the US, would they have the power to enact what the equivalent would be for their societies right right now, because or is it just sort of like you're there's or there's you have this all this inertia, you can't start fresh.

24:47I think I'm gonna start in the 60s. No, you definitely can. I mean, the American system's different because it's a federal system. Right. And there's probably in many ways, it's good thing that there are limits to what the federal government can do in the US. But if you take the UK or most governments where there's a lot of power at the center, I mean, what we just been talking about, which is the technology revolution, how do you use it to transform healthcare, education, the way government functions, how do you help educate the private sector as to how they can embrace AI and order to improve productivity.

25:25I mean, this is a huge agenda for a government and a really, really exciting one. I mean, I keep saying to people that were in politics today because sometimes when they get a bit, you know, people get a bit depressed about being in politics because you get all this criticism. People certainly in the West feel society's not changing fast enough and well enough. And I say, no, it's a really exciting time to be in politics because you've got this massive revolution that you've got to come to terms with. Hmm. Speaking of federalism, do you worry that so you advise these dozens of governments? And for any one leader, you're probably giving very sensible advice for their country.

25:58It's positive expected value. But to the extent that that limits the variance and experimentation across countries of different ways to govern or different policies, are we losing the ability to discover a new Singapore because there's, you know, Western NGOs or whatever global institutions we have will give you good recommendations and maybe there's like some missing thing we don't understand that an experimentation would reveal. Yeah, so we really don't do that with our governments because by the way, one of the things governments should be able to do is experiment to a degree. And part of the problem with systems is there's always a bias towards caution.